Grief: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
In the season of giving, grief can go into the return pile.
Ed. Note: The Griever’s Digests have been our most popular posts and the ones people talk about with me most frequently. This is my call for volunteers to contribute as I currently have an empty bench. If you’re interested, drop me a note (just reply to this email). If you’re looking for the courage to open up, read some of the past editions. Once you start talking, it comes to you. Thank you and now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.
The best offense is a good defense, so let me start by saying that I’m not here to put down grieving or people who are religious. I think grief is necessary and important. I also think religion is fine in moderation.
I just don’t believe that grief is a gift.
The gift of grief is a popular trope in organized religion, institutions of which I am so fond:
Grief is a gift God gives, meant to help us heal and draw into a closer relationship with Him and the eternal intimacy He has promised.
Grief is a God-given gift and healthy process designed to help people survive a loss, according to Suzanne Harvath, a psychologist, coordinator of human and pastoral formation and associate professor of pastoral theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.
— The Archdiocese of St. Louis
My older brother, Justin, calmed and assured me when he told me, "When you are in the midst of grieving and you are starving for peace, the Kingdom paradox of desperate peace distilled says this, Hallelujah, all I have is Christ." That. Will. Preach.
Again, grieving is healthy. You need to grieve as part of your journey when a loved one dies, and I think it is a natural process you should embrace rather than being a fucking potato like I was. Grief can bring relief.
I think of grieving like any of the one of life’s journeys. At some point, you took a right-hand turn1 off the path from childhood to adulthood and began following a new course. You veer into lanes of parenting or new challenges, or maybe loss and loneliness.
Sometimes you merge into the eight lanes of I-4 through Orlando called grief.
It’s not always eight lanes barreling along at unsustainable death-defying speeds with lane closures that emerge out of thin air. Sometimes it’s just two lanes of Texas Hill Country farm-to-market road or Route 14 in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom; peaceful, sparsely populated and teeming with fresh air. Of course, sometimes its the Cross Bronx Expressway near the Bronx River Parkway on a Sunday in July, where traffic moves six inches in an hour and you begin questioning basic human existence.
Life, after all, is a highway.
Digressing…I see grief as an overlay to life’s stages. For example, my sister was 16 when our mother died and she’s grieved well into adulthood; through college and grad school, through marriage and loss, through job success and personal and professional uncertainty. Your experience is not always up to you and it both dictates and is dictated by the other factors of your life.
But a gift? I’m not sold on that.
Grief can also cripple, emotionally, mentally and physically. My own grief overwhelmed me in my 20s, some years after my mother’s passing. It turns out that I may have only experienced a tropical storm of grief. Hurricane-force grief is out there and it’s some scary shit.
Complicated Grief
It’s a terribly-named condition, right? All grief is complicated. My wife’s grief for her father’s passing is different from her sister’s and her mother’s. Each of them have complex feelings that can’t be resolved with a pamphlet or single therapy appointment.
Complicated grief is, for all intents and purposes, the internal, prolonged ache that comes along with grieving. Symptoms include numbness and detachment, withdrawal and isolation, difficulty carrying out normal routines and feeling that life has no purposes, for starters. They are all very similar to depression, but complicated grief adds on the extra layer of grieving: bitterness about the loss, feelings of helplessness because you could not prevent the death, fixating on your loved one’s death, problems accepting the death and inability to reflect positively on their life.
Most of these behaviors are outward, but the grievers among us tend to hold their cards close to the vest and not show them. Some of them seem like natural and immediate reactions driven by heightened emotions in the moment; a widow wishing they had died along with their spouse.
But, if you live by the adage that time heals wounds, then complicated grief becomes more of a concern when you reach six, nine or 12 months after the passing. If the feelings are still as intense, it’s time to talk to someone.
When complicated grief gets more…complicated
After a year, you might expect the grief to subside. Not go away, but lessen some. It’s the intensity that can cripple or hold you back from moving forward. No one is asking you to turn your back on a memory, but you have to live. That’s not possible for everyone.
Prolonged Grief Disorder is a diagnosed condition where grief has consumed you. The American Psychiatric Association lists the symptoms and we’re talking about some heavy stuff: feeling as if part of you died, a continued disbelief about the death, anger or bitterness about the death, and the absence of emotion, among them.
Now, the APA is quick to point out that people with bipolar disorder or depression are more likely to experience this, though I would challenge that there are a lot of people out there experiencing it who have never been diagnosed with either of those.
PGD was added to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM V, in 2022. The DSM is not just The Bible of mental illness2 but it also allows clinicians to bill insurance for treatment of the condition.
There is, of course, a counterpoint. Experts believe it’s improper to classify grief as a mental illness. Joanne Cacciatore, a social work professor at Arizona State University, was quoted in a New York Times article from 2022 about her opposition to PGD’s classification as a treatable condition. “When someone who is a quote-unquote expert tells us we are disordered and we are feeling very vulnerable and feeling overwhelmed, we no longer trust ourselves and our emotions. To me, that is an incredibly dangerous move, and short sighted.”
The story boils down to a tug-of-war between the social workers, who distrust the motives of the medical providers, and the medical providers that want to bill for the intense levels of therapy required to lift a person out of a prolonged state of grief.
Capitalism!
When it all builds up…
The same article in the Times includes an interview with Amy Cuzzola-Kern, who was caught in a grief loop. Her brother had died in his sleep one evening from a heart attack and she was blaming herself for not noticing that he was unwell. She followed the path to a PGD diagnosis and went into therapy to overcome the burden and move to acceptance.
What happens when you don’t make make the first move? Can grief cripple you?
I’ve shared with you how ignoring my own grief led to a series of panic attacks, clinical diagnosis and years in therapy. If you’ve never had a panic attack, it’s not particularly fun. Your heart races and you feel paralyzed. Your mouth goes dry and you can’t control your breathing. I thought Ted Lasso did a pretty good job of portraying it.3
Some people experience nausea, increased blood pressure or lowered immunity as side effects, just as they would with any other type of stress.
And then, there is the very real broken-heart syndrome called takotsubo cardiomyopathy. This is the enlargement of the left ventricle of the heart, which weakens the muscle and prevents it from pumping blood effectively. It gets its name from the pot used by Japanese fishermen to catch octopus. The ventricle narrows at the next and becomes round at the bottom, resembling the takotsubo.
The symptoms are the same as a heart attack: sudden and overwhelming chest pain, shortness of breath, vomiting and palpitations. The difference is that the heart never arrests. It’s a temporary condition treated with diurectics, beta blockers and blood thinners. Scientists have studied the condition for years and the only common thread is that people with this condition have undergone significant emotional distress, usually the loss of a loved one.
So, grief doesn’t permanently cripple but it can (literally) break your heart. It’s most decidedly not a gift, but good can come from it.
Like 95% of life, it’s about what you make of it.
Final thoughts on finality…
“The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our own lives and unprepared to help others cope with losses in theirs.”
— Dr. Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life
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Mine was a right. Maybe yours was a left.
This is where I point out that homosexuality and transsexuality were both considered disorders by the DSM as recently as the 1970s. Modern medicine really isn’t that modern when you think about it.
Ted Lasso aside here: Ted Lasso is a lot of things to a lot of people and I don’t know how successful it would have been if not for the pandemic and our collective search for things to watch. It’s such a marvelously layered show full of themes — relationships, fathers and sons, female empowerment, and mental health among them. The portrayal of Coach Lasso’s panic disorder was painful to watch, as someone that has endured his own panic attacks, but masterfully done.