what should I say

12/25/2014

Holiday grief–LISTEN up!

Holidays are hard when you’re mourning. Like performing your own root canal with only elevator Muzak for anesthesia. Blindfolded. While wearing oven mitts and running down the middle of Alligator Alley with hungry gators sunning nearby.

I wish I were exaggerating, but that ridiculous example far understates it.

I’m doing well this year, my fifth widowed Christmas.  Last year, my fourth, I was doing “meh.” Okay.

But the first three? (I just shuddered as I typed those four words.) I no longer feel that agonizing, raw pain of new grief, but even its memory kept me from posting earlier this month, when it might have helped someone going through the indescribable anticipation of the first holiday season without their parent, child, sibling, spouse, or other dear one.

I couldn’t revisit those feelings — that pain — while heading into my own “doing better” holiday season. Not this year. Not yet.

So if I — a person in every way “moving forward” with my life — shied away from addressing the agonies of “new” grief during the holidays, imagine how much harder it is for your friends who have lost someone within the last year (or two).

Here are some ways you can show you care:

  • Acknowledge the loss. The best condolence doesn’t attempt to “cheer up” the mourner. Rather, it validates the survivors’ feelings of grief. “I know this is/was your first [second, etc.] Christmas [Hanukkah, New Year’s…] without your husband [father, daughter, sister, friend…]. You’ve been in and will continue to be in my thoughts.”
  • Ask, and then listen. This isn’t a time to tell about you and yours (unless the mourner asks). This is a time to offer your bereaved friends the chance to speak of what their aching hearts need to share.
    “Would you like to tell me about how you and ____ celebrated ____ together?”
    “What were _____’s favorite holiday traditions?”
  • Do something. For those who are grieving, even small gestures — a handwritten note, a quick text, a dropped off candy bar or flower, an act of service (like shoveling sidewalks or, for those of us in warmer climates, pulling weeds) — can mean the difference between despair and hope during one of the hardest times of year.
  • Repeat. Once you’ve checked in and done one (or all) of the above, start over. Unlike the holidays, which hit the calendar once in the year and cycle away for a year, grief is ever-present. Moments of sorrow can yield to moments of joy and acceptance in the kindnesses shown by friends, but they are temporary.

It takes time — LOTS of time — before the excruciating fog of new grief lifts, and after the holidays, when the rest of the world seemingly goes back to normal, the contrast between “peace on earth” and the sorrow of the mourning heart can seem even greater. Your ongoing thoughtfulness will help your friends through.

11/04/2014

Taboo Topics When Someone Dies–Part 3, Money

Part 3 in this series on taboo topics (*see below) focuses on money matters and why you should leave them alone.

Would you walk up to random people and pat them on the stomach? Of course not, except… Have you ever noticed that insensitive relatives, acquaintances, or even strangers will do that to women in the latter months of pregnancy? No matter that it’s intrusive, rude, and creepy. (It happened to me, more than once.)

Would you walk up to random people and ask them about their finances? Of course not, except… Have you ever noticed that insensitive relatives, acquaintances, or even strangers will do that to mourners in the earliest days and months of bereavement? No matter that it’s intrusive, rude, and creepy. (It happened to me, more than once.)

Here is what you need to know about the finances of those who are grieving:

1) Their finances are none of your business — unless …

… the bereaved asks you about money matters, concerns, or questions (in which case, you should limit your words to providing direct answers, not asking them questions or making assumptions), or

… you already have a professional financial relationship to the bereaved (and/or the deceased) as their financial or insurance adviser, accountant, broker, loan officer, etc., and your inquiries are

relevant to that relationship,

timely for the altered needs of the survivors, and

mindful that most major decision-making should be delayed for at least a year.

2)  Financial gifts may be desperately needed by bereaved families, even though mourners’ finances are none of your business. If the deceased was the primary (or even secondary) breadwinner in a family, the sudden loss of income can be financially devastating. Even small monetary gifts can help offset expenses, and they will show your tangible support for friends who have lost loved ones.

3) Death is expensive for its survivors.

Whether the death was expected (due to age and/or health issues) or unexpected (due to undiagnosed health matters or external forces), there are likely medical expenses. Big medical expenses. These may include (but aren’t limited to) doctor, hospital, and ambulance services (**see below for a digressive rant). The financial costs can be huge, and the emotional costs of drawn-out payments for treating the already-deceased loved one can be just as difficult to pay.

Funeral, burial, and cremation expenses can be prohibitive and drain a family’s financial reserves. Payments are often required up front. My home (and the land it stands on) still belongs to my mortgage company as much as it does to me. Even after it’s paid off, I’ll still owe property taxes as long as I own it. How awful it is that the only land I’ve purchased and own “free and clear” is fully uninhabitable: my husband’s burial plot.

Legal and business fees add up. I remember the sticker shock of having to pay for changing the title of my husband’s car to my name before I could sell it. Various accounts and deeds can cost even more. Eventually, every legal document or business account once in the name of the deceased must be updated, closed, or renamed, and these transactions can be costly.

 4) Not everyone has adequate — or any — life insurance (***see below).

Don’t assume.

Don’t judge.

Preexisting health conditions, finances, or emotional constraints may have prevented purchasing such policies.

5) Life insurance payments feel like blood money. They are not windfalls or fun lotto winnings. Their intent is to pay for current and future life expenses for the surviving beneficiaries.

ONLY named beneficiaries have the right to decide how such funds should be spent. Period. If you have an opinion on how it should be spent, keep it to yourself.

Do NOT ask about or comment on life insurance amounts. The subject is not only private — it’s painful. Survivors who are asked about whether they received life insurance payments may feel cornered or pressured into discussing details that only their financial advisers should be privy to. (Remember #1 on this list!)

Don’t ask to borrow money from life insurance funds.

I apologize if this post feels stern. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin by now, but I still remember some people’s intrusions during my earliest months of widowhood. Many meant well. I understood their concern for my well-being, and I continue to feel gratitude for the gifts generous souls sent our family at that time. However, I also recall the inappropriate questions of those who were more interested in satisfying curiosity than consoling my family.

___

*I talk about other taboo topics — politics, religion, appearance, and legal status — in separate posts (while, yes, talking about the very things you shouldn’t talk about).

**My digressive rant:
The ambulance bill provided a double shock. The 5-minute “ride” cost more than $150 per mile, and when I received my credit card statement verifying payment, the expense was listed under “travel and entertainment.” While I appreciated the efforts of the EMTs who responded to my 911 call, and I didn’t begrudge paying for their efforts (fruitless as they were), seeing the cost listed as “travel and entertainment” infuriated me. Still does.
(Okay. Rant over now.)

***If you’re on the fence about purchasing life insurance and you have dependent family members, do it. Now. Even small policies can help. I hope you outlive your policy, but if — Heaven forbid! — The Worst Thing (your death) should happen to your loved ones (as it did to me and mine when my husband died), having a financial cushion may be of indescribable help to them, even if it is a small one. [Note: I’m not endorsing any company or industry by saying this. I’m sharing first- and secondhand experience.]

10/29/2014

Taboo Topics When Someone Dies–Part 2, Religion

If you know me in person (or through my writing) I hope you’ll find this post title disconcerting. I hope you’ll think it seems downright odd for me to discourage would-be comforters from referring to religion as they console the bereaved, because I hope I’ve conveyed (in clear, though never in-your-face ways) how integral religion is to who I am.*

So in part 2 of Taboo Topics**, WHY in the heck do I insist you should not invoke religious topics when speaking to the bereaved?

Too many people spurt inconsiderate spiritual platitudes at mourners, reaching for the first handy sayings that come to mind.

Spraying spiritual platitudes on the bereaved is as effective in helping them as when inexperienced cooks spray water on grease fires — flames spread, burning a larger area.

Consider these brimstone-scattering thoughts as you approach your grieving friends:

  • Not all family members have the same religious views or attitudes. What offers comfort to one may deeply wound (or even offend) another.
  • Unresolved familial disagreements about faith-related matters may leave the bereaved feeling anxious or guilty. Pointing out those differences does not help.
  • No one fully knows any heart or soul but their own. Assumptions about the deceased’s “heavenward” status can cause mourners more pain than condolence.
    • Sometimes “outsiders” (even within a family) aren’t privy to all the circumstances of the departed one’s life (or death, or both). The deceased may have lived a praiseworthy public facade but presented an altogether different reality behind closed doors.Grief can be complicated for these survivors.
    • In cases where the deceased secretly (or openly) abused family members, feelings of relief may overshadow (or battle alongside) grief.
  • Survivors of suicide face offensive outbursts from people whose words can’t possibly be intended to console (“Suicide’s a sin, so your loved one’s going to hell”). Survivors also hear too many insensitive assumptions by those who may mean to console but who instead inflict more injury (“Don’t worry. God will forgive your loved one”). Never assume you know what prompted the suicide, and never make spiritual assumptions about it or about the survivors.
  • Avoid using these religious platitudes (and others like them):
    • “She’s gone home to God.”
    • “He’s in a better place.”
    • “You just have to trust in God’s will.”
    • “God needed him more than you do.”
    • “It was her time.”
    • “You’ll see him again.”
    • “It won’t be long before you see her again.”
    • “Heaven needed another angel.”
    • “Now you’ve got an angel in heaven watching over you.”

Remember, I’m not anti-religion. On the contrary. My faith has remained the one constant, the one source of comfort and sanity and security when the box of my life felt soaked in mud, ripped open, overturned, shaken out, and run over. Often I agreed with the sentiments of the platitudes (that he was in a better place, that I did trust in God’s will, that I knew I’d see him again…).

However, hearing them thrust upon me did not help. It felt like the people who said them wanted to cover up or erase my pain, as if it were a thing to be lightly brushed aside. What I needed was to have my loss acknowledged.

If you have an already established pastoral relationship with the bereaved, it may (as in it might possibly, but it might not necessarily) be appropriate to offer spiritual counsel, scriptural comfort, or doctrinal comments. But before you preach at your congregant, listen.

For everyone else who wishes to console a grieving friend, don’t bring religion into your condolences unless your grieving friend first invites you into the topic.

As in all aspects of grieving, LISTEN to the bereaved and follow their lead. IF your grieving friends express an interest in speaking of spiritual matters, by all means share your thoughts, but do so carefully and from your heart, not from the first trite words that come to mind.

___

*I don’t say this to be preachy but to acknowledge the core of my survival during the most difficult part of my life. My reliance on God’s unwavering love and my faith in His absolute awareness of me (and my grieving children) is what kept me going when my soul was flayed raw with grief.

___

**I talk about other taboo topics — politics, money, physical appearance, and legal status — in other posts.

07/03/2014

Fireworks of Grief

July Fourth weekend, 1992. 

Their home phone rang as my parents walked back in the door after visiting Mom’s aunt over the holiday weekend. It was Mom’s doctor — not his staff — on the other end. “Where have you been? We’ve been calling for days. We’ve got you scheduled for surgery.”

Mom hadn’t told me about the biopsy — or even about the lump that prompted it. She hadn’t wanted me to worry. My first inclination of something wrong was when an uncle called to ask me if I’d heard the results. “No,” I’d assured him. “There’s nothing the matter. They’d have told me. You must be mistaken.”

Back in January she’d had her annual exam and mammogram. All was clear. In April she’d seen a small lump in the mirror (it was visible but not palpable) and she’d made an appointment. Her doctor recommended a biopsy. She had the biopsy and left town for the weekend.

The cancerous cells had already burst through all the lymph nodes.

Surgery, radiation, and chemo followed.

My husband and I moved our family from Arizona to Florida to care for her as she recovered while Dad continued working nights. She did well and returned to work.

20150704_multiburst fireworks

photo by Teresa TL Bruce, TealAshes.com

July Fourth, 1995, after watching the fireworks, we walked in the door and found Mom (who’d stayed home with a slight headache) slumped against the hallway. It was the first visible symptom that breast cancer had resurfaced, this time in her brain and spinal column.

The following week we learned it was terminal.

It’s been 19 years since that second devastating Independence Day. In the intervening years our family sometimes rekindled the positive traditions of early times. After my husband’s illness and death, though, the redoubling of grief made — still makes — the Fourth (like most widowed holidays) harder to manage than it used to be.

It’s not easy to construct new traditions. It’s not easy to “get over” grief when you miss loved ones who “should” be sharing special days. Please be patient with your grieving friends. Invite the bereaved to join you in your celebrations. Ask them about the traditions they cherish. Acknowledge your awareness of them, let them know they are not forgotten, even though they may be alone in their loneliness on Independence Day and other holidays.

06/27/2014

Comfort after Mom’s Funeral

When my mom’s mother died, I was a preteen child. I remember looking up as grandma’s best friend put her arms around my mom and cried along with her. Through her own tears, she told my mom, “I know I’ll never replace your mother, but I’ll try to mother you for her.”

Twenty years later, after my mom’s funeral, that same dear woman (who was then widowed and had long since become Mom’s best friend) embraced me and said, “I know how much it hurt when I lost my mama. It has been years and years, and sometimes it still breaks me up. I won’t tell you it will stop hurting, because you never lose the hurt when you miss the ones you love. But it won’t always hurt as much or as deeply as it does now. One day you’ll feel the sweetness of your love as much as the pain.”

I found comfort in her acknowledgement of my grief. Her words validated the pain I felt. They promised I wouldn’t forget the love I’d always felt from my mom. They assured my love for her would remain significant, even in her absence.

In that time and place of acute, agonizing new loss, I didn’t want to hear anything that diminished the significance of my grief.

  • I knew I wasn’t the only person to have had a loved one die, but I didn’t want my grief compared to theirs.
  • It was helpful to hear, “I know how much I hurt when my mom died. I’m here for you,” but it never helped to hear people say, “I know exactly how you feel,” because they didn’t lose my mother.
  • I was grateful that Mom no longer suffered from the cancer that killed her, but I hated hearing other people say, “At least she’s not suffering anymore.” 
  • I fully believed then and continue to believe now that my mother’s soul IS “in a better place,” but it felt hurtful and trite to hear would-be consolers say, “You can take comfort that she’s in a better place now,” because the important, essential fact was that she was gone.

I didn’t want to hear that I would stop hurting, because in that moment of bereavement when my LOSS surrounded me, the pain of mourning preserved my connection to Mom. To think of not missing her or to consider that I might stop mourning her felt like thinking of dismissing the bond between us and dismissing the significance of her role in my life.

I was pregnant with our second daughter when Dad’s mother died, and I was pregnant with our youngest daughter when my mom died. I can’t count how many well-meaning souls attempted to console me by saying, “At least you have the new baby to look forward to,” as if I should be content and ignore my grief because welcoming a new life should “undo” my bereavement over the end of my grandmother’s life — and then over my mother’s. As much as I glowed and grinned in the anticipation of each child’s arrival, I grieved for their yet-unborn losses, too, knowing they’d never get to know their great-grandma who’d nurtured and inspired me as much in my adulthood as she had in my childhood. I mourned for my youngest, that she’d never know the grandmother who’d rejoiced in putting as much loving energy into her too-brief years of grand-mothering as she’d put into decades of mothering me.

The condolences that offered me the greatest comfort in my new, raw grief (as a granddaughter, a daughter, and more recently as a widow) were the simplest, most spontaneous and heartfelt expressions of acknowledgment:

  • I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m so sorry to learn of the death of your mother, your grandmother, your husband.
  • I wish I knew what to say. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.
  • This is awful news. I’m devastated for you.
  • I’m keeping you in my thoughts. You’re in my prayers.