Healthy mourning, part 2: difficult deaths
by Mira and Charles on October 23rd, 2009Yeah, I know. Is death ever easy to deal with? But some deaths are more difficult than others. Not long ago, I attended a funeral for a young man in his 30s who’d died after a long battle with drugs, leaving behind a daughter whose mother had abandoned both of them a long time before. And he’s been a very brilliant guy filled with promise. And how do you handle a death like that if you’re his mother or daughter?
There are many reasons some people’s deaths are hard to deal with. Their life was short or difficult. Or you had a complicated relationship with them that left you with unfinished business. Or their death was unusually painful. What does healthy mourning look like in these cases?
When someone dies, we often feel they’ve been cheated, and you have too. They just didn’t get all that was coming to them. You both missed out. It’s extra sad, and it’s also infuriating. You’re really mad, but it’s hard to know who to be mad at.
Don’t look for easy answers. It’s OK that there are mysteries to which only God knows the answer. But healthy mourning doesn’t mean making everything OK or finding closure, whatever that means. It just means a healthy process. And that means opening up all your dark and painful feelings and thought to the healthy air by sharing them with people.
It’s not that you will suddenly realize that their death or their life was not a waste. But by having real conversations with people about these issues and feelings you will gradually come to feel at peace with their life being what it was. Maybe it was a waste in some ways, but you can be okay with that. Every life doesn’t have to be a wonderful gift to humanity or a total delight to whoever lived that life.
But if you do air out your thoughts and feelings, you will come to see that there were good things too. This is usually lost in our feelings of grief, guilt, regret, and anger. But over time we find those good things and learn to hold on to them a little better. That’s perspective, and that’s healthy.
Then there is the issue of forgiveness. With every death, there is the need to get or give forgiveness. We tend to dwell on the ways we’ve been hurt, or have hurt the other person. But of course it’s too late, we think. Except that it isn’t. It’s never too late to forgive.
And it’s never as hard as we think. It just takes the realization that everyone does their best and no one’s been as badly hurt as we think. I know this, because this is what people always say when they do find forgiveness, and they almost always do, even when they never thought it possible. So if you’re going to end up here, realizing that you’re basically okay and that the other did her best, why not focus on that now? You don’t have to fully believe it yet. But there’s a lot of comfort in herding your thoughts in that direction until they finally arrive there.
And if you were needing forgiveness from the other person, assume that they were on their way there, and that they would have gotten there too. Accept the forgiveness they would have given you.
As for the unfinished business, well, just finish it. Unhealthy mourning too often consists of fragments of dialogue in which you or loved one hurl painful words at each other and nothing goes further than that. So instead, have a real dialogue with your loved one. (Okay, it’s an imaginary dialogue, but it’s real too because the feeling are fully alive, and the resolution will feel totally real.) Take that painful thought (for example, “You were never really there for me”) and take the next steps. What would the response be? And the response to the response be?
A skilled professional or even a wise friend can help a lot with this. The point is that you will see that the resolution that you’ve been longing for has not been out of reach. You weren’t as far apart as you thought. And that’s very healing.
Bottom line: when a death is specially hard to deal with, don’t stew in your own juices. If you work on these seemingly impossible issues, you’ll find they’re not impossible. You can and will feel better.
As I said last time, there’s also a lot of help for issues arising out of a loved one’s death in Everything Happens for a Reason and in The Emotional Energy Factor.
