On Grief and Resources
I’ve been doing a lot of work around grief lately.
Both of my parents died in 2023. Two other friends also died in 2023 - both former coworkers. One was in his mid-thirties and had a rare brain tumor; the other died from COVID.
My dad’s death last June came after several months in the ICU. He endured repeated rounds of dialysis, which he hated, and ventilator-associated pneumonia, which I hadn’t heard of before. He had opted for open-heart surgery, I think because he didn’t fully understand the risks given that he was a cancer patient for over 10 years, and like many people, believed that doctors are superheroes. I was with him, and held his hand when they turned off the machines at his request.
I cried a lot.
That night, I had dinner with my mother, and spent time with a friend. My nervous system was reverberating as my brain tried to update all the variables that referenced my father - one of the oldest globals in my memory system. Everything had to be changed from present tense to past tense. I went to bed early, and continued to feel my brain vibrating for about a week. Time seemed to slow down as I tried to wrap my mind around this new reality.
I was grateful that I wasn’t required to be back at work right away. And when I did go back, everything felt harder than it normally would have. My memory was deeply affected, so I was leaning even more than usual on looking things up and writing notes to reference in the next minute, hour, or day. I couldn’t be sure I would remember from one minute to the next, what I was trying to do, or how I was trying to do it.
For weeks afterward, I was still bursting into sobs, alone in my apartment.
I found The Grief Recovery Handbook extremely helpful, and went through all the exercises of writing a letter to my dad. Somehow, the step of reading the letter out loud to my partner helped process emotion that was otherwise struggling to come out.
I did a grief ritual with a group of strangers. My family didn’t want a funeral. The person running the ritual gathering said grief is too big, we have to hold it in community. We cried together and exchanged hugs. I was grateful that it was outdoors, and COVID was less of a risk at that time.
And then a few months later, just as I was starting to think about what was to come next in my life, my sister texted to say that our mother had died.
We had expected she wouldn’t last long without Dad. They had been married 50 years, and the months with him in the hospital had been difficult enough, without the hard truth of learning that he would never be coming home again.
I had been planning to fly back across the country and visit Mom, but in the meantime I had been calling almost daily. She was still as active as ever, working in the garden, and going for walks with friends. So it was sudden in the sense that her health had not been in obviously precipitous decline.
The grief for my mother is more complicated than it was for my father. Perhaps since I wasn’t there, I’ve felt more numb, despite using all the same tools that helped when my father died.
Around the same time, my best friend’s mother died. Her experience has been quite different from mine, but we’re both trying to slow down and take the time we need to process the enormity of losing parents.
When people ask me what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve had to explain, which is especially weird when it’s in the context of doing things like interviewing for work.
It’s also given me pause regarding how we expect people to just go back to work. The official policy at many places is to give something like a week off to grieve for immediate family (parents, spouse, or children), but otherwise just one day. That policy doesn’t consider a sibling as immediate family, nor a partner who is not a spouse, nor a best friend.
In 2022, someone on my team lost her long-time partner’s mother, which according to company policy, didn’t count as immediate family at all. And the grief obviously affected her, though she struggled to talk about it, and at the time, I struggled to understand what was happening for her.
But now I get it. I really do.
Knowing what I know now, I wish our culture was better at providing time and resources for processing grief.
Obviously, it goes against the typical capitalistic workhorse mentality. If anything, we’re supposed to self-medicate by working harder! Work is supposed to be a welcome distraction and stability! Which, it certainly can be. It can be very helpful to have the routine, as well as some semblance of support in a social environment at work.
However, we don’t provide people with extra paid time off for grief, or other accommodations. The long tail of recovering from loss deserves more attention and respect, not to mention education.
Resources
Here are some resources I found particularly comforting in my grief journey. I hope they are helpful for supporting yourself, your loved ones, and any coworkers who might be on this path.
Books
In-person/zoom
Grief ritual workshops like those by Amy Hyun Swart https://www.amyswart.com/grief-medicine
Podcasts
All There Is (I recommend starting from the beginning)
Other resources that have been recommended to me
You’re going to die (workshops and podcast)
Francis Weller’s workshops and books (he’s interviewed on All There Is and You’re Going To Die)