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Key points
- Many tools are available to help people work through grief.
- Therapy, EMDR, and medication can be helpful.
- Support groups offer an opportunity to vent pain and learn from others.
“You went after your grief like it was your job,” a friend remarked recently.
It’s a somewhat dry assessment of a tear-drenched process, but she was right. After Tom died suddenly, I hunkered down to grief work with grim determination. That’s the kind of hairpin I am. Information soothes me, and I like action whenever possible. I want to handle stuff, and I want to do it in the healthiest way possible. It’s how I navigate life.
When people compliment me for being strong, I don’t think they know how much work has gone into it. What follows is my personal process in coping with grief; yours may be different, but perhaps you’ll find something helpful here.
Therapy is always my go-to.
I describe my family of origin as Woody Allen meets Eugene O’Neill. Things were complicated and often dark, and I became acquainted with therapy quite young. (And early psychopharmaceuticals, but that’s another not-pretty story.) I even paid for my own therapy as a teenager when my then-separated parents punted, and my therapist finally got impatient about unpaid sessions. (Grandpa left me a couple of grand, and I dipped into that.) I’ve been in and out of therapy since then and credit it for saving my life in my darkest days. Therapy is part of my personal brand, and I’m OK with that. The healthiest people I know have been in therapy.
When Tom died, I had a nearly 20-year on-and-off relationship with a therapist, and we were already on a weekly schedule because she’d been helping me cope with a serious health problem. She’s been invaluable. My heart breaks for everyone who has not been able to find a therapist who is taking new clients since so many are swamped these days, what with the state of the world. (Psychology Today has a directory of therapists for those who are searching.) I am fortunate. But the tsunami of grief was a lot for even that most excellent relationship, and so I reached for every healing tool I could find.
Medication helped to a degree.
The day after Tom died, I had a follow-up appointment with my oncologist. (“Yesterday?” she said, startled. “And you came here?” I shrugged. “It was something to do,” I said numbly.) Sympathetic and sad (she’d met Tom many times), she did what she could, giving me prescriptions for an antidepressant I had used successfully in the past as well as something for anxiety and something to help me sleep. I used the latter two sparingly but was glad to have them.
I had what I called Xanax days when the pain nearly strangled me. Half a pill took the edge off. These medications in no way shielded me from the pain; at most, they kept me functional while I dealt with it.
EMDR helped me see past the trauma.
In the first months, flashbacks of finding Tom felled by a heart attack were an impenetrable wall of shock and horror, keeping me from the pure grief. Every time I tried to think of Tom, I saw that. So when my therapist suggested EMDR, I was all in. The EMDR therapist said I’d started unusually early in the process—people usually come as a last resort—but we had pretty quick results because the traumatic image hadn’t had time to become entrenched. The memory didn’t go away, and it still haunts me sometimes, but it receded enough to let me start dealing with the grief.
Online support was key.
Sometimes the sadness and pain built to a point where they needed release, to be spoken aloud. That’s where a Facebook grief support group helped. There people understood and could respond to the nuances and unspokens of my grief waves. We all grieve differently, but we all learn from each other as well. Emitting these primal screams among people who were roughly in the same space was entirely different from talking to even the most sympathetic friends.
I also found a weekly online support group for people who had lost a spouse, which is not the same as losing a parent or child or anyone else. Our group of about five to eight grievers and a couple of social workers was together officially for two years under the auspices of a hospice company. When the company ended it, we (minus the social workers) took ourselves unofficially to Facebook Live and get together still.
I got—and still get—a tremendous amount from David Kessler’s web-based grief support and training, Tender Hearts. While I had my own support group and didn’t join those on Tender Hearts—there are specific groups for all kinds of losses—between Kessler’s videos and almost-daily Zoom discussions, I came to understand so many aspects of grief: guilt, anger, forgiveness, other people. Talking to and listening to grievers, guided by the wisdom of a professional, has been key in my grief education.
And books helped.
There are a million grief books out there, and I dabbled. I was most touched by Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking about losing her husband of 40 years suddenly. (Tom and I were together almost as long.) I also found comfort in a couple of David Kessler’s books, Finding Meaning and Visions, Trips and Crowded Rooms, about the things people witness as others pass. I read all of these a couple of times each.
I also got a dog. For company and hugs.
And, of course, I leaned on friends. Heavily.
Where all this got me
So I’m three-plus years out now. What has all this done for me?
I’m doing OK.
And that feels like a lot.
I still wear sadness like a lingering scent, and it can still overwhelm me without warning sometimes, but I’m doing OK. I haven’t quit my support groups, but my attendance has gotten spottier. I talk to my therapist monthly rather than weekly.
I’m finally starting to think seriously about cleaning out Tom’s closet, where his clothes still hang as he left them. (I think that every time I touch something in there.) I still have to ride grief waves, I still cry, and I still talk to his picture. But these days, my thoughts turn as often to what’s next as to what was. My work now is less about absorbing the loss and more about accepting it and rebuilding, figuring out who I am and what the rest of my life might look like since it will look nothing like I’d imagined.
So yeah. I have worked hard at grief, and the work is not over. I feel more emotionally solid than I have in a long time—wounded but walking. Grief still blindsides me in a million little ways every day, but I don’t think anything big lurks in the shadows. I have worked hard, and I’m preparing to start the next job: moving forward.
Tom would be proud of me, I think. Because he knew this is how I am. Nobody has ever known me better, and I doubt anybody will.
