Typically when I think of grieving the loss of a loved one, I think of all of the things I lost when I lost that person. That might be the sound of their voice or their contagious smile. They might make the best peanut butter fudge in the world or the most tasty no bake cookies. I miss calling my unadopted dad for advice. He had this way of getting you to think through situations that I don’t think EVER steered me wrong. I miss Kate’s quirky sense of humor and her gluten free sugar cookies. I miss my grandpas enjoyment of storytelling. Even when the story wasn’t that great, his enjoyment in telling it was just too good to pass up.
But grieving isn’t always about the things you had with a person that are now gone. Sometimes the grief is about the moments missed, the opportunities gone, the moments that never were and now will never be. A fairly obvious example of this would be an infant lost, whether before or after birth. All of those potential memories, hopes, dreams, experiences, just gone in an instant. You didn’t even have time to find out who they were going to be. How can you help but wonder? Who was this tiny little human grow up to be? A doctor? An engineer? Actor? Dancer? Preacher? Millions of possibilities. What would their laugh have sounded like? What color would their eyes turn out to be? What kinds of mischief would they have gotten up to? There is no end to the questions that will never be answered.
Another example of this kind of grief could be found in an estranged relationship. Here the grief might feature a lot of what if questions. What if I had made the effort to reach out sooner? What if I had picked up the phone and just called them? What if? What if? What if? How am I going to find closure with them gone? Why didn’t I ever tell them I loved them? All of the moments that you could have, maybe should have had, opportunities now forever lost.
Yet another example, and one close to home for me, is relationships that should have been and yet somehow never came to be. I met the woman who became my mother in law almost twenty years ago now. Up to that point, I had always wondered about what kind of mother in law I would have. I had hoped to have a mother in law that I could really relate to. A woman that I could bond with and grow close to. A woman in which I could find the ‘mom’ I so desperately craved in my life. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long after being married to find out that that wasn’t likely to ever be the case. Although my mother in law was polite to me and we seemed to have a few interests in common, we never bonded or grew close. The same was true of our kids. My mother in law was super close to her daughter and her daughters children (who lived next door to her.) and she just didn’t seem to have enough of herself left over for all of the people in our family. (Maybe it was because my sister in law only had three kids and we had eight all together. I don’t know.) Then as the years passed and her mind slowly slipped away, she didn’t even remember who my husband or I was or who our children were. When she died, it opened that door that had previously only been cracked, leaving us wide open to the grief of knowing that everything that could have been and should have been, now and forever, would never be. All of the memories that my kids should have had of their grandma. Instead, when my youngest daughter was asked by the clergyman at the funeral if she was as close to her Nana as her cousins, she told him she didn’t even know most of things that had been said about her in the service. When it was asked for people to come forward with their funny memories, none of my children even budged. They didn’t have a single fun memory with her to share. In the loss of my mother in law, I am not grieving the loss of everything I and my family have lost, but rather the loss of everything that we never had.
It’s important to remember that we should never put grief in a box. Whether for someone else or for ourselves. There is far more to the grieving process than likely any of us will ever truly realize. Too often grief is in open door to guilt and recriminations. Grief has many faces. It is not easily understood or forgotten. It is often misunderstood and labeled as something other than what it is. I hope through what I share, I can rip the blinders off of grief for those who don’t understand and can never imagine the devastation that grief can leave in it’s wake.
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