Thinking about Grief...

In group today, myself and my fellow intern chaplains discussed grief and grieving. After my experience working with Hospice, I have a few things I believe strongly enough to pass on, and now, I'm gonna pass them on to you.

Grief used to be a pretty normal experience. People tended to die at home, and so growing up kids learned how to deal with it almost instinctively. Some were hit harder than others, of course, but in general people knew what they were feeling and why.

Then came the advent of modern medicine, and things got a bit cocked up. Sure, we were better at curing diseases, but death became a thing that happened away from the home, and children were shielded from it. And even with all our advances, people kept dying. Only now, we didn't know what to do.

Nowadays, most people don't believe that they are gonna die. Popular culture has told us that death really only happens to bad people, unlucky people, or those who make bad decisions. We, the general, run of the mill, basically good people, probably won't die. We've had our shots, we've paid our taxes, we don't hurt people, we'll be fine. Small wonder we don't know what to do when other people like us die deaths that don't fit into that moral worldview.

When others around us grieve, we feel bad and we feel awkward. We kinda want them to feel better, and we REALLY want them to feel better so that we can feel good about feeling good. So we try to "fix" them, try to say the magical thing that makes them happy, and if it doesn't work, we suspect that we just didn't say the right thing, and/or that their grief is REALLY bad and they need a professional.

As a kinda/sorta professional, let me tell you now. There IS no right thing. Grief is a wound that cannot be healed with a bandage, it only heals by being permitted to grieve. You can bottle up feelings for awhile, but eventually that dam will burst and those feelings WILL be expressed, often violently.

So go ahead and feel what you feel, and don't let anyone tell you its wrong. Also, if someone near you is suffering in such a way, make sure they know its okay to feel as well, that they aren't doing anything wrong. It'll be the best thing you can say to them.

Got a push on Facebook...

After my last post, is it a bit ironic that this blog got left by the wayside for awhile? Leave comments, they help me keep going...

So where was I...

Oh yeah. Recovering from St. Patrick's. I mostly behaved myself yesterday, and though I have a bit of Guinness Karma still working on me I expect I'll be in good shape come my shift at the hospital tonight, though between all the singing, shouting, and second hand smoke, I think my voice has dropped an entire octave.

Yeah.