Grief never enters a room quietly. Sometimes it’s like falling down a flight of stairs, and sometimes it’s like getting hit by a SEPTA bus at 40 mph. Either way, it will kick your ass loudly, and the recovery process depends on the degree of injury and what lingers after the impact.
In my personal life and in my profession, I have become deeply acquainted with the inevitability of grief. It comes in many forms, and doesn’t only show up when a loved one dies. We can also grieve the loss of a marriage or a friendship, a home, a job, an older version of ourselves, a treasured object, or a particular moment in time (I’m looking at you, pre-mobile device era).
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross gave us the Five Stages of Grief, and later her protégé David Kessler added meaning-making as a sixth stage to the original denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance model we’re all too familiar with. While these stages can apply to any form of loss (usually not in order and sometimes all at once), for today’s purpose I’m talking about the SEPTA bus kind: the death of a loved one.
On my first day back to the office after Christmas vacation, within the course of three hours, I learned that the mother of one client and the father of another had passed away. In my work, holding space for grief is an absolute privilege, so on some days, as the gravity of loss hits me all at once, the weight reminds me of just how gloriously human this work is.
You’ll never hear me complain about being a highly empathetic person. Compassion is a gift, one that I try to cultivate every day (usually successfully, but sometimes with an egregious faceplant). Still, it can bump up against my emotional threshold on occasion, so when I heard that not only one, but TWO of my clients had experienced loss on the same evening, the news landed like a prize fighter’s left hook.
Why would I grieve for someone I didn’t know, you ask? Well, first, I’m not an asshole. Watching others suffer hurts my heart. I even get weepy when the kids in a baking competition get eliminated, so in MY world, when someone tells you that their parent just died, empathy is automatically required.
Secondly, it wasn’t so much that I was grieving the loss of the parents themselves, but rather for two people I sit across from week after week, whose pain I’ve witnessed, stories I know, growth I’ve celebrated, and with whom I’ve built the weirdly comfortable alliance that exists only in the therapy office or confessional booth.
When people I care about are hurting, I feel it with them, not because it overwhelms me, but because connection is part of the healing process. Being a therapist may be my job, but being deliberately human informs how I do it.
I’m lucky enough to share a space with two of my safe people. Anna (my biz partner), Pam (another therapist friend), and I have offices in the same building, so we usually have lunch together, talking business and letting off steam. The next day at work, I texted Anna with, “I’m very sad,” so she and Pam came to my office to let me unload a bit. As I began talking about the loss my clients had just experienced, I started to cry.
But then, at the most exquisitely precise moment, Anna cracked a joke, and I started to laugh. I don’t remember exactly what she said, probably something about farts, because let’s be honest, even in grief, nothing compares to a well-timed fart joke. She wasn’t being insensitive. She just knew I needed a pause, like the space between words that give them each meaning and allows us to take a breath. I felt much better after that release.
I noticed that the same thing happened when I met with each of my grieving clients that week. They both processed their feelings, of course, and recounted the circumstances of their parents’ deaths, but there were moments when offering a little levity felt natural, and both chose to welcome it. Although those silly interludes wouldn’t take away the gripping pain of loss, somehow, they loosened it just enough to break through the sadness for a while, not to bypass the process, but to create a little room to breathe.
David Kessler said that, “Grief doesn’t always look heavy. Sometimes it laughs. Sometimes it connects us to something beyond words,” and he is so right. As I advance in my own grief and loss pilgrimage, I find that my favorite memories of my departed loved ones are rarely the sad or angry ones, but the ones that make me laugh – the funny stories we retell with relatives on birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays that become written into the family lore. Maybe laughter really is the best medicine – even after you’ve been run over by a speeding bus and have to learn to walk all over again.
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