Anger and Grief

"Grief is perhaps the emotion we fear the most."
- Brene Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

It's so much easier to get angry than it is to grieve. Much easier to over-function and plan than to break down, especially when surrounded by children and the needs of a busy household. I've been wrestling with grief over the past weeks, trying not to feel the sorrow of my father's diagnosis, not to feel the loss of what I thought would be a life-long friendship, not to fully swallow the pain of a child who has been routinely excluded.

My MO for grief is usually to brew anger in my gut (no wonder I have so many gut issues) and then let it fly like the steam of a teakettle late in the evening when the kids are in bed. Rob usually gets a contact burn from being a beta listener, and he patiently steps back and waits for the pressure to die down before offering a few words of support. Rarely do I substitute tears for the anger, but when I do it's more cleansing for me and easier for Rob to offer support. The tears are more rare because it hurts too much to go there, and I don't know how to "do" grief.

In a wonderful article called "The Geography of Sorrow" by Tim McKee (The Sun , October 2015, http://thesunmagazine.org/), psychologist Francis Weller talks about how modern society has lost the grief rituals that sustained our ancestors in a tribal culture: "When modern people engage in grief rituals, the often say it feels familiar, as if they've done this before. Yes, we have, for more than two hundred thousand years. And then, within the past few hundred years, it practically disappeared. That's a profound loss."  We now grieve alone, not wanting to inflict our discomfort on other people, not wanting to disappoint.  We've certainly lost the practice of thanking the one who grieves, as Weller notes in the same article:  "During the grief ritual you go off by yourself to weep, and when you return, the group welcomes you back and thanks you for helping to empty the communal cup of sorrow. How many of us have ever been thanked for our grief before?"

I was fortunate to read McKee's article and Brene' Brown's book at the same time I was suppressing my grief. With a double whammy of insight and instruction, I was able to give myself space and permission to feel sorrow and to let the steam of my anger settle back down into tears. I still want to function, to not overstate my grief or let it overwhelm me, but a wise, wise friend told me that my compassion and my grief (shared in many cases) can prove a valuable undercurrent to pragmatics and planning. To sit compassionately with one who suffers, to listen and not try to fix, would certainly be a gift.