Grief is Like a Ball in a Box

Links referenced in this podcast:

Lauren Herschel's Twitter Feed

Karen Lanser's blog post about Lauren's Twitter Feed----more----

Transcript:

Thanks for joining us, and welcome once again to Like Driving in Fog, an Emotional Healing podcast. I’m Mary Young.

When I was in high school, we had a college student come and speak to our English class. She had published a book of poetry called Clouds of April or something like that (that’s 40 years ago -- I’m lucky to remember this at all).  The premise behind the book - the premise behind the title was that spring is a time of growth, and renewing, and renewed optimism, and that 40 years ago April was the month with the most amount of suicides statistically. And you wonder why am bringing that up. I’m not here to talk about suicide today. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes sometimes there are no words and there’s always hope.

I do want to talk about grief. Grief is one of those things that will hit you really hard right at the get-go, and you think it’s going to crush your soul. And then time passes, and you get accustomed to the new normal, and the grief isn’t as rough. And then someday just out of the blue, it’ll be as painful as if whatever the incident was had just happened. And it drives people crazy- it drives me crazy - when it’s like that. And it’s easy to think that we’re doing it wrong. If we were grieving “properly,” we would be past this. If we were more emotionally healthy, this wouldn’t bother us. Yeah. That’s not true, you guys.

First, let’s go back to my definition of emotional health: feeling your emotions and being able to express them appropriately. Stuffing something down, compartmentalizing, is not feeling your emotions. So when grief rears its head, you need to just go with it. Now, I know that that’s not always an option, okay. Sometimes you have to stuff it down just to be able to function at that particular moment in time.

 Let me give you an example. About a month ago, on a Friday lunchtime... I was about to get on a conference call. In my day job, I do computer training over the Internet. I was about to get into a classroom that would’ve lasted 90 minutes to two hours. I was the instructor. It’d been a busy day, and my cell phone is usually on mute while I’m teaching, and I was teaching several classes that day. So I had not even looked at my cell all morning, and I had five minutes to spare, so I grabbed my phone and started looking at messages. There was a message from an unknown number, asking me to call them.

It wasn’t totally unknown - it was a number I’d dealt with before. It’s actually friends of mine, but I didn’t have every family person’s number recorded in my phone. So I knew which family it was, but I didn’t know which family member it was. I called them, and she told me that a good friend had passed away the night before. And no sooner had I hung up the phone from that conversation than my student showed up in my classroom, and I had to go from being shocked and stunned and sad, to being a professional facilitator and leading this class.  So I took those feelings, and I stuffed them, because I had to bury them for at least the next two hours.

Here’s the problem with stuffing or with burying. It’s really hard to tell your emotions: okay guys, I’m going to bury the sadness and the shock and this grief for two hours, and then it will be okay to feel it.  No, it doesn’t work that way. You bury that grief, that emotion, and it stays buried for a while. My previous experience has always been that it comes back at the most inopportune time.  It’s one of the reasons that I work on feeling the emotions at the time that they’re happening, but sometimes you have to stuff them, like I did last month.

I am still coming to terms with John’s loss.

I can tell myself he’s not in pain anymore.

I can tell myself he’s reunited with his wife (she passed away last July).

I can tell myself he lived a full happy life (and oh man, did he!), but that doesn’t erase the hole that’s in my life now.

That doesn’t erase the changes that I’m going to have to make because he and I traded dog sitting for one, and now have to find a new dog sitter.

Interestingly enough, the week before I got the news about John, I had followed a link on Facebook and somebody had written a blog post about something they had heard somebody else say about grief.  I have been sharing this far and wide in the last month, because it is the best description or illustration of grief that I’ve ever heard, and so I’d like to share that with you here today. I will put the link in the transcript but I want to go ahead and just give you the basic gist of it.

There is a woman named @LaurenHerschel and she did a series of tweets about grief. Somebody else took her metaphor and turned it into a blog post (with her permission).  It’s been shared on Facebook -- it’s pretty much gone viral. And everybody I’ve shared it with has said: oh my gosh that is exactly how it feels, and it certainly fits my own experience as well.  When I talked to my therapist about it, we were like: this could just as easily be describing trauma.

Imagine there is a box. If you need a visual, just draw a square on a piece of paper, and then draw circle inside that square. Have it almost as big as the square - that’s the ball that’s inside the box. On one side of the box is a button, so draw a button on one side, and that button is what we call the pain button.

As that ball moves around inside that box, the ball is so big that it can’t help but hit that pain button, over and over and over and over.  And that is your early stages of grief, when it’s fresh, and raw, and feels like it’s going to rip your heart out because that ball in the box keeps hitting the pain button.

Over time, the ball gets smaller, and when it’s smaller it doesn’t hit the pain button as much.  So it only occasionally hits the pain button. But every time it does it’s just as fresh, just as raw, just as painful as when it was brand-new.

For some people the ball never ever goes away. It just shrinks down to a manageable size, and you’re able to function 90% of the time, until that ball hits the pain button.

Sometimes there will be a new incident that is similar, and that hits the pain button again. When my friend Dee passed away in July that was painful, but it had been seven months. We’d gotten through Thanksgiving. We’d gotten through Christmas. We were about to get through her birthday, and it was manageable. The ball was smaller; it didn’t hit the pain button as often.

Then her husband passed away, and it was like losing Dee all over again. He’s not my last connection to Dee -- I’m friends with the family. I do Thanksgiving and Christmas with some of the family, but this coming...this coming Thanksgiving will be the first time that people my age will be the oldest people at the dinner table.  We’ve always had somebody from the parents’ generation. John, Dee, Taylor...they’re all gone now, and we are now the older people at the table, and that’s going to be different.

Today, that ball in the box is pretty well giant-sized. In the future, I know it will shrink, and then there will be days like the Fourth of July family reunion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, their anniversary -- all of those first special days after loss.  

And the ball will grow big again on those days, but it’s okay, because part of being emotionally healthy is feeling your emotions even when they’re painful.

 

Thanks for listening to Like Driving in Fog. Until next time, go make it a great week.