Couples (and others) Communicating after the Death of a Child
This writing comes from a letter I wrote to a client who is having marital problems after the loss of a beloved family member. He could not understand why, in a time when couples “should” grow closer, and become united by tragedy, he and his wife were seemingly growing just more and more distant.
If you feel distance from your partner that is confusing, right when you most need them or has expected their support, perhaps my words might help you. If you feel that pressure to be happy-happy-happy, you might find solace here.
Couples, even the most healthy and strong ones, face great challenges when they face a significant loss. It commonly is a time of unexpected distance, and very confusing isolation. Most people think, “How strange! You’d think that a tragedy would UNIFY a couple!” Or “Hmmm, that couple must not be a very strong one.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Many couples don’t make it after suffering great loss. It is so painful…nothing that they might have ever dreamed, but the distance, and the sad suffocation of communication renders them unable to continue together. I firmly believe that this can be completely avoided with the right type of help, and that couples *can indeed* help each other, or at very least, come to understand the workings of great loss in each of their individual lives.
Unfortunately, one thing about our society that I deeply, deeply lament, is that we don’t TEACH about death, and about the myriad huge losses that WILL, guaranteed, be a part of our lives. We are taught —by what we see all the time — that we are to express sympathy, offer some form of help, then forget it. We don’t talk about the dead person after all the services are done and everything is neatly packaged up and put away.
We don’t allow ourselves to express those strong waves of understandable SORROW that we feel, in the very depths of our hearts, in the very depths of the place that makes us who we are, and how we relate to the world. We are encouraged to be “better.” To smile. To be thankful for what we have. While those ideas are nice, they are not always appropriate, or helpful.
The phrases out of all too many people’s mouths encourage us to stifle our true and pure sadness. They ALL come from very caring, well-meaning people, but they are too frequently not at all helpful, as they suggest that our natural, and true upset and devastation is somehow distasteful, inappropriate, or too long-lived.
“Cherish your beloved memories and be thankful that you had him/her in your life."
“Time will heal you."
“Are you over it yet, honey?"
“I’m worried Perhaps you need to get on some medication to help you."
“Are you feeling better yet?"
"S/he’s in a better place"
“At least you have ______. "
“You are so strong!"
“God will help you."
“Don’t cry! Think about the good things! That is what ____ would want!"
“Thank good ness that you have other children!"
“Stay positive! S/he would not want to see you like this!"
“God works in mysterious ways."
“Your late loved one won’t rest if s/he knows you’re crying!"
“Thing of all the good things in your life!"
“You have so much to be thankful and happy for!"
“Don’t upset the other children!"
"God doesn’t give us more than we can handle." “Stop; your sadness hurts me."
“We must carry on."
“Children are resilient. They get through pretty well (nothing could be more
damagingly FALSE)."
No matter how true or well-intended any of these phrases may be, they do not acknowledge simple, pure, *understandable* pain. We humans boast a gigantic spectrum of emotions. And this is a beautiful privilege and blessing that we’ve been given. It is lamentable that societally, we rush, feeling justified in uncomfortably trying to pull people from feeling anything sad, or hurt, or depressed.
We were GIVEN these emotions. They exist in our makeups *for a reason.* And when we rush to escape them, to wipe them out, to cover them with “optimistic” smiles and “positivism,” we are chopping off a crucial part of our amazing beings. We are also teaching ourselves, and worse, our children, that such emotions are to be stifled at all costs. And…they *always* manifest themselves in other ways, most commonly, in unfavorable ways, be they in our own attitudes toward life, or those toward others, our own children included.
Pain is just pain. Nothing more. It is something natural, and in its singular way, very pure. When we are hurting deeply, we wear no masks. We are raw and exposed. In a world where false smiles and always-happy presentation is the obsessively desired standard, the pure quality of the raw, hurting heart is a thing of beauty that most of us don’t get to see or share very much. We cover it. We apologize for it. We run from it. And worse, others try to help us do that. It is what we have been taught.
Couples, facing deep, heartbreaking loss, are often caught without knowing how to even begin to relate to each other. Again, we are not taught how to go about it. Each person in the couple is attempting to deal with his and her own deep, raw emotions, ones that cause discomfort; ones we’re encouraged to “fix.” That alone is very, very difficult. Add another person to the mix — and a person whom you’re supposed to be the closest to — and it begins to get confounding. Heck, with our *own* feelings, it is already complicated and hard.
Now there is another person to consider…and that person is supposed to be the one whom we go through everything with, who we support and who supports us. Our partners are supposed to be those people in our lives who *get us,* who have the comfort and answers and love. When deep, dark feelings have us strapped, or scared, though, and we are trying to navigate our way through them, it’s often supremely hard often impossible, to deal with our OWN experience, much less that of another, even our most profoundly loved ones.
Each person in the couple tends to try and deal with his/her hurts in the best way s/he knows. Every minute is different and changeable during these times. Sometimes you want to cry. Others, you want to escape into a TV show. Others, you want to talk about the person whom you’ve lost. Others, you want to laugh. Others, you want to silently think and mourn. Others, you just want to die. It is ALL normal, and it is ALL OK. The conflict begins when we start trying to make these feelings into something else.
We commonly hope that our partners might intuit exactly where we are with our feelings, and we hope that they somehow *know* how to comfort us. After all, they are supposed to know us, right? Our assumptions here are not correct, because when we are that deep in, with feelings that we’re taught to fix and change, we don’t even tend to know *ourselves* very well, much less another, even that person whom we love with all our hearts.
If we are struggling with how to comfort ourselves, then it follows that expecting others to be able to do it is unrealistic. Nobody is in the same place, emotionally, when these things happen. Perhaps you might want to talk, while your partner needs to escape into a movie. Perhaps your partner is crying when you want to remember the good times that made you laugh. Perhaps you want to be quiet, or aren’t able to talk about it, but your partner wants you to —
Without kind guidance through these experiences, couples can become resentful of each other, they can even begin to feel that they don’t trust each other as much as they’d hoped. They begin to close down and the distance grows. The PAIN that causes this is doing its thing — when ignored, when escaped from, when forced to be something it is not, we become uncomfortable and comfort becomes elusive and impossible.
Time allows us to shove all of the hurt down, but there it lies, barely dormant, right under the surface. Little things can set it off. A look, a thought, a trinket you see…can catapult you into a sense of desperate isolation…and ironically, that loneliness can be the deepest, right when we have our partner at our sides. When we can not simply experience what IS, we feel terribly alone. And those smiles we force forth are particularly ugly.
Many people entertain the erroneous idea that it is hurtful to address the pain. They avoid bringing up the person who died, because they don’t want to cause upset. They sometimes even act as if the person who died had never existed…it is disrespectful to the understandably hurting heart, and to the memory of the person who died. Yet we’re taught to (mis)handle it in this manner. People attempt to “get back to normal” in hopes that everyday life can return, and things can lighten up. (Note: for many, things will *understandably* never “get back to normal,” and that is absolutely OK.)
Will opening the flood gates destroy us? No. In fact, it can open us to light and healing. It can bring forth a sweet, pure communication that we rarely have the privilege of experiencing in our everyday lives, marked as they are by society’s crazed drive to always be happy-happy-happy, positive-positive-positive. True sadness does not have to imply that we are going to freak out, slit our wrists, become vastly dysfunctional, or lose our minds. It is usually the complete opposite — true sadness, expressed with love, to those people whom we trust, can be a path to great growth, deepening of the pure soul, and strengthening of a relationship. Only when it is able to be expressed without suffocation, though, without others’ urge to force us into another feeling and presentation to the world.
How to stumble forward without crushing our relationships? The first thing to do is to reaffirm our love for our partners, and to express that we are very sad, too, that he/she is hurting. We can express that we want to do whatever it is that comforts. We can listen. We can talk about the person we’ve lost. We can sit in silence and listen to a song that person loved. We can walk in silence. There needn’t be any words. Simple respect for sadness, acceptance of it; ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of it is the first step.
How to get there when communication has broken down? First, it helps to identify where YOU are in the process, and this can change day-to-day, even hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute. Then you can express it. Your partner needs *help* to be able to be there for you. Typical questions, and states of grief-communication-pain include the following. Do you see yourself in any of these? You can be one way one moment, and another the next. It helps to identify where you are, and to be able to let your partner know it, also.
1. I am hurting deeply, but can not talk about it yet. Words are not adequate for my experience. I am sad…but can’t talk. I need to let these feeling swell in me until I understand them more.
2. I want to talk about the person whom I have lost. I don’t want their memory to die.
3. I am hurting because I need to cry but don’t want to have to feel guilty about it, or that I have to stop crying.
4. I am shoving everything down. I am hurting, but can’t find the words or way to express it.
5. I want you to be with me. I don’t need to talk. I just want you to love me in my sadness. No “fix” necessary.
6. It hurts me that you don’t talk about the person who died. Please just mention his/her name here and there. Remind me that you remember and loved this person too.
7. I would love for you to simply BE with me and let me be sad. Let me cry. Let me feel like hell. Your arms remind me that your love is here in the sadness.
8. I know that I am repeating the same story over and over. I need to do that. Bear with me.
9. I resent the fact that you are acting as though the death never happened.
10. I am being a bitch / ass because I am hurting, and my feelings are not finding a place to BE, to *rest.* I am raw and exhausted.
11. Please, please keep close. I may seem cold or distant, but I am not…I love you, and want you here. I just can’t express it. You may feel that I am rejecting you, but I am not; I just am wrapped in pain. It has nothing to do with how much I love you.
12. I want to help you but would like to know how. Would you like me to talk about it? Hold you? Leave you alone? Listen? Help me. Nod if you can’t speak. I don’t need words.
13. When you and I stop communicating, and I feel this pain, it is so, so lonely. I start wondering if you love me.
14. Is there anything that I am inadvertently doing that is making your hurt worse? Can you tell me what it is, and I will try to understand?
15. How can I help you (this is the least helpful question, as the hurting person usually doesn’t have the slightest idea of what will help)?
Though it may sound utterly corny, when you are distraught to the point of not being able to speak — a well-known hell for most of the bereaved—think about *writing* the above sentences out. Point them out to your significant other if you have to. The heart and mouth sometimes simply can not say it; pronouncing certain words becomes impossible and shadowed silence becomes a mode of living. These little above mentioned points can help others gauge where you are, and how you’re truly feeling.
Obviously, if somebody is deeply depressed for extended periods of time, then we chose to address it with more prescriptive seriousness. A pain that is deeply devastating puts us in emotional places that are difficult to communicate from. Without being taught, we tend to bumble, and cause one another further damage. When we are talking about our loved ones, or partners and family, that damage is particularly sad.
Be sad. Be mournful. Be filled with sorrow. Be depressed. Be devastated. Just BE. Allow yourself to get to know that pure heart that resides within. Sometimes it is so sensitive that it feels extremely uncomfortable. We sometimes scoff at our own heaviness. We try to “snap out of it. We punish ourselves for "lack of progress." We are confounded by grief's aspects of unmanageability.
"But I was doing so well!" We self-recriminate for stumbling, and for not living up to others' hopes for us. We sometimes feel like failures because the world spins ahead, and we simply do not fit any longer.
And our hearts bear it in silence that later spills out in other, often very negative ways.
