Grief for Dummies, Dense and Stoics
Walking Men Through the Dark Woods of Loss
Grief is unpleasant. Grief is elusive. Grief is confusing. Grief is uncomfortable. It can look like tears, anger, laughter, depression, manic activity, numbness and more. I want to offer a men’s primer on the experience of grief. Much more could be said than what I will cover but I want to offer what has been helpful for me in a topic I was mostly unaware for many decades.
Why should you read this article?
This is a heavy topic. Not fun. Not light. There are four reasons I encourage you to read on.
First, it is core to human experience. We have all lost something, remember a road untraveled or made a choice that cost us dearly. If we are designed for inter-personal connection and communion, improving our grief capacity will improve our relationships. A holding of grief will serve our spouse, children and friends well.
Second, many of us are stuck in grief and unable to get free. We have experienced loss, pain and betrayal in such a way our quality of life is diminished. Lack of unawareness does not mean grief is not present haunting and shaping our way of seeing the world. Moving on and the next thing does not leave grief and sadness behind. Even the best coping strategies will prove inadequate and subtle hints of self-sabotage will be ever present due to unprocessed grief. This article will point a way forward through the stuck-ness of grief.
Third, modern western society has neglected an adequate response to grief. Marketing has appealed to this powerful emotion: “Do you feel something missing? Invest in this product or service or experience and you will be complete!” Social media gurus promote a focus on the positive, forward thinking mindsets and the notion that life is better when we are happy. This stands in contrast to ancient cultures who hired mourners in death and donned sack cloth for active extended grief periods. This is hard to imagine with our present-day sensitivities. Flying a flag at half-staff, moments of silence and emojis are not enough. Pain is out, happy is in. Unpleasant and hard are negative, ease and fulfillment are positive. This article joins the cultural movement for substance and different.
Fourthly, finally and most importantly, grief is the avenue for true transformation. Grief, suffering and the unpleasant is the greatest motivator for human behavior. It is a place of pausing, pondering and re-prioritizing. We best adopt change when we finally arrive at the end of our self. The recovery Twelve Step groups are perhaps one of the greatest transformation tools of the last century. They begin at the point of grief, humility and loss. Countless adherents testify to lasting change. This article agrees and supports this notion.
Let’s get into grief.
Six Sad Men
I arrived at the apartment complex in the early evening. It was dark and cool, but not cold for a February night. The medical examiners van was parked in the red fire zone and the police officer’s cruiser double parked cars crammed into two small stalls. The empty gurney sat near the first step leading up to a door ajar on the top floor. When I stepped into the room six men were standing and sitting somberly and silently. I could see the sadness and soberness on their faces. I introduced myself as a chaplain. They nodded acknowledgement. Their minds wandered deep caverns of thought in distant far off places. They were lost. They had no words, no questions. The silence was an oddly comforting blanket in that lamp-lit room.
Do you know what these men were feeling? How would you describe it? What might they need in that moment?
I share this story because I am aware of the overwhelming sensation that most men avoid. We avoid it because we don’t know what to do with it. Grief.
Meet Grief
Grief is the most common and ancient of human experiences. A newborn is pulled from the safe womb and the initial cries are grief. A loss of safe, warmth and paradise. A mother’s labored screams are grief. Joy comes for sure, but grief and anger dominant labor and delivery.
Grief is loss. Pain and sadness accompany grief like shadows. It is real and it is abstract. It is obvious and elusive. It is a paradox in so many ways. It may or may not involve tears. Grief is not a bad thing, nor evil or sinful to feel. The return of it at unexpected and unwanted times is not a signal that something is wrong with us. It is a normal and acceptable feeling. Grief is a walk through a dark forest. Most prefer meandering sunny, flower-filled meadows. We must walk through one to get to other for a forest encircles every bright, light meadow.
There are three things I recommend for those growing in the experience of grief or having rarely encountered grief.
First, become (re-)familiar with the sensation and what it feels like in your body. Consider those circumstances that you have been in before. Remember what you felt physically, what you might have said, and any other inner sensations. Our bodies will react and signal to us with a pit in the stomach, weight on the shoulders, pressure on the chest, deep headache in the back of our head, and more. What do you notice? What’s happening inside of you? This is a strain and unpleasant, like physical exercise. This exercise is to increase awareness and capacity.
Second, my wife a gifted trauma therapist suggested a powerful exercise to me. Listen to the audio recording of someone crying on YouTube (like this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKKvfFknnMY). Spend five-minutes listening to it in silence. Not reading, doing other things, but experiencing it. Sounds like torture, right? It’s not easy and it is incredibly revealing. It will stir some things up. What do you feel? Anxious? Avoidant? Angry? Panicked? Confused or lost? What do you notice?
Write down a description of what you were feeling. Choose words, find synonyms, analogies, metaphors, and similes to help you. You can also write down other experiences that might have felt similarly. Put language to what you’re feeling. Not a writer? Talk about it with someone with enough emotional maturity to join you in the reflection.
Third, sit with a moment of loss or grief you have experienced. Put pen to paper in a free-write form. “I really miss Grandpa…” or “On March 25 my world changed when…” Put the details down and also include observations about the real-time bodily sensations. If you have someone to sit with it could be a personal sharing exercise rather than writing. Either way, recount the event in a sequential order. Notice what you feel as you tell the event. Notice where you get stuck, confused, rush, through or forgetful. One caveat: It may be helpful if you decide to dive into a particularly devastating event or high impact trauma to have a trained guide or skilled friend walk you through the event. If you are new to grief, it can help to start with personal events that you feel okay talking about.
These suggestions are to help us as men get more comfortable and familiar with this feeling of grief. We cannot care for our loved one’s grief until we know how to care for our own grief in some form. We cannot feel another person’s pain unless we know what pain feels like for our self.
Grief comes like a wave on the beach moving toward our feet in rapid series and suddenly receding leaving behind quiet or relief. Grief can trigger talking and manic activity, or dampen every desire leaving us unable to utter a word or get off the couch. Grief can be like a bird in a tree, offering a flutter of wings for a moment only to vanish when we glance at the branches and leaves. Grief can require us sitting quietly and watching and waiting for it to move and make itself seen. Grief is carried alone, but better managed with others to support.
What To Do With Grief
Imagine watching a sport like American football for the first time with no awareness of the rules or game play. We see players in some of the most ridiculous looking armor crashing into one another and throwing, kicking and grasping this funny shaped ball. Only one or two ever touch the ball and others run down the field pretending like they have the ball and other enormously-sized players only ever grab each other in some kind of bearhug grab until a whistle blows. What would it be like to try to make sense of the antics? Boring, confusing, pointless and uninteresting. How would it feel to explain the game? Frustrating, impossible, overwhelming. Knowledge of player positions, penalties, varying points, and the rest of it give fullness and depth to the game. Without background and terminology contemporary American football will likely be described as a stupid sport.
This analogy is to illustrate the importance and power of giving language, terms and context to the experience of grief. It is foreign for most of us. Countless men have told me how they never (or only once ever) saw their father cry. If they witnessed their mother’s cry it triggered panic and worry – “I better do what I can to make it right!” The emotional landscape, grief central to it, was barren or a wildfire to most boys. Much of the overwhelming sensation of grief is in our inability to name or put language to the emotion and sensation. Many men consider grief a stupid feeling and change the channel. In my experience, talking about grief demystifies it and reduces the powerless feeling commonly associated with it.
How does finding the right words empower us?
In a recent conversation, a middle-aged man expressed feeling bad for not following through with his elementary-age child. He had promised to take his son to a friend’s house after a brief errand but arrived home two-hours late. The playdate window had closed, nothing would change that, so he felt bad. When asked about the follow-up with his son there had been none.
I wondered about his lack of apology or checking in with his son, so I asked, “You felt bad?”
“Yeah, I felt bad.”
“Tell me more” I prompted.
“I don’t know. He really wanted to play with his friend so I felt bad about it.”
Inviting him to relate to his son’s experience I asked, “What do you think he felt?”
“I think he felt bad too.”
I gently pressed, “Can you imagine being an 8-year old boy who really wanted to play with his friend and was looking forward to it as soon as dad got home. What would it be like for that boy?”
His eyes revealed something was touched and said, “He’d feel really disappointed… and let down.”
“Yeah, he just wanted to play with his buddy” I added. “You probably have a better sense of what you feel now. What is the bad you feel?”
He shared, “I feel really disappointed. I really let him down.”
Now the father was in a better place to go to his 8-year old son. Feeling bad doesn’t lend traction and power to our lives. Disappointment and the grief of letting someone down are motivating!
Expanding our Emotional Lexicon!
Top feeling descriptors for men are mad, sad, and glad. Nothing and I don’t know follow close behind. The invitation is for us to get more creative, accurate and precise in our language. Reminds me of my appreciation for those that can really cuss! I’m not talking about the F-bombers who come up with new renditions of the simple four-letter word. I’m talking those old-sailor types that skillfully walk the gangplank and back in a way that makes me think, “Dang, I don’t like what he’s saying but I sure like the way he says it!”
Here's how we might expand our emotional lexicon. Mad might be angry, disrespected, embarrassed, humiliated. Sad might be heart-broken, lonely, dark, crushed. Glad might be valued, celebrated, important, joy. Word-banks abound and countless words exist to move us toward better emotional precision. As my dad taught me to work on the car engine I was able to graduate from “Hand me that tool there” to “Grab me a three-eighths socket wrench.” Consider this an invitation, even an exhortation, to grow in the quality of what you say to describe what is happening inside.
Does this mean you will need to learn a bazillion new words? Nope. Probably only 3-6. Twelve tops. Throw in a few adverbs like really, profoundly, completely, somewhat, or a little and you could change your whole way of communicating!
Another valuable exercise: Identify a handful of words that are common feelings. You can brute force find them from word lists. Or, more effectively, re-tell a story of a personal event. If your story involves being pinned 10-seconds into the first period of the varsity wrestling match, consider what word captures the feeling. Does he feel disappointed? Is it mad? Or perhaps humiliated, overwhelmed and powerless? A fourteen-year old getting up from the sweaty mat with the deafening cheers from the bleachers is more than disappointed or mad. Trust me, I know.
The stories that will help you are the memorable ones: Victories, defeats, surprises, and major changes. If you try a new feeling word to capture that sensation, see if it fits. If it doesn’t feel right, discard it like jeans that don’t fit and try the next one. Good words are like well-fitting jeans! They will feel right. Right-fitting language is enlivening and empowering.
Now that we’ve introduced grief, became more familiar with the inner emotional landscape and considered finding more effective language, let’s get into the processing of grief for men.
Grief is Therapeutic
In therapy, grief is often understood as the other side of anger. In the experience of loss and trauma clients are encouraged to welcome the feeling and linger. At times it will be on the grief side of things, and at other times the anger side of things. They are connected and partnered like interwoven masculine and feminine energies. Nurture and softness coupled with power and initiative. Seeing this relationship can open us to the aspect of grief we have difficulty accessing.
The grief cycle is widely recognized for its journey through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Each leg of this cannot be rushed through or skipped over. They will arrive and leave in their timing. Keeping distant from the loss only prolongs and represses the inevitable.
If willing to lean in a helpful process is naming our grief. What does this mean? First, we are acknowledging the loss. Putting language and a word to the feeling is like step zero of a Twelve Step group, “My name is Mike and I’m feeling lost.”
Second, loss events close a bar over our torso and an emotional ride begins. Ups, downs, drops, twists, highs and lows – and it’s not over in 90 seconds. This can go one for weeks, months and frankly, we carry the big ones the rest of life. Ignoring the sensation doesn’t mean they are not real and can intensify the experience. Feel the sensations, acknowledge the thoughts, accept the temporality of what you experience, and find support from others. No one should ride a grief roller coaster alone.
Third, in describing the events as we remember them and putting them in their proper order, we begin to process our grief. This is not just story telling. It actually helps organize things for the future.
Imagine a grief inducing experience in this way. Our days and weeks are a story typed into a stack of pages. A grief-inducing event is a powerful gust that hits the stack and the papers lie on the ground blown about. We rush to pick up the pages and put them into some semblance of order. Inevitably the pages will be out of order, and a couple pages may have blown off and were never retrieved. The disordered pages of that experience and the missing ones contribute to the debilitating nature of grief. Disorder and pages lost are two grief events felt by one gust. For many it is so unpleasant they would rather not think about the event disorderly stacked on the corner of the desk. Others thumb through the pages, but it is confusing and disorienting to read.
When we do the work of grief we seek to organize those pages into their proper order. Then, symbolically, we can bind them and place them on the shelf. Unprocessed grief shows up as disordered events cluttering our mental desktop. We can push them aside and work around them, but they are always present. A constant reminder and something we must actively put out of our awareness. Then we either stay away from the desk or bury the chaos under a few more stacks using up precious desktop space. Processing grief is a holy and productive and excruciating work. It takes resilience and patience and perseverance.
Transitioning from knowledge to practice
If you have read this far I admit I am intrigued. There is something profound that has touched your life and you have honest questions. While just an article and some personal distance is present, I want to extend an invitation for a conversation. It may be about the content here, it may be your own personal experience of grief, or you may have some added perspective others including myself would benefit from.
This article began as I named grief as core to human relationship, a place many men are stuck, something with cultural value, and an avenue of transformation. Grief is the most ancient of experiences and I offered ways to become more familiar with it. We can only care for another’s grief to the extent we can care for our own and this will require us expanding our language and understanding our grief events.
This article is written as a primer, a beginning point for walking men through the dark woods of loss. Hopefully some gaps have been filled, light cast or new questions raised. Much more could be offered. As we conclude a few questions for next steps:
Is there an area of unprocessed grief taking up space?
What have you lost that still causes pain today?
What is the story you don’t want to talk about?
How have you paid a price for the choices in your journey?
Who is someone you grieve the loss of relationship with?
Which of the suggested grief activities will you practice?
If you are ready to engage any of these questions I would invite you to do so with another; An experienced friend, a therapist, a grief, counselor, or a life coach are all people capable of guiding you through these dark woods.
How the Story Started
On February 18 I received a text message: “EPD chaplain requested, PD handling scene of 20yo deceased.” I called dispatch, received additional info and started the drive to the scene in central Everett. Chaplain drives are solitary, emotion-filled trips. This time I turned on my voice recorder to capture some of what was flooding me. From there I transcribed much of what is recorded here. This call led to my encounter with the six sad men I shared of earlier. Adding to this particular call was a language barrier. A woman present became the defacto translator. I introduced myself and to assess the emotional state of the group I asked, “Have you ever been through anything like this?” I watched their eyes as the translation was relayed. One man to my right was particularly quiet and his eyes flooded with tears. I nodded acknowledgment and a moment after he spoke the woman shared, “My little brother back home.” It had been suicide.
I had the honor to bear witness and join him in his double grief.