Support group for grieving people: what happened and what I learned
Yesterday I tried something that I have never done before: I attended a support group for grieving people. Having lost 4 very important people in less than two years, the most recent of which was my mother in January, I have been struggling with grief and anger and exhaustion from it all. the anger and grief has started to make me a bitter person and I have caught myself being cold or short with people that I love, and that just isn't acceptable to me. I started researching online for some resources for free grief counseling. Being a teacher, there just isn't a lot of extra money to go around, so it was imperative to find something for free. My first choice was to find a grief counselor of some kind, but unfortunately one on one counseling just isn't ever free, or even affordable from what I could find, which I guess makes sense. That left support groups, which honestly scared the crap out of me. the thought of sitting and crying in a room full of strangers sounded like a total nightmare, and additionally, all the support groups I could find were hosted in churches by church leaders. I am not a Christian by any means, now am I even religious, so this was additionally intimidating. All the same, I figured I had nothing to lose and if it got too preachy I could just leave.
When I showed up to the church, I was shaking, I was so scared. churches in general make me nervous. I think that is because they are these big expensive buildings with a bunch of beautiful windows and other amenities, filled with people who are dead sure that they have it all figured out. I have always been suspicious of anyone who claims to have all the answers, no matter how harmless or peaceful those answers may seem to be. The concept of absolute faith in anyone or anything makes me uncomfortable. Being sold faith or religion, even more so. When I hear the word "Christian" or am presented with any associated imagery my mind immediately turns to the vast number of terrible things that have been done over the past two thousand years in the name of Christ. So much war and pain and death and wrongful imprisonment. And in modern times, while Christians don't still burn down the villages of Pagans or hang those suspected of witchcraft, they do other awful things, like get into politics and use their beliefs to impose their arbitrary moralities in the form of bogus legislation on those who choose not to subscribe to the same ideas and dogmas. It is a hard thing for me to reconcile with the fact that most of ordinary Christian people I meet seem to be perfectly nice and well-meaning.
So I have all my own negative thoughts about Christians and their beliefs weighing me down as I walk into the hug Baptist church and right away I can't find where I am supposed to go. The normal Sunday service had ended and most of the attendees had already left. There were all sorts of rooms for bible study and Sunday school and even a little cafe. The facility was enormous, which made me even more nervous and I could feel ,y anxiety creeping up the back of my neck. I was starting to panic and I immediately began to run down my list of justifications for leaving before even finding the meeting I was there for in the first place. While I was trying to find away to justify to myself that it was OK to just bail, a lady walked up to me and asked me if I was lost. I told her that I was and that I was looking for the grief support group. She showed me down a long hallway to a meeting room at the end where about a dozen people were milling around waiting for the meeting to start. I was the youngest person there by a wide margin and it looked like they all knew each other already. That made me more nervous.
There was another lady who identified herself as the "facilitator" and gave me one of those sticky "Hello My Name Is" name tags to write my name on and stick to my shirt. I wrote a fake name and stuck it on. I'm still not sure why I did that. Everyone was super nice and they weren't asking for anything weird or too personal, just my name, but my instinct was to lie about it. So there I am, sitting with a fake name on my chest waiting for this meeting, this group, this whatever it is to get started and no one has said anything to me yet except for hello, and I just started to cry. Not a little bit either, but full on bawling. The tears were coming faster than I could wipe them up and I just went to pieces. I was so embarrassed. I was at a grief support group, there were boxes of tissues everywhere because if ever there was going to be a place where it was appropriate to cry in front of strangers, this was it. But yet, there I sat, scared out of my mind, weeping uncontrollably and feeling so ashamed of myself, I wanted to die. No one made faces at me, no one said anything dumb, no one called attention to my reaction to just sitting there in that room. They all just gave me my space and let me cry, which was really the kindest thing anyone could have done for me in that moment. I had the weirdest sense of DejaVu , I felt as though I had already done this all before, that I had already been to this church, seen these faces and felt these feelings while crying into the denim sleeve of my jacket, but of course that was not true at all. I had never done anyone it before, so that feeling only added to my general confusion and discomfort.
After a few minutes the facilitator closed the door to the room and got the meeting started. We started by going around the room and saying our name and who we had lost and how long ago. I was near the end of the circle. The people who went before me were mostly over the age of 60 and had all mostly lost spouses and parents. Then it was my turn. I gave my fake name and then listed my real losses. My grandmother two years ago, lost to Parkinson's disease. My uncle about a year ago, lost to end stage lung cancer. My grandfather about little over one year ago, died of a self-inflected gunshot. My mother on January 20th, died after a 12 year long battle with multiple types of cancer, bad chemo therapy, a brutal course of radiation treatment, 3 bowel obstructions with emergency surgeries, and a host of other cruel ailments, accidents of nature and generally poor medical treatment and advice. The group got pretty quiet Apparently I had the biggest list and the saddest story. I know this because they all broke the silence at once to tell me who freaking terrible that all was and how sorry they were. A man two seats down from me burst into tears when he heard my losses. He had just lost his wife four days ago, but he didn't cry when he said so. But hearing my story wrecked this poor man. He was 85 years old, his back was bent and he stooped forward at this permanent angle, he got up from his chair, joints creaking audibly and made his way over to me, closing the short distance between us painfully slow. When he got to me he threw his arms around me and said "darling, that is just too much for someone so young, you poor thing, I am so glad you made it here to be with us today. I know we will all be praying for you." I lost it again, the sobs just started and they didn't stop, but no one really seemed to mind. the man let me go and sat back down in his seat. They finished the introductions and then the facilitator went and got me a workbook for the "program" that I had apparently shown up to. She told me that the workbook was $10, but it was OK, if I didn't have the money that day, which I didn't, so that was a relief. Then she put on a short 30 minute video to go with this week's assigned lesson from the workbook.
The video was a series of people sharing their own stories and the main focus this week was on how to plan for and get through the significant dates and anniversaries that are so hard when a loved one dies. Things like the holidays and their birthdays. My mom's birthday was just a couple of weeks ago and it was a real bitch to get through, so the video did contain information relevant to me and my own experience. Very often the video steered the topic toward prayer, bible study and general faith in God as methods of coping, and while I don;t personally subscribe to those methods or ideas, it wasn't pushy and was all clearly harmless. This was a support group in a Baptist church, after all so some amount of dogma was to be expected. When the movie ended we moved on to some more discussion of what he had just watched and our thoughts on it. The discussion was good and I was pretty surprised about how many of the things I could relate to despite my own lack of faith in the core principles. Then the facilitator turned the group's attention to me to ask if I wanted to share any more about my experience and the final days of all of the loved ones I had lost recently. At first I thought I was going to shake my head, say "no thank you" and let them just pass me over, but before I could do that, my mouth opened and my whole story just came pouring out. All of the things we went through, how much I hate cancer, how angry I am at my grandfather for his suicide, for abandoning my dad while he was losing his wife and really needed his father, how furious I am with the doctors who treated my mom and ultimately killed her, how horrible it has been to watch everyone just get sick, decline and die, how scared I am that that is exactly what will happen to me someday and how alone I feel with all my pain and rage and sadness. Everyone listened quietly. No one interrupted me. When I was done talking and had gone through another half box of Kleenex, I braced myself for their response.
Anytime I talk about what has happened to me and my family, anytime I try to express my loss to someone, they usually say something infuriating like "time heals all wounds" or "I totally understand how you feel because I have lost someone too". Time DOES NOT fucking heal all wounds. There is no amount of time that can pass that will make me feel better about having my mother stolen from me, that will make me feel better about watching my grandmother take her last breath, that will make me less angry at my uncle for refusing to see a doctor until it was too late and then dying in my parents house and making my dad experience that, or that will make me forgive my grandfather for being so weak and leaving my dad when he needed him most. It cannot be quantified. You can;t mark a date on the calendar for me to look forward to when everything will just magically be alright, so please, if you are one of those people that says this to those who are grieving, just bottle up that noise, ok? I know you mean well, I know it is said as a gesture of comfort and support, but it comes out as dismissive and patronizing. And the "oh, I totally understand how you feel because I blah blah blah" might be meant as an attempt to relate to the grieving person, but what it sounds like is you jumping up and making an opportunity to talk about yourself right when someone has just shared something deeply painful and personal with you. Just knock that shit off. Take a risk and just listen. Instead of trying to list reasons why everything is going to be OK, try just saying "I'm so sorry, that fucking sucks." Because that is something true that doesn't minimize what the other person has just shared. It's easy to remember too.
So there I am, bracing myself for a barrage of meaningless platitudes from this group of strangers, but they never come. Everyone just said how crappy it was, that it was unfair to have so much loss under such tragic circumstances and that they were all glad I had come to attend their group. It was such a relief to express myself to a group of people who all understood what was helpful and what was not helpful to say to me. It is important to note that I do have an incredibly kind and wonderful husband who is always more than happy to listen to me anytime I have anything that I want to say or talk about, but we have been over and over my own loss so many times, we he is sort of out of things to say. He is always a sympathetic ear, is always ready for a hug or to offer me a shoulder to cry on, but beyond that, he has seemed a bit lost for how to help me with what I am going through, and I really do understand this. There is only so much to say about it all. And so going somewhere else and talking to people with more experience than either me or my husband seemed like the next logical step.
I am glad I went to the support group. It wore me out, but when it was over I finally felt empty. Now, that might not sound exactly like a good thing, but it is. For months now I have felt this overwhelming pressure of sadness and rage and depression building up inside of me, and at times when the pressure has become too great, it releases itself in the form of drinking too much, spouting off at the mouth at those around me, and generally being just plain depressed. Being able to sort of "open the valve" and let all the angry sad pressure out until I was just plain empty was a relief. The workbook is sort of bible heavy, which I am not so into, but I think I can use the other bits of it and try to make it work for me. I plan on going back next week. Hopefully I can start to heal, because just walking around with this knot of grief inside of me, trying to carry it all on my own has been fucking killing me. It is time for a change.
When I showed up to the church, I was shaking, I was so scared. churches in general make me nervous. I think that is because they are these big expensive buildings with a bunch of beautiful windows and other amenities, filled with people who are dead sure that they have it all figured out. I have always been suspicious of anyone who claims to have all the answers, no matter how harmless or peaceful those answers may seem to be. The concept of absolute faith in anyone or anything makes me uncomfortable. Being sold faith or religion, even more so. When I hear the word "Christian" or am presented with any associated imagery my mind immediately turns to the vast number of terrible things that have been done over the past two thousand years in the name of Christ. So much war and pain and death and wrongful imprisonment. And in modern times, while Christians don't still burn down the villages of Pagans or hang those suspected of witchcraft, they do other awful things, like get into politics and use their beliefs to impose their arbitrary moralities in the form of bogus legislation on those who choose not to subscribe to the same ideas and dogmas. It is a hard thing for me to reconcile with the fact that most of ordinary Christian people I meet seem to be perfectly nice and well-meaning.
So I have all my own negative thoughts about Christians and their beliefs weighing me down as I walk into the hug Baptist church and right away I can't find where I am supposed to go. The normal Sunday service had ended and most of the attendees had already left. There were all sorts of rooms for bible study and Sunday school and even a little cafe. The facility was enormous, which made me even more nervous and I could feel ,y anxiety creeping up the back of my neck. I was starting to panic and I immediately began to run down my list of justifications for leaving before even finding the meeting I was there for in the first place. While I was trying to find away to justify to myself that it was OK to just bail, a lady walked up to me and asked me if I was lost. I told her that I was and that I was looking for the grief support group. She showed me down a long hallway to a meeting room at the end where about a dozen people were milling around waiting for the meeting to start. I was the youngest person there by a wide margin and it looked like they all knew each other already. That made me more nervous.
There was another lady who identified herself as the "facilitator" and gave me one of those sticky "Hello My Name Is" name tags to write my name on and stick to my shirt. I wrote a fake name and stuck it on. I'm still not sure why I did that. Everyone was super nice and they weren't asking for anything weird or too personal, just my name, but my instinct was to lie about it. So there I am, sitting with a fake name on my chest waiting for this meeting, this group, this whatever it is to get started and no one has said anything to me yet except for hello, and I just started to cry. Not a little bit either, but full on bawling. The tears were coming faster than I could wipe them up and I just went to pieces. I was so embarrassed. I was at a grief support group, there were boxes of tissues everywhere because if ever there was going to be a place where it was appropriate to cry in front of strangers, this was it. But yet, there I sat, scared out of my mind, weeping uncontrollably and feeling so ashamed of myself, I wanted to die. No one made faces at me, no one said anything dumb, no one called attention to my reaction to just sitting there in that room. They all just gave me my space and let me cry, which was really the kindest thing anyone could have done for me in that moment. I had the weirdest sense of DejaVu , I felt as though I had already done this all before, that I had already been to this church, seen these faces and felt these feelings while crying into the denim sleeve of my jacket, but of course that was not true at all. I had never done anyone it before, so that feeling only added to my general confusion and discomfort.
After a few minutes the facilitator closed the door to the room and got the meeting started. We started by going around the room and saying our name and who we had lost and how long ago. I was near the end of the circle. The people who went before me were mostly over the age of 60 and had all mostly lost spouses and parents. Then it was my turn. I gave my fake name and then listed my real losses. My grandmother two years ago, lost to Parkinson's disease. My uncle about a year ago, lost to end stage lung cancer. My grandfather about little over one year ago, died of a self-inflected gunshot. My mother on January 20th, died after a 12 year long battle with multiple types of cancer, bad chemo therapy, a brutal course of radiation treatment, 3 bowel obstructions with emergency surgeries, and a host of other cruel ailments, accidents of nature and generally poor medical treatment and advice. The group got pretty quiet Apparently I had the biggest list and the saddest story. I know this because they all broke the silence at once to tell me who freaking terrible that all was and how sorry they were. A man two seats down from me burst into tears when he heard my losses. He had just lost his wife four days ago, but he didn't cry when he said so. But hearing my story wrecked this poor man. He was 85 years old, his back was bent and he stooped forward at this permanent angle, he got up from his chair, joints creaking audibly and made his way over to me, closing the short distance between us painfully slow. When he got to me he threw his arms around me and said "darling, that is just too much for someone so young, you poor thing, I am so glad you made it here to be with us today. I know we will all be praying for you." I lost it again, the sobs just started and they didn't stop, but no one really seemed to mind. the man let me go and sat back down in his seat. They finished the introductions and then the facilitator went and got me a workbook for the "program" that I had apparently shown up to. She told me that the workbook was $10, but it was OK, if I didn't have the money that day, which I didn't, so that was a relief. Then she put on a short 30 minute video to go with this week's assigned lesson from the workbook.
The video was a series of people sharing their own stories and the main focus this week was on how to plan for and get through the significant dates and anniversaries that are so hard when a loved one dies. Things like the holidays and their birthdays. My mom's birthday was just a couple of weeks ago and it was a real bitch to get through, so the video did contain information relevant to me and my own experience. Very often the video steered the topic toward prayer, bible study and general faith in God as methods of coping, and while I don;t personally subscribe to those methods or ideas, it wasn't pushy and was all clearly harmless. This was a support group in a Baptist church, after all so some amount of dogma was to be expected. When the movie ended we moved on to some more discussion of what he had just watched and our thoughts on it. The discussion was good and I was pretty surprised about how many of the things I could relate to despite my own lack of faith in the core principles. Then the facilitator turned the group's attention to me to ask if I wanted to share any more about my experience and the final days of all of the loved ones I had lost recently. At first I thought I was going to shake my head, say "no thank you" and let them just pass me over, but before I could do that, my mouth opened and my whole story just came pouring out. All of the things we went through, how much I hate cancer, how angry I am at my grandfather for his suicide, for abandoning my dad while he was losing his wife and really needed his father, how furious I am with the doctors who treated my mom and ultimately killed her, how horrible it has been to watch everyone just get sick, decline and die, how scared I am that that is exactly what will happen to me someday and how alone I feel with all my pain and rage and sadness. Everyone listened quietly. No one interrupted me. When I was done talking and had gone through another half box of Kleenex, I braced myself for their response.
Anytime I talk about what has happened to me and my family, anytime I try to express my loss to someone, they usually say something infuriating like "time heals all wounds" or "I totally understand how you feel because I have lost someone too". Time DOES NOT fucking heal all wounds. There is no amount of time that can pass that will make me feel better about having my mother stolen from me, that will make me feel better about watching my grandmother take her last breath, that will make me less angry at my uncle for refusing to see a doctor until it was too late and then dying in my parents house and making my dad experience that, or that will make me forgive my grandfather for being so weak and leaving my dad when he needed him most. It cannot be quantified. You can;t mark a date on the calendar for me to look forward to when everything will just magically be alright, so please, if you are one of those people that says this to those who are grieving, just bottle up that noise, ok? I know you mean well, I know it is said as a gesture of comfort and support, but it comes out as dismissive and patronizing. And the "oh, I totally understand how you feel because I blah blah blah" might be meant as an attempt to relate to the grieving person, but what it sounds like is you jumping up and making an opportunity to talk about yourself right when someone has just shared something deeply painful and personal with you. Just knock that shit off. Take a risk and just listen. Instead of trying to list reasons why everything is going to be OK, try just saying "I'm so sorry, that fucking sucks." Because that is something true that doesn't minimize what the other person has just shared. It's easy to remember too.
So there I am, bracing myself for a barrage of meaningless platitudes from this group of strangers, but they never come. Everyone just said how crappy it was, that it was unfair to have so much loss under such tragic circumstances and that they were all glad I had come to attend their group. It was such a relief to express myself to a group of people who all understood what was helpful and what was not helpful to say to me. It is important to note that I do have an incredibly kind and wonderful husband who is always more than happy to listen to me anytime I have anything that I want to say or talk about, but we have been over and over my own loss so many times, we he is sort of out of things to say. He is always a sympathetic ear, is always ready for a hug or to offer me a shoulder to cry on, but beyond that, he has seemed a bit lost for how to help me with what I am going through, and I really do understand this. There is only so much to say about it all. And so going somewhere else and talking to people with more experience than either me or my husband seemed like the next logical step.
I am glad I went to the support group. It wore me out, but when it was over I finally felt empty. Now, that might not sound exactly like a good thing, but it is. For months now I have felt this overwhelming pressure of sadness and rage and depression building up inside of me, and at times when the pressure has become too great, it releases itself in the form of drinking too much, spouting off at the mouth at those around me, and generally being just plain depressed. Being able to sort of "open the valve" and let all the angry sad pressure out until I was just plain empty was a relief. The workbook is sort of bible heavy, which I am not so into, but I think I can use the other bits of it and try to make it work for me. I plan on going back next week. Hopefully I can start to heal, because just walking around with this knot of grief inside of me, trying to carry it all on my own has been fucking killing me. It is time for a change.
Comments
Post a Comment