meeting in the aisle

On grief (and the year of magical thinking)

So yesterday I found myself stuck in an airport for more hours than is strictly healthy. This whole week has been a bit ridiculous for me. I’ve left my work laptop behind twice (once in a bar, rescued).

I missed a flight yesterday for no apparent reason, somehow tuning out the calls over the loud speaker throughout the entire airport with my very unusual and normally hard to miss name.

I had to change my flight destination to that cheap one further out of the city, adding another hour and a half onto what was already turning out to be The Longest Day Ever.

And to cap it all off I arrived home only to discover I’d locked myself out of the apartment. Oh yes, this week has been a doozy!

But the upside of my ridiculous and ridiculously annoying behaviour is that I had the time to both start and finish The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion in one day. And oh my, what a book.

Heartbreaking. Gentle. Insightful. This book, more than any other I have read to date, provided me with a glimpse into the world of profound grief, but in a good way if that makes sense.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

The timing, for me, could not have been better. The older I get and the more life throws at the wall, the more important understanding grief is becoming to me. Not only understanding grief, but also knowing what to do when someone else is experiencing grief.

What to say. What to do. When to see them. When to leave them alone. What is it, exactly, we should do when faced with someone in the throes of debilitating grief?

While I of course have no idea what The Answer is, I can only say I am learning to stick by the following rules for myself:

• Acknowledge it. Bring it up. Acknowledge the grief the person is going through. No matter how hard it is to bring ‘it’ up, do it. Don’t be the one to turn away, to stay silent, and to pretend nothing has happened.
• Just be there. Whether it’s on the phone, in person, on skype, in letters, in whichever form of communication you can, be present. Even if you feel like you can’t do anything, your presence is important. Make the phone call, drop in and say hi, send that letter or whatever it is and Be There.
• Don’t try to fix it. Grief is long and hard and a process and debilitating and sends someone physically haywire as well as mentally and emotionally. It’s serious, and it’s hard and it’s long but it’s not up to you to fix it. 

Well, this wasn’t meant to be a how-to, and the very fact that I’ve had a ridiculous week and am clearly in need of a holiday and am absolutely disorganised in my own life mean I’m definitely not qualified to provide anyone with a how-to. But this is the kind of thing I would have liked to know a couple of years ago, so I’m publishing it.

But I’m always keen for my advice - what are your tips for dealing with someone else’s grief (or indeed your own)?