This past week marked five months since I lost my wife—and my kid lost his mom—to cancer. It’s a loss that I get to grieve twice: once with my own grief, and once more as I help walk my son through his. In a way, he’s been the most resilient out of any of us; his grief will be spread out over a period of years as he becomes more emotionally mature and starts to absorb more and more pieces of this. But even though he’s dealing with this incredibly well, it’s still excruciating to watch your kid wrestle with the awful reality that his mom has died.
My number one coping mechanism has always been reading and researching—doctors love me and my Google-fu—and I’ve been reading one of the leading figures in children’s grief, psychologist William Worden. He’s critical of the “five stages of grief” model that we all know (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). I recently learned that those were never intended to be a one-size-fits-all model for grief (they were developed to describe what people go through when they discover they have a terminal illness). Worden suggests instead four “tasks of grieving”: accepting the reality of the loss, experiencing the pain of grief, adjusting to an environment without the deceased, and to find an enduring connection with the deceased while reinvesting in life.
These aren’t steps to be completed one after another, ticking the boxes as we go. The idea is that you move back and forth between the tasks, working on each one a little at a time, for as long as you need to. But this way of looking at grief has been a huge help to me—both in dealing with my own grief and in understanding my son’s as I try to help him with it. He’s at the age where he has his own small chores to do around the house, so with him I tend to think of Worden’s tasks as our “grief chores”. Over the next four posts, I’m going to take a deeper dive into each grief chore, one at a time, from the points of view of a grieving dad and a grieving kid.
Accepting the reality of the loss
“Denial” has so many more layers of meaning for me these days. On an intellectual level, obviously I know what’s happened and I’m under no illusions that it’s anything but real. I haven’t quite convinced every last cobwebby corner of my brain, though. A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting on the living room floor building a very cool train track (this one had a pretty sweet elevated spur leading all the way up to the ottoman—we figure it’s not a proper train track if there’s no risk of property damage). As we were building, one of the cats came down the stairs and landed exactly on that one creaky board that every staircase has, and my brain instantly concluded “wife is coming downstairs” and I looked up and smiled at her. Let me tell you, I have never given that cat such a glare as when it turned the corner. I felt pretty stupid once the thinky bit of my brain caught up to the automatic bits, and I realized that I had just inadvertently worked on this task a wee bit more.
Sometimes you have to make a conscious choice to work on this task, too. The kid’s school had “Pyjama Day” a month or two after my wife died, and it dawned on me that while all of his PJs were fine for sleeping, they were maybe a bit too ratty for me to send him out with in public. Reality tapped me on the shoulder: my wife was the one who bought the clothes for everybody in the family, and now the Household Purchasing Officer position was vacant. Two choices: send the kid to school in a too-big T-shirt and sweatpants and pretend those are his pyjamas and everything’s fine, or suck it up and brave the mall, shopping for clothes for the first time in literally 16 years (believe me, I know how lucky I was). It might not sound like a big deal, but it was outside my comfort zone—and I got it done. The kid got to go to school in very cool new pyjamas, and I’m becoming more comfortable in my new role as Apprentice Household Purchasing Officer. One more step taken on this chore.
But what about when you’re in kindergarten—what does this grief chore look like then? For my son, it’s learning how to be tactful when dinner is different than it used to be (“Daddy, this tastes great—you finally made a good dinner!” -actual quote). It’s realizing that you might need to pick someone else to make a craft for when your class works on a project for Mother’s Day. It’s worrying about how a new friend will react when they find out that your family looks different from theirs. It’s discovering that there are some wishes that even Santa can’t grant.
And for the dad improvising his way alongside, it’s making sure that my kid knows the full reality, not just the scary bits. That even if I don’t get the green beans quite right, that I’m still making sure he’s taken care of and safe. That even though he might not be able to deliver a Mother’s Day card to his mom, that there are many women in his whole family and community that love him and will wrap him in hugs. (And that I would happily open a box of bath bombs on Mother’s Day… just saying.) That our family may look different than we had planned, but it’s still bursting at the seams with love. That’s it’s okay to not be okay. And that we’ll keep walking towards “okay”, together, one chore at a time.