Today’s chore, Worden’s second task of mourning: experiencing the pain of grief. (What on earth am I talking about? Check out part one.)
I don’t buy into the idea that men shouldn’t cry or aren’t allowed to have feelings. It’s fair, if not eloquent, to say that I’ve experienced the crap out of the pain of grief. And so when I first read about this task, I figured it was easy peasy, just check off a box by letting the tears come when they need to. I think it’s important to cry in front of my son, so that’s not an obstacle. He’s not thrown by it at all; he’ll either give me a hug or an eye-roll.
Two wrinkles, though.
The first is that the pain of grief isn’t limited to sadness. It’s really an emotion fruitcake with little chunks of anger, relief, guilt and various unidentifiable bits of other stuff baked in. The one I have trouble experiencing, the one that really makes this a chore for me, is anger. Most people who know me would be surprised to know that I have a fairly short temper—and that’s because, over time, I’ve learned how to control it and how to express it in healthy ways. Lately, though, there’s a lot of extra anger building up that needs to be dealt with: anger at cancer, God, and the universe, mostly.
Sometimes it’s really hard not to yell when a full carton of milk gets spilled by a five-year-old who’s learning to be independent, or to mind my language when assembling a very cheap and poorly-machined skating frame (seriously why didn’t I just spend the extra ten bucks on the metal one) in front of an impressionable kindergartener. So a big part of this task for me is learning new, healthier ways to release that anger, especially because there’s a little pair of eyes, with an understandable reservoir of anger of their own behind them somewhere, watching to see how it’s done.
That leads to the second wrinkle: my son needs my help with this chore. I wouldn’t assign him the chore of scrubbing all the floors every day—he’s too little. And I can’t expect him to handle this one on his own, either. The most important lesson I’ve learned so far is that his grief is not my grief, and his reactions don’t have to be my reactions. It’s normal for him to feel sad and angry, but it’s also normal for him to feel happy when I’m sad (and vice versa). It’s normal for him to have no idea how he’s feeling except that jumping on the sofa while playing the recorder as loudly as possible is the only thing right now that makes it feel SO MUCH BETTER. It’s easy to confiscate the recorder and snap something about consequences. It’s way harder to get him to slow down, take some deep breaths and tell me what he’s feeling.
Guess which one helps him make some progress on this chore. And sometimes right when things are going well with my grief, his grief hits him like a truck, and he needs me to wade back in and feel it all over again with and beside him. Those moments are among the very hardest of this whole process, because it breaks my heart to know what he needs to go through.
It turns out that this task isn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be, but I’m glad that we’re working on it together. Stay tuned for chore #3 coming soon: adjusting to a world without your loved one.