If you were my patient and you were grieving, I would comfort you. Most of the time, I would know the words to say and the ones to skip. I would help you think about loss, grief, and life in a way that would spur you to action. I would help you fit your thoughts and feelings differently than when you came to me. Hopefully, this would help you live better with your grief. I would say to you, “I don’t want to make you forget about your loved one. I hope to help you live better with their memory.”
Accepting the loss of a loved one is the first task of grieving. For weeks after Uzma died, I wanted to see her when I turned around the various corners in our house. I waited to hear her voice. It still feels off not to have her next to me in the car, on a plane, on road-trips, and vacations. I am often half-lost without her as my problem-solving partner. All this still happens. But time makes all this less frequent and less painful. Repetition is the mother of learning, they say. When reality keeps dashing the hope of a loved one’s presence, the heart eventually gets it. It accepts the permanence of loss.
Adjusting to life without the loved one — another task that every bereaved person must eventually master — is a bit harder. Accepting the reality and finality of loss does not make this easy. Uzma and I were equal partners in life. But even equal partners split the tasks of life in unequal ways. Their differing interests, skill, and circumstance decide where the line gets drawn.
Uzma worked part-time since our oldest was born. But that was outside the house. Inside, she was the engine behind our family’s social calendar, the kids’ extracurricular activities, and most of the day-to-day planning and organizing of our life. I helped with all of them, but she was the wizard who made it all work. Adjusting to life without her means figuring out how the trick works after the magician s gone. Someday I will get the whole illusion, but today isn’t that day.
A surviving parent must also adjust to life by taking on the sole responsibility of helping children grow up adequately adjusted. They must grow up reasonably content. Capable of love. Practiced at enjoying life. There’s one plus to being the only parent. One doesn’t need to check every new thing about the kids with the other parent. But there’s a significant downside. One doesn’t have anyone equally invested in the same kids with whom one can when one wants, discuss every new thing about the kids.
It could be something as simple as figuring out the right age for each child to handle her first mobile phone. One must decide upon the best way of teaching her to be on time, to be a good judge of character, to consume media critically, to manage money properly, and a million other things. Usually, parents complement each other in small and big challenges like these. Each fills the gaps in the parenting temperament and skill of the other parent. While self-aware parents are always trying to improve on this, the loss of one’s parenting partner makes all this harder. Having said all that, young kids at home do force one to move on with the first two tasks of grieving.
Failing to navigate grief properly is risky. One must give grief its due, but no more. Otherwise, one gets stuck with what counselors call “complicated grief.” Complicated grief is grief possessing the survivor in a way that she has a hard time returning to normal life. She becomes too focused on what reminds her of the dead. Or just as obsessively tries to avoid anything that reminds her of her loss. She pines so hard for who and what she has lost that she becomes detached from the living.
She wishes she had died with the one she loved. She is consumed by sadness. Not just in the immediate aftermath of her loss, but months and years later. About seven percent of the bereaved end up with complicated grief. Though no one is immune, being a woman, being older, having a lower income, and losing a child or a spouse, especially to cancer, increases the risk of complicated grief.
For most of us, the passage of time makes the most of the work of grieving easier. However, there’s one part of navigating grief that seems to get harder with each passing day. It is the hardest part of grieving — keeping a connection with the dead while moving on with life. This task one overlaps with everything else one does, whether adjusting to life again or accepting the finality of loss. Every social visit, road trip, vacation, everything one does to have fun, every step, and every breath to tackle life anew risks blurring the memory of the loved one. Meeting this challenge is critical to avoiding complicated grief. This, the thing that appears to get harder with time is the hardest thing about grieving. I hear me saying to myself, “I don’t hope to make you forget about Uzma. I hope to help you live better with her memory.”
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This post was originally published on Sep 15, 2019, at www.UzmaMD.com, a blog about finding inspiration and humor in the breast cancer experience. Its themes are love, life, loss, and resilience in the face of one’s mortality. The blog’s creator, my wife, wrote and published a book, “Left Boob Gone Rogue: My Life With Breast Cancer.” It is available as both paperback and Kindle edition on Amazon.
