“Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.”
-Sarah Dessen
How many of us have heard the saying, "Don't speak ill of the dead!" Or maybe you have been told, "Just remember the good times." Did this change your view of the departed? Or if you have had another kind of loss maybe you heard a similar statement. For example when I had my hysterectomy last year I heard, "You are so lucky to not have a period anymore!"
When we have suffered a loss, whether it is a physical death or feels like one, it is not uncommon for us to look back with a skewed perception. If we loved the person deeply then maybe we remember only the good times. The laughter and kindness they brought to our lives. If we had a rocky relationship with the departed maybe we only remember the bad times. We look back and think to ourselves what a crappy person they were. Maybe we are even glad they are dead. How can these skewed memories impact our grieving?
In order to grieve properly, according to Worden (2018), there are four tasks we must accomplish. These tasks are: accept the reality of the loss, process the pain of grief, adjust to a world without the deceased, and find a way to remember the deceased while moving forward with one’s life. As we can see if we are not accurately remembering a person and the relationship we had with them then it can and will impact our attempts to work our way through grief. If we make the choice to only see the good in the memories of someone we lost it doesn't change that there were bad times. The memories of those bad times are still there asking to be acknowledged.
In order to walk the path of grief we have to process ALL of the emotions not just the ones we want to process. We have to learn to sit with the emotions that make use uncomfortable. To listen to what they have to say so that we can learn and grow from them.
The piece above is one I created recently around this topic. Last July my "first love" died very suddenly from Covid at the age of 56. For the sake of privacy I will only call him RS. I may explore this relationship more in another post, but for now I'll just say it was an almost 23 year long on again off again relationship that radically shaped my life.
In the early days after RS passed I found myself looking back at the happy moments. The love. The friendship. The excitement. His smile that you felt in your soul. I found myself living in a fairy tale that never existed. The truth was RS and I had a relationship characterized by great highs and even lower lows. It was turbulent and passionate. It took me to what was at the time my greatest joy and then crushed me to the brink of self-destruction. My heart and my body still bear witness to the scars of this love.
When I stopped to consider the path of grief and how we navigate the journey I saw that in order to fully honor myself, him, and our relationship I had to face ALL of it. By choosing to only see what I felt was positive I was not seeing things clearly or honestly and would not be able to move forward. The bad times are still waiting in the corner, ready to jump out and destroy me at any given moment. They come up in nightmares. They appear when I am walking through a store and a song comes on that reminds me of him. The smell of Big Red gum or maybe the way the wind blows and suddenly I am back in a place where the bad times are choking the life out of me.
The piece above captures part of the truth of our relationship. He was larger than life in my heart and mind. Any time he called I came running. I worshipped the ground he walked on as if he were my golden calf. He was a god to me and even now still is on some level. And just like the god of the Old Testament, RS was both loving and the bringer of wrath and destruction for both of us. The relationship with him set me on a path of other abusive relationships and many years of heartbreak and sorrow. I am devastated that he is gone and find myself dwelling on the conversations we needed to have and never did. The answers I needed to find and now can't. I regret the times I thought of bringing up the tough topics and then chose to ride the wave of joy and ignore the pain the answers might bring me. There is so much to process with this kind of intense grief, but the first step is being honest with myself. Only then can I truly start walking again.
Reference:
Worden, J. W. (2018). Grief counseling and grief therapy: A handbook for the mental health
practitioner (5th ed.). Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
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