When my son was stillborn, seeking comfort on my own behalf was a complicated thing. People around me urged that I treat myself as a friend, and reminded me that if I were talking to another person, I would not advise self-punishment, guilt and blame. They were right, of course. While this was good advice, it was difficult to enact. Part of me wanted to fully absorb the blow of my son’s shocking death. It was grueling to take it in. The idea that I might ever smile again seemed as impossible as not. I still had people who loved me, and whom I loved. How could I manage this?
At a certain point however, the pounding sorrow threatened to subsume me (I keep thinking of the feeling of rough surf) and I needed to rest if only to continue to receive the blows. I wanted to feel them and there was a limit to how much I could sustain before I sought something else.
It is hard to describe the thing I sought as comfort, but in fact it was something like that concept. I felt it difficult to permit the notion, that given the circumstances that surrounded the death of my baby, I might seek and allow comfort. I think this rejection of comfort is likely common among women and men coping with loss. Why is this the case?
My OB-GYN put me in touch with a woman who had experienced a loss similar to my own. In a moment when I could permit myself respite, I called her. She and I talked for a while and then I asked her the question that had been percolating in me for weeks. I asked her whether there was an “other side” to be reached because I was having such an awful time with the novelty of this grief. I remember using the words, “other side.” That week, my life felt so relentless and my grief so rudderless. I felt as though I was seeking a medical prognosis, and that knowing what was likely to happen would guide my treatment. I wondered if my life would be this -permanently exhausting, akin to the feeling that one has when dry heaving for hours. This grief was clarifying too, had meaning unlike nausea, but that only made it more difficult to sort out and to understand.
“Is there another side to this grief?” The loss-mom I was talking to paused. She conveyed that the loss stays, but the understanding evolves and that life continues on. I don’t actually remember her words and I am writing down the spirit of her words as best I can recall. After the better part of a decade, I am inclined to agree with her assessment.
The death of my son changed me. I have a permanent mark of loss both inwardly and outwardly. I can be lonelier. This kind of loss experience is not always well understood, and I have lost many things beyond my son. But all of these necessary complexities have companion elements. Where I am lonelier, it makes me less afraid of solitude and more easily able to listen to my own voice. Where I feel misunderstood by some, those who are close to me are treasures and I am humbled and grateful for their presence in my life. I still love those whom I have lost.
In my estimation, the greatest gifts of my own mourning were the things it turned up, these unexpected leavings. I think of the seashore after an enormous coastline-altering storm. There is so much to find there. And though one may not understand every complexity (certainly I don’t) there is a sad and a strangely empowering shift in remembering what is lost and in finding a place for a new reality and way of being in an among all these memories and losses. And I have permitted myself to smile again. And I have felt joy and absence, both. And they enhance one another. And I am so grateful.
And so for those who are struggling now with the concept of seeking comfort, if it feels difficult, consider seeing it as a raft to the next place of mourning and the integration of complex grief.
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