I Thought I Was Grieving What I Lost

Sometimes grief isn't only mourning what happened. It's mourning what you had to become while it was happening.

There was a feeling inside my grief that I didn't know was there.

Anger.

When someone first suggested it to me, I was almost offended.

How could I possibly be angry with someone I loved that deeply?

The person I had lost was the love of my life. He had lived for years with brain cancer with a strength that remains one of the most extraordinary things I have ever witnessed.

I knew what he had endured.

I knew how much he had suffered.

I understood so much of why he made the choices he made near the end of his life.

So anger felt incompatible with the story.

Until I finally allowed myself to touch it.

And when I did, I discovered something that would become one of the most important parts of my own healing:

Understanding why someone did something does not mean you weren't wounded by it.

Grief Has Hallways

We often speak about grief as though it were one enormous emotion.

Sadness.

Someone dies, something ends, a future disappears, and we grieve.

But grief rarely stays in one room.

You walk through sadness and encounter longing.

Follow longing and perhaps you find fear.

Open another door and there is guilt.

Another might contain relief.

Another resentment.

Another anger.

And sometimes the feelings we discover are so inconsistent with the way we believe we're supposed to grieve that we quickly close the door again.

I love them.

How could I be angry?

They were suffering.

How could I resent them?

They didn't choose this.

Other people had it worse.

How could I feel sorry for myself?

And so we begin editing our grief.

We allow the emotions that seem sufficiently loving and hide the ones that feel disloyal.

But grief isn't interested in maintaining a polished version of love.

Eventually, it asks for the whole story.

The Part I Didn't Know I Was Grieving

My anger wasn't simply about death.

It was about what happened while I was waiting for it.

When someone you love is dying, grief can begin long before they are gone.

There is the diagnosis.

The changing future.

The things you slowly realize may never happen.

The person you love is still sitting beside you, and somehow you are already beginning to miss them.

But sometimes there is another layer.

There can be months or years in which your nervous system learns to live differently because loss feels permanently nearby.

You watch.

You anticipate.

You listen differently.

You become exquisitely sensitive to changes.

You try to prepare for something no human being can actually prepare for.

That was part of my experience.

Near the end of my partner's life, circumstances surrounding his illness and the way he was contemplating his death left me living with profound uncertainty about when I might lose him.

I understood his suffering.

I understood his desire for autonomy.

I understood why a man who had spent years living so courageously with brain cancer did not want the final chapter of his life defined entirely by being a dying patient.

And I loved him beyond words.

But while all of that was happening inside him, something was also happening inside me.

I became a watcher.

I lived on eggshells.

I struggled to sleep.

My nervous system remained braced for the possibility that the moment I was terrified of could arrive without warning.

And after he was gone, I thought I was grieving him.

I was.

But eventually I discovered that I was also grieving what surviving the approach of that loss had done to me.

That was where some of my anger lived.

Someone Doesn't Have to Be Guilty for You to Have Been Wounded

This may be one of the hardest truths I have learned.

We often treat our emotions like a courtroom.

Before we're allowed to be angry, somebody must be guilty.

Before we're allowed to acknowledge harm, somebody must have intended to cause it.

Before we're allowed to say this hurt me, we seem to believe we must first prove that the other person should have behaved differently.

But human relationships are rarely that simple.

Sometimes somebody can be doing the best they know how to do from inside extraordinary suffering...

and their choices can still deeply affect you.

Sometimes there is no villain.

There is simply impact.

Emotion isn't a courtroom.

You don't have to prove someone's guilt before you're allowed to acknowledge your wound.

This realization allowed me to hold two truths I had previously believed were incompatible:

I understand why you did what you did.

And it hurt me.

Both were true.

Neither needed to defeat the other.

When Compassion Becomes Self-Abandonment

Compassion is beautiful.

But sometimes compassionate people become so skilled at understanding everyone else's behaviour that understanding becomes the place where their own experience disappears.

They were traumatized.

They were struggling.

They were sick.

They were afraid.

They didn't mean it.

They didn't know better.

Maybe every one of those sentences is true.

But notice how easily they can be followed by an invisible conclusion:

Therefore, I shouldn't be hurt.

That's where compassion quietly becomes self-abandonment.

Understanding someone else's pain should give their behaviour context.

It should not require you to erase its consequences.

There is room for another sentence:

Something happened to me because of how you carried what was happening to you.

That sentence doesn't condemn anyone.

It simply puts you back into the story.

Love and Anger Can Live in the Same House

Perhaps one of the reasons anger is particularly difficult after someone dies is that death changes where the conversation can go.

When someone is alive, anger has somewhere to travel.

You can confront them.

Ask why.

Tell them what happened to you.

Hear their answer.

Fight.

Repair.

Leave.

Return.

But death can leave us holding an interpersonal emotion inside a relationship that can no longer respond in the ordinary way.

There may still be two sides of the conversation.

But only one person remains to speak them.

So we censor ourselves.

Especially when the person was deeply loved.

We protect the dead.

We protect their memory.

Sometimes we even protect them from feelings they are no longer here to be hurt by.

But love and anger are not opposites.

Neither are:

Understanding and hurt.

Compassion and resentment.

Gratitude and devastation.

Forgiveness and grief.

You can know someone didn't want to leave you and still feel abandoned by their absence.

You can understand someone's choices and still resent what those choices required you to carry.

You can remember someone as extraordinary and still tell the truth about the parts of the story that wounded you.

You can love someone completely without loving everything that happened because you loved them.

The second truth does not contaminate the first.

It makes the story whole.

Sometimes We Grieve Who We Had to Become

This reaches far beyond death.

Sometimes a daughter spends years caring for a dying parent and later realizes she isn't only grieving her mother.

She is grieving the years she had to become a caregiver instead of simply being a daughter.

Someone leaves an unpredictable relationship and realizes they're grieving the person they became while constantly reading the room.

Someone loves a person struggling with addiction and discovers that beneath the loss is grief for the years spent waiting for the phone call.

Someone survives a prolonged crisis and discovers that when the crisis finally ends, their body hasn't received the message.

The watcher remains.

The fixer remains.

The anticipator remains.

The person who learned never to relax remains.

And suddenly the question isn't only:

What did I lose?

It's:

Who did I have to become while I was losing it?

That question changed something for me.

Because I could finally understand that some of what needed healing hadn't begun when my partner died.

It had begun while I was trying to survive the possibility of losing him.

The death was a loss.

But so were the months of fear.

The powerlessness.

The vigilance.

The version of myself who believed she had to remain prepared for an impossible moment.

She needed grieving too.

The Feelings We Decide Aren't Allowed

There is a temptation in grief to rank emotions according to how faithfully they represent our love.

Sadness is permitted.

Longing is beautiful.

Gratitude is honourable.

Anger feels dangerous.

Resentment feels shameful.

Relief can feel almost unforgivable.

But feelings aren't testimonials about someone's character.

And they aren't measurements of how deeply we loved.

They're information about what happened inside us.

Perhaps healing doesn't require acting on every feeling.

But it may require allowing ourselves to know that the feeling exists.

Because what we refuse to feel doesn't necessarily disappear.

Sometimes it simply waits.

Behind another door.

Farther down the hallway.

Until something makes us safe enough to finally enter.

The Whole Story Gets to Come Home

I don't think healing required me to decide that my anger was more truthful than my compassion.

It required me to stop forcing one to silence the other.

I could understand his suffering.

And acknowledge mine.

I could honour his choices as belonging to a human being facing circumstances I can barely imagine.

And tell the truth about what living beside those choices did to me.

I could love him.

And be angry.

I could be profoundly grateful for the years we had.

And furious about what was taken from us.

I could admire the way he lived.

And grieve what the end required of me.

None of those truths made the love smaller.

They simply meant love no longer had to carry the entire story alone.

And maybe that is what waits for some of us farther down grief's hallway.

Not a terrible secret.

Not proof that we didn't love enough.

Not some ugly truth about ourselves we should have discovered sooner.

Maybe there are simply rooms containing feelings we once believed weren't allowed inside the same house.

And perhaps healing is opening those doors slowly enough to discover:

They can all live here.

The love.

The anger.

The gratitude.

The resentment.

The tenderness.

The unfairness.

The person you lost.

And the person you had to become while losing them.

You don't have to walk the entire hallway today.

You don't have to open every door.

But perhaps you can stop believing that whatever waits behind the next one has the power to invalidate everything that came before it.

Sometimes grief isn't only mourning what happened.

It's mourning what you had to become while it was happening.

And telling the whole truth about what loss cost you does not betray the person you loved.

Sometimes it is how you finally stop abandoning the person who survived them.