6:06pm September 26, 2014

I just wrote this, about the bad side of grief, and emailed it to my entire family.

I’m posting it here as well in case anyone can relate.

I haven’t written a lot about grief, and on the other hand I’ve written a lot of poetry about my personal experience of it. One thing I’ve had to remind myself is that grief is love. The fact that we can grieve exists because we love Ron so much that we don’t want to see him die. The fact that Ron can grieve is because he loves life and loves us so much he doesn’t want to leave. And that means that grief, however hard it is, is a good sign in a way.

But I’ve seen another side to grief, in myself and in every family member I’ve interacted with. And it’s this side that I want to warn everyone about. Some of you will have already caught on. Some of you won’t. But this side of grief is extremely dangerous and has to be avoided and treated with extreme caution.

The way I see it, the bad side of grief is almost like a living thing. It behaves much like a living thing that wants to destroy love, destroy family, destroy community, and destroy happiness. It wants to destroy everything we can do to help each other through these times, and everything we can do to help ourselves. It’s sneaky, it’s conniving, and it’s dangerous.

You may catch yourself feeling all alone in the world. You may catch yourself resenting all the people who could potentially help you — your family, your friends. You will find reasons, you will be handed reasons, not to trust people you ought to trust with your life. You will feel as if nobody could possibly understand you. You will feel as if everyone you thought you could count on, can’t be counted on after all. And tiny little things, things that wouldn’t usually even make a blip on your radar screen, will become “reasons” to believe those things about others. Someone will say or do something and you will decide it has more meaning than it has, that it means the person can’t be trusted, or that the person doesn’t understand, or that you can’t count on them, or that they don’t truly love you, or that you don’t truly love them. You’ll remember every single thing about them that drives you crazy. Then you will find more and more reasons to build your “case” that you are all alone in the world and that nobody can help you. You will almost start to actively look for reasons to build this case. And from there you can easily spiral into despair, depression, and a sense of futility.

And none of this is you. None of this is your own fault. All of this is this weird way that grief twists people in on themselves. I’ve seen it too many times to count. That’s why I say it’s almost as if grief is a living thing that takes control of our thoughts at this point. I’ve seen it trying to do this to me, and I’ve seen it trying to do this to other people in the family. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways.

And the thing is, however messed up we can sometimes be as a family, we need each other right now more than we’ve ever needed each other. Which means that when we see the twisted side of grief rearing its ugly head, we have to fight it. When we start feeling ourselves think in this way, we have to tell ourselves “This is the grief talking, I can’t act on this or people will get hurt.” I’ve had to tell myself that between five and twenty times every time I interact with another family member lately — so this isn’t just advice I’m giving to other people. You don’t want to know the things I haven’t said, the things I haven’t screamed at people, the things I haven’t done. There’s a time to say things, but there’s also a time be quiet, and I’ve been keeping my mouth shut, a lot. And I should be. Not everything you think is something you need to say.

I’ve said that love is the only thing that will get us through this. And that’s true. We all have to love Ron with everything we’ve got. But we also have to love each other. And we have to learn to distinguish between the grief that is a kind of love, and the grief that just wants to twist us in knots and tear us apart from each other. One will save everything, one will wreck everything. And our best hope of getting through this intact is to love each other, and try to avoid acting on the evil side of grief, for lack of a better term.