We’re all chasing happiness — that abstract, ephemeral thing we hope will somehow turn perennial. We can recall moments when we’ve felt it, but we are still ready to banish sadness from our lives entirely and turn a new, happy leaf. Our aspiration is sincere and quaint and seemingly feasible, should we play our cards right. After all, good things happen to good people. Don’t they?
Without realizing it, we assign morals to sensations. Surely, that which feels good must be good! But, if this is true, then it must mean that all that feels bad must also be wicked. Like a plague, it ought to be eradicated.
We act as if suffering has no purpose other than to incite misery. It is our mortal enemy, crossing its steely arms in front of those elusive golden gates. As soon as we feel it, we want to shake it off, because the only thing worth feeling is happiness. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if trauma and hardship are not just things to be done away with?
When happiness becomes an ambition rather than a feeling, we trudge through sorrow with our eyes shut. But what happens when we experience something so tragic that it cannot be wished away? Naturally, it feels safer, surer to insist upon our autonomy. We have been blessed with free will; we can work through this.
Of course, all that we experience, even that which we forget, shapes our perceptions, experiences and personality in ways that are not always obvious.
In some sense, this is true. We ought not wallow, at least not for long. Friendship is magic, and clinical psychology has come a long way since Freud’s infamous couch. Even in a cruel world, saving graces exist. Nonetheless, grief must run its course.
This distinction is of the utmost importance because we have the most to learn from that which is most horrific. Grief stands alone in that it is uniquely permanent. It is a mysterious force that bonds itself to our soul when life gets worse than you ever thought it could be. There is no choice in it, and I envy those who presume there to be.
Of course, all that we experience, even that which we forget, shapes our perceptions, experiences and personality in ways that are not always obvious. Like the crack in your windshield, we change ever so slightly until one day we realize: Woah, I am big now!
But grief is nothing like this. Certainly, it is the antithesis of imperceptible. In the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger, or whatever adage floats your nice little lifeboat, you are born anew. In some ways, it is strange to see a single event alter the course of your life so drastically, so immediately. It is terrifying, senseless, insurmountable. We all balk at the horror, and no one seems to know what to say.
The pain of others is terrifying because we are almost entirely helpless to it, and yet, for some reason, we feel responsible to remedy it.
All we know is that it is terrible and that we want it gone. But seeing a shard of someone’s grief is nothing like carrying it yourself. The pain of others is terrifying because we are almost entirely helpless to it, and yet, for some reason, we feel responsible to remedy it. But when we think ourselves capable of curing the suffering of another, an obligation to do so arises. What was once compassion mutates into some sort of duty, and with it comes protocol.
We see grief, and we become robotic in our attempts to abolish it. It stops being about the very real person who most certainly has it the worst, and instead becomes an obsession with saying the right thing. It’s like we lose our humanity the second tragedy strikes. Suddenly, we are cowering in fear as we posture friendship.
I’m here when you need me, when you’re ready to talk, for whatever you need, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ad infinitum. But what exactly does it mean to “be there” for someone? We’ve said it so many times that it’s become entirely separate from a sentiment long forgotten. We say it not because it means something, but because we are supposed to. It is obligation masquerading as empathy, and I am largely uninspired.
Plagiarized from Hallmark, these stock phrases are brittle in the face of grief. They bend to its will like grass in the wind. Everything is inconsequential, and your shoddy sympathies simply won’t do. We think ourselves liable for the pain of our loved ones and yet, more often than not, we have not an inkling of what it is to meaningfully console them. We are lost in delusions of empathy, and when all is said and done, we are more relieved to have not done the wrong thing than we are concerned about bearing witness to the pain of those we love.
The myth of empathy may be what started this whole apathy business. We fancy ourselves omniscient thinking we can understand the suffering of others when really all we can do is imagine it. It feels easy, natural even, to accept these visions of suffering as truth.
We all like to think that we can understand the people we love most, but we have never been them, and we will never be them. We can only know what they tell us, filtered through our own experience. To really be there for someone, you must forget yourself — abandon your fear to acknowledge their suffering. Do not let your imagination get the best of you; instead, accept that which you cannot understand.
There are simply some things that must be carried alone, and to see it in live action is to be reminded that someday it will be us on the podium.
Grief is terrifying to its host because it is entirely upending and ostensibly unending. But it is terrifying to its audience because it reminds them they are alone in a crowd. One’s grief is rather unconcerned with their friends and family, who can sense this impenetrability, even if only unconsciously.
Sadly, we cannot crawl beneath the skin of our beloved, nor can we accompany them in moonlit dreams. There are simply some things that must be carried alone, and to see it in live action is to be reminded that someday it will be us on the podium. So we assure ourselves that even though what so-and-so is going through is so so bad, things will get better; in fact, they already are! In doing so, we succeed only in consoling ourselves.
Life goes on with little rhyme or reason. There is no exposition and rising action, no neat conclusion. It’s terrifying just how vulnerable we are to it all, isn’t it? And yet, no matter how scared we are, no matter how thoroughly we try to prepare for it, we can never be ready for it when it does come.
Still, grief is not the enemy, and it cannot be torn out of us because it became inseparable from our essence as soon as it arrived. It is horrifying and agonizing — and meaningful. Do not forget it. Do not wake up one day and not know who you are because you have abandoned the pain that accompanied you there. Hold yourself tight and don’t let go, and when it finds those you love, do the same for them.
Do not throw vague condolences and silver linings their way to abdicate yourself of responsibility. Instead, laugh at their jokes, even when they are morbid. Do not shy away from the magnitude of a pain that is not yours to bear. Understand grief as a constant, even when weeks and months pass. Above all, know that it will change them, and promise to love whoever they become in its wake.
