Sometimes learning about someone else’s loss and grief is a gift and sometimes it is a horrible burden. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes the difference for me so that I can share my own loss and grief story with others in a way that makes it more likely to be received as a gift.
I got some insight recently when I reread Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life,” her astonishingly raw and honest essay about grieving the loss of her mother. One passage jumped out at me: “After my mother died, everyone I knew wanted to tell me either about the worst breakup they’d had or all the people they’d known who’d died. I listened to a long, traumatic story about a girlfriend who suddenly moved to Ohio, and to stories of grandfathers and old friends and people who lived down the block who were no longer among us. Rarely was this helpful.”
Like Strayed experienced, I felt like a magnet for stories of tragedy when my husband died. People wanted to tell me about their pets dying, their siblings dying, their parents dying. These stories almost always fell into the horrible burden category. As Strayed notes, “rarely was this helpful.”
Not because the dog or sibling or parent that died wasn’t a husband, although that’s part of it. Mostly it wasn’t helpful because I felt like the person telling the story now needed me to comfort them, which I couldn’t do, because I was too consumed by my own grief.
It reminded me of how when I was pregnant, every mother I knew wanted to tell me about their horrible labors. The people I knew who weren’t mothers told me about the horrible labors of their friends and loved ones. Everyone knew someone who had had a horrible labor and they regaled me with the horrible tales. It was absolutely not helpful.
I think people do this because they are trying to build a bridge between themselves and whoever they are sharing with. I assume people thought that telling me their awful loss and grief stories was a way to show that they understood loss.
But the instances in which the sharing felt like a gift to me had a distinct quality to them: they were brief, they focused on feelings, and they made me feel seen. The stories that felt like a horrible burden were the “long, traumatic stories” Strayed mentions—complete with gratuitous details about body parts and fluids, the mechanics of medical interventions, and the idiosyncrasies of accidents. Whereas the gift stories allowed me to open up, the burden stories left me speechless.
Because we don’t talk much as a society about loss and grief, we don’t have well-developed skills for doing so. It’s no wonder so many people who were likely trying to build a bridge with me left me feeling worse.
I’m not suggesting that we talk less about these things for fear of making a mistake. I think we should talk much, much more about loss and grief so that we can learn how to do it. I’ve stumbled through it as much as anyone, often making things worse, which is exactly why I’ve been trying to identify what makes the difference between the gift story and the burden story.
These are the guidelines I’m going to use myself:
First, be aware of why I am sharing my story. There are times I’m sharing because I want validation of my own experience. After a former student of mine who I worked closely with died, I noticed that I mentioned his death sometimes because I wanted others to tell me it was ok to feel the loss as powerfully as I did. There are times I may realize I’m about to share because I want validation and I can then decide whether that is appropriate in the moment. A newly widowed person isn’t someone I want to burden with validating me, so once I realize validation is what I’m after, I can decide to not share.
Other times, I want to let someone know I understand, at least to some extent, what they are experiencing. I often share my grief for my husband with new widows to let them know that I comprehend the kind of loss they are experiencing.
Sometimes I’m sharing to process my emotions. I recognize this as my motivation for sharing stories about my grief for my mother for decades after she died. Processing emotions is something I really only want to do with close friends or my therapist, so when I notice myself doing this with someone unequipped for that, I can opt to stay quiet.
Second, share only the relevant part of the story. If my goal is to connect with someone and let them know I understand, I’ll focus on feelings, saying things like, “I was scared when my husband died, too,” or on commonalities with the person I’m talking to, like, “I still have a hard time in grocery stores because of all the food-related memories I have of my husband.” If I’m sharing to normalize certain emotions, how my husband died isn’t relevant.
Third, keep it brief. Because we are so unpracticed in talking about grief, a little grief talk usually goes a long way. I talk about it way more than most people do, admittedly, but I also try to intersperse it with humor or lighter moments. I try to give a nutshell version of my story and then offer, “I can say more, if you’d like.” Sometimes people do ask for more detail.