Monthly Archives: May 2024

grieving

Don’t be a jerk about grammar, especially when someone is being vulnerable

I’ve been thinking about verb tense lately.

As I slowly write my memoir of being my husband’s caregiver after his stroke, verb tense gives me regular fits. Yes, everything happened in the past, but it still feels so present to me. Using past tense verbs seems inauthentic, but using present tense seems grammatically incorrect.

Last week, Gina DeMillo Wagner’s discussion of why she wrote her memoir in present tense got my attention. She mentions that writing in the present tense “mirrors the experience of grief and trauma,” which helps me realize that some of my verb tense confusion may be attributed to my still-active processing of what the year before my husband’s death means for me.  

While I will likely continue to debate which tense to use in my memoir, Wagner’s post isn’t the only reason I’m thinking about verb tense. Another widow posted recently in a Facebook group about having her verb tense corrected during a conversation with a neighbor: she mentioned her dead husband in the present tense and the neighbor corrected her verb to past tense.

I was shocked and outraged on her behalf.

When someone is talking about their dead loved one, it is never appropriate to respond with a correction of how they did it. Asking for clarification is fine—“did that happen recently or in the past?” is totally ok if verb tense is confusing—but if you are able to figure out what the person is trying to communicate and you are correcting their grammar only because you feel a grammatical rule has been violated, my advice is to suck it up and let the violation go.

“But I can’t help it!” my grammar fanatic readers will cry.

Sure you can. I believe in you. You may not be able to help noticing the violation, but I am absolutely certain that you can keep it to yourself.

And here’s why you should: correcting someone else’s grammar comes across as judgmental and smug in the best cases and cruel and dismissive in the worst. It makes YOU look like a jerk. Most importantly, it damages the trust that relationships are built on.

Many years ago, I shared something very personal I had written with someone I trusted. They proceeded to disparage the typos, misplaced commas, and less-than-perfect word choices. Their focus on the perceived errors in my writing rather than on the expression of vulnerability made me feel like they didn’t care about me or my experience.

Perhaps their intent was to help me improve the writing, but the effect was that I never shared anything personal with them again. That relationship slowly dwindled away.

Another time, I was telling a story about something difficult I had experienced. I said, “So me and my friend—”

The listener cut me off. “So my friend and I,” they said with eyebrows raised condescendingly.

Being interrupted mid-sentence made me feel like the listener cared more about my usage than about the upsetting experience I was sharing.

I suppose it’s a win for the listener that after that I carefully studied the rules of subject and object pronouns and never misused one again. I would hope they consider it a loss that I also iced them out of my life. Another relationship lost over grammar fanaticism.

When you correct a vulnerable person’s grammar, you might as well say, “I see that you’re in pain, but that’s no excuse for dangling a modifier.” Or worse, “I see that you’re in pain, but I’m smarter than you.”

Or “I see that you’re in pain, but I’d like to make this all about me and my grammar pet peeves.”

Yup, you’re being a jerk.

I get as hearty a chuckle as anyone else when I see quotation marks, apostrophes, and other bits of punctuation misused, but I also recognize the conventions of these marks as arbitrary and socially constructed. I can notice these things, be amused by them, and still not make condescending and rude remarks. I am living proof that one can refrain from using their flair for grammar, punctuation, and mechanics to make others feel bad.

And I can let my compassion be stronger than my noticing of a rule violation. In the case of a death, people who are used to referring to a loved one in present tense may take a while to get used to referring to that person in the past tense. Give them the time, even if it takes longer than you would like.

Buddhist life, grieving

You’re not the only one who is lonely

In his compassionate and deeply thought-provoking book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vivek Murthy makes clear that nearly everyone is lonely at some point in their life but one of the cruel tricks of loneliness is making you think you’re the only one who is lonely. You are suffering through an almost universal experience yet believe everyone around you feels connected to others. The truth is that if you are lonely—whether it’s a longtime state or a fleeting feeling brought on by a particular situation—others near you probably are, too.

Loneliness often accompanies grief. If you are already lonely when grief hits, your loneliness may be compounded. We don’t tend to talk about either loneliness or grief, and by not talking about these outlaw emotions, we fail to develop not only our skills for talking about them but our ability to tolerate them in ourselves and others. When we see grief or loneliness heading toward us, we hurry to slam the door and lock them out.

We label people who are grieving downers and we urge them to “move on,” “get back to normal,” or cheer up. But being told to move on or cheer up just makes me feel lonely—it’s proof that the person talking to me doesn’t get it. When someone has told me to move on or cheer up, not once have I felt less alone, and more importantly perhaps, not once have I gotten closer to moving on or cheering up.

While I find those comments completely unhelpful and even alienating, I feel for the people making them. I think they are afraid. The next time someone says something like that to me, I hope I have the presence of mind to respond with, “I’m afraid of grief, too.”

It’s not just fear at work, though. I think people equate taking time with grief to a lack of effort or activity, as if the hard work of grieving has no value.

In a culture obsessed with productivity, taking time to grieve seems wasteful. It appears to be “doing nothing.” We think activity is inherently valuable while doing nothing is inherently lazy, but in fact, the opposite is often true. One of my favorite Buddhist sayings reminds me of the folly of taking action in lieu of reflecting: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

I guess you could say that in my grief process, I’ve done a lot of standing there. I have chosen not to distract myself with activity and instead to turn towards my grief and give it space. I’ve been a downer. And yet, more often than not, when I’ve talked about my grief with others, they’ve reciprocated in authentic and vulnerable ways. Being a downer and standing there with my grief rather than hurrying through it has become a connecting point between me and others.

Often standing there with my grief is difficult. For example, last week I took something off my calendar that was a reminder of the life I had with my husband before he died. Date night dancing showed up every Saturday on my calendar. Taking it off my calendar was the easy part. The hard part, the real work, has been sitting with the hard hollow that forms in my throat every time I see the empty space on Saturday on my calendar. Even harder has been not pushing past those tough feelings with distractions but rather sitting with them, feeling them, acknowledging them, turning toward them.

Standing there with someone else who is grieving means holding space for them, not trying to cheer them up or fix their grief. That person in front of you who is grieving feels lonely and thinks they’re the only person feeling it. But they aren’t. You feel it or have felt it. I know you have. Don’t just do something—stand there.

grieving

Recognizing a Grieving Behavior that No Longer Serves Me

For over four years, date night dancing has shown up on my google calendar every Saturday night.

In January 2020, I gave my husband video dance lessons for his birthday. We loved dancing together but had a limited repertoire and had talked often about taking dance lessons but always found an excuse not to. I thought the videos would be a good stepping stone. We did the lessons every Saturday night. We made it into a date night, having a nice dinner and wine before heading down to the TV room to dance. I put “date night dancing” on my google calendar to repeat every Saturday night.

After his stroke, I left date night dancing on the calendar because we planned to resume it once he was able. We joked about it sometimes; he would take a few steps with his walker, look at me, and say, “Date night dancing, here I come.” We talked about how date night dancing might look different in the future, depending on whether he used a wheelchair, a walker, or a cane. I new he would be debonair in any case.

After he died, I kept date night dancing on my calendar to remind me that the life I remembered before his stroke really did happen. Every time I saw date night dancing on my calendar, I cried, remembering how hard we laughed during our video lessons, how his arms felt around me, what a terrible follower I was. It hurt but it helped me feel connected to the life we had led.

About two years after he died, I started considering taking date night dancing off my calendar. It confused me sometimes to see something on my calendar that wasn’t really going to happen. My social life was a little more robust by then and I sometimes had real plans for Saturday night. Seeing real plans side-by-side with date night dancing made me feel like the past was competing with the present.

But I preferred to live with those feelings rather than seriously contemplate taking date night dancing off my calendar. I changed date night dancing to yellow, a color I don’t use for anything else on my calendar, so that when I glanced at a Saturday and saw an event in yellow, I would know the day was actually free and I could schedule something.

Last week I ran into a friend who is grieving the death of her daughter. As fellow grievers, we tend to skip the small talk and dive right into what matters. Immediately after hello, we were sharing details from our grieving—what we missed about our loved ones, how the changing of the seasons reminds us of them.

At some point we talked about how different people grieve in different ways and shared a bit about other grievers we are watching. “I’m a little worried about a friend of mine,” she said. The friend is holding onto things in a way that seems concerning. We brainstormed some ways to express concern to a grieving person without resorting to “shoulds” and judgment, which deny the individualized nature of grief.

One possibility we came up with is to ask, “How is this behavior serving you?” The open-ended nature of the question allows for the asker to learn that what seems concerning to them is perhaps nothing to worry about.

After that conversation, I asked myself, “How is keeping date night dancing on your calendar serving you now?”

I couldn’t come up with a way that wasn’t problematic. I don’t need reminders of the wonderful, happy, silly things we did together. I don’t need to feel a twinge of guilt when I make real plans on a Saturday night.

Still, it felt like a betrayal to take it off my calendar. It felt like saying I was ok with forgetting some of the details of our life together.

It’s ok to forget things, I told myself. It’s normal. The date night dancing isn’t what matters. What matters is the love and devotion we shared and that I can’t possibly forget.

Part of me does not actually believe that it’s ok to forget some of the details. A larger part of me, though, can see that keeping date night dancing on my calendar was not helping me move forward or heal. It was keeping me in sadness and guilt.

This Saturday will be the first Saturday in over four years where date night dancing will not show up on my calendar.

death

Wondering If You Should Attend a Funeral? and what to wear, do, and say if you go?

I find funerals and memorial events very comforting these days, but that was not always the case. I hated my mother’s funeral and those of my grandparents and other older relatives who died when I was a teenager and young adult. They seemed to me to be very uptight affairs, depressing, and overly long.

As I got older and no longer had an adult telling me I had to attend, I would worry about whether I should be attending, was I wearing the right clothes, did I say the right thing, and so much more. My view of funerals changed when I was in my early 30s and attended a very formal Catholic funeral for a colleague. As I was looking around, feeling very uncomfortable amidst the Catholicism, thinking I had dressed all wrong and probably shouldn’t even be there, my colleague’s sister approached me and asked how I had known her sister.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” she said when she found out I was a colleague. After hugging me, she asked me to tell her what her sister was like to work with. After I shared a story, I asked what her sister was like as a sibling, and the sister excitedly told me about some teenaged shenanigans the two had engaged in. When I left, I got another hug and a heartfelt, “Thank you for being here.”

That’s how I learned that funerals serve two important purposes that have nothing at all to do with religion or whether you’re wearing the right thing: they offer comfort to the loved ones of the person who died, and they provide other people who attend an opportunity to learn more about the person who died.

That realization helped me let go of my worries about whether I should attend funerals and memorials—if it fits into my schedule, I go. I figure if I can offer comfort and show interest and curiosity about the person who died, I’ll be welcomed, and that has always been the case.

I used to wonder if I knew the person who died well enough for it to be appropriate for me to attend. Now I understand that knowing the person who died isn’t even a requirement and I have attended many events for people I didn’t know to show my love and support for their loved ones. When a colleague’s child who I had never met died, I went to the funeral. When an acquaintance’s partner who I had never met died, I attended the memorial.

When my husband died, I wanted as many people at the celebration of life as possible. I was eager to hear stories about him that I might not have heard before and hear other versions of the stories I had heard. Several people showed up who had not known my husband but wanted to show their support for me, and I was incredibly grateful for their presence.

There may still be times when it’s best not to attend. If you are concerned that your own well-being will suffer, stay home. If your presence could cause some drama, stay home. If it is simply impossible for you to either offer comfort or show interest in the person who died, stay home.

If you go

What to wear: Events in churches and religious spaces are usually more on the conservative side, so I usually wear something fairly plain, dark, and professional-looking. Events held elsewhere are often more casual. Sometimes the invitation or announcement will mention a theme or dress code. For example, for my husband’s celebration of life, I included in the invitation that folks should wear whatever they thought Tom would most appreciate. This clued people in that the event wasn’t very serious—and folks showed up in wonderful outfits that he very much would have appreciated. I wore a short skirt, a cousin wore a pastel tuxedo jacket, many friends wore camping/rafting clothes or tie-dye.

Food and drink: If the invitation doesn’t mention food being served, assume there won’t be food. If alcohol is served, drink lightly. I did serve alcohol at my husband’s memorial event and needed to arrange rides home for a guest or two, which I would have preferred not to have to do.

What to say: It’s ok to not know what to say; genuine and authentic words of concern are better than platitudes. You don’t have to fix anything; in fact, it may be more important to hold space for people.

If you don’t go

Send a text the day of the event expressing your wishes for an event full of love (or whatever feels appropriate to you). There’s no need to explain why you won’t be there; you can simply say you’re sorry to miss it.