Tag Archives: loneliness

grieving

Sharing Grief (and seeing fire starting as an act of love)

I have been very up and down with my grief the last few months. The three-year anniversary of my husband’s death was less awful than I expected, but then I was a bit blindsided by hard grief a month later. The last few weeks have felt less tumultuous and I’ve noticed a kind of tender sweetness in my grief.

A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Sweden with my sister and my 13-year old nephew. They both knew my husband well and Tom came up in conversation regularly. At one point, my nephew began reminiscing about some of his favorite adventures with my husband. He mentioned a video message Tom had sent him just a week before he died.

I had forgotten about that message. My then 10-year old nephew had been at our house and we had set up an obstacle course in the alley for Tom to go through in his new motorized wheelchair. My nephew had asked if he could try the course in the wheelchair and Tom said yes, but then before that could happen, Tom was exhausted and went in for a nap. Hour later, after my nephew had left and Tom had napped, Tom told me he felt bad that he had not followed through on his promise that my nephew could ride in the wheelchair and he asked me to record him apologizing. I did, sent the video, and completely forgot about it.

When my nephew mentioned it a couple weeks ago, I asked him if we could watch it. He immediately called it up on his phone. Hearing my husband’s voice and seeing the exhaustion on his face was a little shocking—I had forgotten both how ragged he was at the end and how responsible he felt toward my nephew. I was overwhelmed with love for Tom, seeing his attention to my nephew even in the face of his own profound exhaustion and struggles. And I was filled with love and compassion for my nephew, who had this video easily accessible, indicating that he watched it regularly. Even after death, my husband made this boy feel loved and seen.

My nephew and I were quiet for a few minutes after we watched the message, neither of us saying anything. In that silence, we connected over our mutual loss and love. Sharing that moment with my nephew made me feel so close to both him and my husband. My nephew and me, together in silence, lost in remembering, missing, and grieving—it was deliciously sweet and sad. I said, “I miss him so much,” and my nephew said he did too. That was all the discussion we had, but in the silence we shared, there was rich and deep communication.

A few days later, my nephew was with me when I scattered some of Tom’s ashes under an old pine tree in one of Stockholm, Sweden’s many nature preserves. I think Tom would appreciate the bed of pine needles and nearby clear lake. On the hike out of the preserve, my nephew told our guide that Tom was “the kind of uncle who lets you set things on fire in the garage.”

Hearing how others remember my husband fills me with love, for him and for them. Setting things on fire in the garage may not seem sweet, but I remember Tom planning before my nephew’s visits to have certain flammable items available and others tucked away. He had safety protocols in mind. Setting things on fire with that boy was an act of mentoring, trust building, and love. Sometimes my husband’s sweetness showed up as setting things on fire. Sometimes it showed up as making a video apology for not sharing his wheelchair.

One of the best reasons I can think of to keep talking about our dead loved ones is that it strengthens our relationships with the living. Knowing that my nephew still vividly remembers setting things on fire with my husband and keeps the video apology makes me love my nephew even more. We share a deep love for Tom, we both feel shaped in some way by him. There’s a hole where Tom was for both of us. Neither of us is alone in our grief.

life skills

Holding Space for Loneliness

I’ve worked hard over the last few years to build my listening skills. One of the key aspects of being a good listener is simply shutting up, and then once I learned how to do that, I had to learn how to stop using the time I wasn’t talking to formulate what I would say when I next spoke. It has taken a lot of discipline and patience with myself to just relax into listening when someone one else is talking.

I recently experienced a tough challenge to my ability to listen when a good friend of mine confessed to feeling lonely. I was surprised because they are someone I have identified as “a social butterfly,” regularly going to events with different people and maintaining many longtime friendships. I have even been a bit envious of this person’s social life in the past.

As I heard them talk about feeling like they don’t have anyone to confide in and they feel alone often, I had the urge to argue with them. They said they felt like they had no real friends and no one wanted to spend time with them. My mind immediately began assembling evidence to contradict their statements about being friendless.

I know from my own experience that being surrounded by others does not mean you aren’t lonely. In fact, the times I’ve felt the loneliest have been times I was with other people. I felt lonely when I was in grad school and it seemed everyone else was going to parties I wasn’t invited to; and when I was in college, I did get invited to a lot of parties but often felt lonely at them. So the proof my mind was gathering to invalidate my friend’s loneliness was irrelevant.

On top of that, arguing with someone when they are being vulnerable is never helpful. Telling a person who feels lonely that they are wrong to feel that way will make them feel more alone. Loneliness is about disconnection and being argued with disconnects us. I know this—but it took everything in me to sit quietly while my friend spoke and not point out what I perceived as the logical flaws in their thinking.

I struggled and floundered. A few times I noticed that when I was asking what I meant to be clarifying questions, the tone in my voice revealed that I wanted to be arguing. My voice took on the timbre of a prosecuting attorney—“Are you saying you have no one to talk to?” I wish I had said, “It sounds like you feel you have no one to talk to,” simply echoing back what they were saying to show understanding.

I had to keep reminding myself that my job wasn’t to show them that they aren’t actually alone but to listen and connect.

I’ve talked before about holding space. It means listening and offering support without judgment, without trying to fix the problem or situation. When we immediately go into fix-it mode, like I wanted to do, we invalidate the feelings of the speaker. In the case of loneliness, that would mean making them feel even lonelier.

This incident was a good reminder to me that holding space can be hard. It’s a skill that doesn’t come naturally to many people, and our society values problem-solvers, so even folks with good space-holding skills may not always think to use them.

Holding space for loneliness can help folks who are lonely feel more comfortable talking about it. When we immediately start trying to fix their loneliness, we shut down that conversation. In the case of my urge to argue with my lonely friend, arguing would certainly have had the opposite effect of connection. When someone feels lonely, proving them wrong is simply not helpful.

In trying to understand why I had such a hard time holding space for my lonely friend, I realized it’s because I often feel powerless around others’ loneliness. Because of my own experience being lonely, I know that simply being with someone else isn’t enough—although it’s a good start. Holding space means being with someone in a particular way: being open, not judging, and being present with vulnerability.

Note about loneliness: I talked about loneliness in my last newsletter. I mentioned Vivek Murthy’s assertion in Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, that most of us feel lonely at some point but we tend to think we are the only person to ever feel alone.

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.