Silly me! You’d think that I’d have learned by now that acting on a hunch can take you into uncomfortable situations, places that can leave you struggling with finding the right words. I guess I’ll never learn.
You see, given the turbulent political times of today – and acting on a hunch – I called to check in on several longtime friends “Jimmy,” “Barbara and “Eddie” recently. Although I was primarily interested in their physical well-being, after reading an article about “grief” (I’ll get to it further down) I’d hope to get their thoughts on that topic as well.
After we dispensed with the small talk, Jimmy opened with a stunner that I suspect may be a truism for millions of Americans these days: “Terry, I’m in grief and terrified with all the news about the current administration’s threat to slash or eliminate Medicaid and social security benefits.”
“I understand your concerns and know that …” – I began before he finished. “So, with that news along with my prostate cancer diagnosis I guess I should start planning my funeral, huh?” I was tongue tied, bereft with the right response. We quickly reverted to unrelated small talk; sports if I remember correctly.
Not long after that another friend texted me the phone number of a mutual friend, “Barbara,” from our days living in Massachusetts. I finally heard from her after several attempts. She began with something I already knew – that she’d lost her husband to cancer three years ago and her only son not long after that. Was I anxious about what to say to her? You bet.
“It’s great to hear from you Terry after all these years. Sorry I’ve not gotten back to you sooner. You probably heard that I lost my dear husband and son during the past three years. I’m still grieving but somehow making it. Also, I’m dealing with cancer myself but hoping for the best.”
Once again, I realized that I was stumped – that I hadn’t anticipated to the news of her cancer diagnosis. Now if there was something I could’ve said better than “I’m sorry to hear that,” or the spontaneous question that answers itself, “how are you doing,” Lord only knows.
For the next 15 minutes we traded fond memories about those many good times in Boston and self-deprecating humor about creaky knees, memory loss, keeping track of our meds and other vestiges of growing old. Again, what if anything could I have said differently? I ended that call feeling so darn incomplete.
A week later I reached out to “Eddie.” After several attempts to reach him, he finally responded:
“Hey man, I appreciate the heads up that you wanted to get my views on grief. Sorry that I’ve not gotten back to you much sooner. Health-wise we’re okay, but the truth is that I’ve been in a grieving funk lately. You see I no longer communicate with people who I thought were friends and even family members over disagreements about religious and political opinions and differences after the last election. Too often these days those conversations turn into shouting matches.”
Now call it coincidence, instincts or just plain knack, but the truth is that some are gifted with the ability to sense a mood and naming the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ – in this instance our national epidemic of grief – in such a way that it resonates universally. Pastor John Palovitz, author of “Our Beautiful Mess” has that gift.
In a recent article he centered on the word “grief” and stretched that word to get the reader to think about it in ways perhaps not previously thought of. Here are some excerpts:
“They may not be dressed in black or sitting in a church pew or tearfully standing graveside or in the back of slow-moving cars with headlights flashing—but they are deeply grieving, nonetheless. They are people who have lost someone they dearly love, though not to death but to something else, something much less expected, something much more unnatural. They have lost them to the knowledge of how unlike they now are; to a moral disconnect that has rendered their relationship mortally wounded. It is death by irreconcilable differences.
Because our politics and our religion have become such a fierce battleground between us and those we love, we are now a nation of people attending perpetual funerals for the living. We continually grieve the partisan talking points, the wild conspiracy theories, the toxic theology and the unbridled hate and all they have destroyed. Every single day is a memorial to what has died before its time.
The present here is a somber wake where we see laid out in front of us, those we have lost. They are in old photos, in dormant text message threads, in long-abandoned social media posts: daily reminders of once-fully living relationships that are over now. And these funerals for the living are devastating because they never end, because we never saw them coming, and because grieving isn’t supposed to work like this.
The only comfort we can take is in knowing how many similarly walking wounded there are around us, how massive the funeral procession is right now, and how much company we have in this great sadness.”
Now I accept that I’ve waded into something deeply personal here, that issues related to grief are a lot more complex. But here’s what can be said – there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution to something so personal. None.
So, to “Barbara,” “Eddie” and “Jimmy” – plus similarly experienced people who just read this, know that you’re not alone in your grief. You are part of a larger – and growing – community of like individuals who are grieving not only the physical loss of a loved one, but the loss of what once were longtime relationships with friends or family members because of religious or political differences, or the loss of what was once an active and vibrant life cut short by an unexpectant deterioration in health.
In the end, if you are on the fringe of or outside that community, give someone you’ve not heard from a call. There are folks sitting in grief and loneliness in nursing homes, beside you in places of worship, hiding in plain sight …and even around the Sunday evening dinner table.
So, act on a hunch and let your physical presence, love, caring and sincerity – not contrived words and expressions – do the talking for you.
Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, the Augusta County Historical Society Bulletin and recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.
