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Proper Etiquette of Grief
I sat at my mother’s dining room table less than a week after my dad’s passing. As I was sitting, figuring out his mail, anger was building and I had to release it somehow. My hand punched down and a pen rolled a few inches away. “You’re being childish,” she scolded.
Well, a child, as well as an inner-child, did just lose her father.
I was in my late twenties, allowed to cry for my dad but otherwise expected to keep my body still. I was to feign emotions. But in doing so, the multi-functioning systems within my entire makeup would know I was lying. I was depressed, stressed and frustrated. Feelings found an exit through my hand. At this level of stress, my breathing was short, fast and unsteady. My thoughts, inevitably, mirrored these actions.
Three months later I had moved into my first house. It wasn’t until that glass slipped from my hand in the 30-year-old sink that I realized three things. First, grief isn’t only about losing a person but also about losing a place, or places. Second, grief over losing a person manifests itself in unpredictable ways. And finally, grief isn’t perfect. The dropping of the glass was innocent but opened a portal to healing that I needed to make more space for.
Write Your Right Feelings
I’m normally well acquainted with the idea of therapeutic writing but was long overdue to visit an empty page. After my incident at the sink, I knew it was time. The cup wanting out of my grasp symbolized that I needed to let go of my own grasp on grief. I could only be in so much control. I needed to release the stress and frustration I felt between losing my father and moving away from the home that was once his.
Around the same time, news broke on how an orca was seen carrying the corpse of her newborn calf for several weeks. I realized this mother was permitting me to undo the taboo on grief. I’d write about my honest, proper, improper, and illogical exploration of it. At my desk, I re-lived how I spent my last days at my father’s house. Behind the cleaning and emptying there, I cornered some time to be with my emotions. This was proper but rawness also followed in my writing:
“My body traveled around rooms trying to feel what he felt before leaving, imagine what he saw in his last glance from the bed. I studied the picture holding itself in place between the mirror and the dresser frame. It was an image of me floating on a plastic orca in the pool. How ironic, now. What had the picture of me as a child seen?”
I wrote, published, and read my first poem aloud before both life transitions. “Dream Catcher” was what I called it, after my father’s tattoo. It describes the last physical interactions with my father’s body. My warm cheek took comfort in the texture of his skin just as the whale took comfort in her calf’s skin.
Rebel Against the Taboo
While reflecting, I noticed that while giving myself space to grieve in the emptying house and trying to understand everything, my emotions never exited through violence. I guess in subconsciously feeling stuck and needing to be “proper” and only cry at certain times at my mother’s, that’s where I felt the need to break out of my head: to slam or hit. I rebelled against pressure, but I’d much rather rebel with words and tears.
While working on “Dream Catcher,” I kept hearing my mother’s voice, my inner critic, say, “No, you don’t want to write that. That’s too morbid.”
Exactly! I thought. This is exactly what death is. That’s why there cannot be Proper Grief, a statue for a body! The body cannot be banned or limited to only showing ‘proper’ grief when it expresses itself in its way. Violence is not the way out with grief, it’s when grief is told to hide or be scheduled that violence strikes.
As strong as my belief in this was, hesitation still showed up before I performed “Dream Catcher” at an open mic night during the following season. Would the audience see it as only “morbid” and “wrong,” too? But my fiancé and best friend were right there the entire time and were moved just as much as I was as I read it.
Luckily my support system showed me I was being honest with my grief. A temper tantrum was not dragging me from the dining room table to the sink to the stage. I had been giving space to my emotions and my body, and in being honest and open while sadness, compassion, and gratitude built up within me.
Allow Yourself To Grieve However You Need To
Here, I’m handing you permission to express your grief. Write it out, vocalize it however you need to. And be sure to have a support system with you as you do, whether it be a counselor, peer support, or otherwise. Remember, violence is not the way out so don’t be in a place or situation that is not safe for you and your grief.
