The Grief Club

I think there are people who know grief, and people who don’t know it… yet.

I don’t mean that everyone who has lost someone experiences grief in the same way. They don’t. I don’t think there is a hierarchy to loss, or that one kind of grief earns you admission while another doesn’t. I just think there is a point for many of us when grief stops being something we understand in theory and becomes something we know.

Before that, you can be compassionate. You can show up. You can go to the funeral, send the flowers, bring the food, say all the right things. You can understand that someone is devastated. You can imagine what it must feel like.

Then one day, you know.

It’s a club no one is particularly interested in joining, and eventually, most of us will. Once you’re in it, you start recognizing other members.

There are things grieving people say to each other that require almost no explanation. The completely ordinary Tuesday that somehow hurts more than the anniversary. Reaching for your phone because, for half a second, you forgot. Feeling fine and then hearing a song in the grocery store and suddenly not being fine at all. The strange guilt that can come the first time you realize you’ve gone an entire afternoon without thinking about them. The way grief can disappear for a while and then walk back into the room like it never left.

There are the firsts, of course. The first birthday. The first holiday. The first time something wonderful happens and they aren’t there to tell. Eventually there are seconds and thirds, and somehow those can surprise you too. Then there are the milestones you couldn’t have anticipated when they died. Having a baby they’ll never meet. Falling in love with someone they’ll never know. Becoming someone they never got the chance to know. Sometimes it’s not a milestone at all. Sometimes you’re heartbroken and you just really wish your big brother were still here to kick some ass.

I think that’s one of the stranger parts of grief. You don’t only grieve the person you lost. You grieve their absence from a life that keeps happening. New versions of you keep emerging, new people arrive, things fall apart and come back together, and somehow they are still supposed to be here for all of it. Grief doesn’t seem particularly interested in following the timeline we assign to it.

Sometimes there are pangs of jealousy, too, although we don’t always like to admit that one. You see someone having lunch with their mother. Someone complains about their wife. You see someone hand in hand with their child. Someone casually mentions calling their dad on the way home. You don’t want them to lose what they have. Of course you don’t. You just become acutely aware that they still have something you don’t. Ordinary things stop looking quite so ordinary once you know they can disappear.

The grievers know. They understand these contradictions. You can laugh until your stomach hurts, and you can have a day when peeling yourself out of bed seems nearly impossible. You can look forward to something for weeks, and then be blindsided by sadness in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. You can celebrate something wonderful and ache because the person you want there isn’t. You can complain about something completely insignificant and, five minutes later, find yourself thinking about everything that actually matters. You can genuinely love your life and still desperately miss someone who is no longer in it. Grief and joy are not mutually exclusive. You can be profoundly grateful for the life you have and profoundly sad for the person who is missing from it.

That may be one of the strangest things about joining this club. Eventually you realize grief is not necessarily something you finish. It changes shape. It gets quieter and then louder. You learn where it lives. You build a life around it. Sometimes you barely notice its weight, and sometimes you still bump directly into it.

I think people who haven’t experienced that kind of loss sometimes worry about saying the wrong thing. They want to make it better, and there really isn’t anything to make better. There is no sentence that makes a dead person less dead. Usually, the people who have been in the club for a while know that. They are a little less afraid of the sadness. They can sit beside it without immediately trying to move it somewhere else.

There is something almost protective in the way I think about the people who don’t know yet. I don’t think they’re naïve, and I certainly don’t think grief makes anyone wiser or better. I just know there are some things I understood differently before loss became personal.

Maybe that’s the cruel bargain of grief. We hurt this deeply because something mattered this deeply. To wish away the grief entirely would almost require wishing away the love that got us here, and I would never do that.

Now, when I see a new griever emerge, I offer them a silent prayer: Oh, no, my dear. Welcome to the club. I’m so sorry you’re here. I wouldn’t wish this membership on anyone, but here we are. We’re here with you. I’m here with you.