When Loss Quietly Rearranges Every Relationship
Reflections from Michal, Deane’s Mom, and E-Motion’s Clinical Advisor
No one warns us that major loss is followed by a social earthquake. Although we ourselves are at its epicenter, the effects spread across all our relationships.
After major loss, we begin to experience the people in our lives differently - not because we want to, but because our emotional needs and capacities have suddenly and drastically changed. Relationships must adapt to contain our loss and sorrow, putting strain and challenging the strength of the friendships and character of the people in our lives.
We learn who can sit with us in the dark, who needs us to turn on the lights too soon, and who quietly slips out of the room altogether. Some people disappear - not out of malice, but out of fear. They worry about intruding, and are at a loss for what to say, so they stay away.
Others rush in to tidy our grief. They want us to be better because our pain pains them too and doing nothing feels helpless or wrong. They miss the version of us that didn’t carry this unrelenting heaviness, and try, consciously or not, to coax us back into being who we were.
Some people pull away because our loss reminds them of their own fragility and distance provides reprieve from the terror that a loss like ours could happen to them too.
And then there are the relationships we ourselves quietly retreat from. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because being with them hurts. Their intact families, milestones, and ordinary joys, shine a light on the endless secondary losses that were stolen along with our person’s past and future.
It’s not envy. It’s the ache of absence, made worse by a living reminder of what could have been.
Meeting new people is its own minefield. Chit chat is impossible with grief at the forefront of our minds. And exchanges with new acquaintances are only a question away from taking a wrong turn that’s impossible to recover from.
But in the midst of all this shifting, something else happens too: a few people emerge who bring oxygen to the stuffy room. We first notice that they’re with us without trying to fix all that’s unfixable. They don’t urge us to recover or drown us in sympathy. They allow silence to speak for love, and inaction to be the thing they do.
They understand that grief expands and contracts and so they stand close without crowding and offer comfort without taking over.
They witness our crushing brokenness on the one hand, while seeing our inherent wholeness on the other. This is not a contradiction to them, rather the bookends that contain grief’s ever-changing contours.
Their presence helps by leaving us the space we need to help ourselves, in our own time, and in our own way. Without feeling that we need to join more than what we’re ready for or hide our grief away.
This ability in others to be there in this way most often comes from having had their own life changing losses. But some of them learned from being close to someone who has suffered a heavy loss.
Is there something small, that I can share with someone in my life, that will help them better support what I need today?