When Loss Quietly Rearranges Every Relationship
There was no way we could have known how profoundly major loss rearranges our relationships. Like the aftershocks of an earthquake, the effects spread far across all our connections.
We begin to experience the people in our lives differently, because our own emotional needs and capacities have often suddenly and radically changed. And because the people in our lives must include our devastation in relating to us.
Grief challenges the strength of friendships and shows us 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 taken away along with our person’s future.
It’s not envy. It’s the unbearable 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 amid all this shifting, something else happens too: a few people emerge who bring light into the dark 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 the full spectrum of grief.
This ability in others to be there in this way most often comes from having had their own life changing losses. But some have learned from being lovingly attuned to someone close to them.
I try to keep this question in mind: Is there something small, that I can share with someone in my life, that will help them be with me and my grief today?