A Couple of Lessons I’ve Learned About Grief (as a Young Adult)
A personal reflection on some things I’ve learned in the months after losing my dad.
“Grief is love with no place to go.”
In the grand scheme of things, I am still relatively new to the complicated feeling that is grief. My dad passed away in July when I was 22 years old and although it hasn’t been a year, I’ve wanted to write an article about how to support a friend that is grieving, especially if that friend is in their early 20’s. After thinking through it a lot, I’ve realized that it’s hard to write an article about “10 things you can do to help someone who is grieving” because grief has so many different shapes and sizes. Here is my attempt to sum up some things I’ve learned, but please note that this is my personal experience and that everyone has a different experience.
If your friend has recently lost someone in their life and you don’t know what to do, I recommend you continue being the good friend you’ve always been to them, but with some extra added level of support. You know your friend best, and you know what your friendship has been for the past years. If you know they like to get gifts, get them gifts. If they like music, send them some songs. If you know they like to open up to you and cry in front of you, let them do that.
In my very personal opinion, grief is about listening. Listen to what your friend is saying and if you don’t understand something, ask questions. Encourage your friend to be vocal about their needs if they are someone who doesn’t usually ask for things. The list of things you can do for someone are infinite and all depend on your relationship with your friend. Grief is a lonely feeling and if you go with your friend into that feeling together, it can be so much less lonely for them.
Over the past months I’ve learned a lot of things through navigating my own grief and the list is still growing. Although I can’t give you a prescriptive list of what to do to support someone, I can tell you about my own grief.
Grief is different for everyone because everyone is different
If you take away anything from this article, it should be the fact that everyone’s grief is different. How someone grieves is based on so many things like age, gender, relationship to the person who has passed, how the person passed, mental health state, physical health state, and so many more factors.
I’ve met a lot of people who have lost a parent and everyone has such a different story regarding how they dealt with their grief. Some people want to always be around people, some people don’t. Some people like to write, some people like to be distracted, some like to do a little of both. Some people like it when you say “everything happens for a reason”, some people hate it. This is why it’s so important to listen to other people’s stories without judgment.
Grief can physically hurt your body
This is something that took me by surprise. The weeks after my dad died my body physically hurt. I don’t know if it was from the crying or the overload of stress hormones in my body, but I felt sore. I’ve noticed that when I start thinking about my dad a lot, my stomach hurts. A few months after he passed, I got a really painful bump on my leg. All of these things were related to my grief. It took me a while to put those two pieces together.
If you have a friend who is grieving, ask about their physical health. Encourage them to get a physical done every year. Grief can impact your body and you might not even notice it. I’m not saying I necessarily want to fix the fact that my stomach hurts when I think about my dad, but the awareness of knowing that my body is hurting is so beneficial to my personal mental health.
Grief is sneaky
For the past few months I’ve been reading The AfterGrief by Hope Edelman (a wonderful fantastic book that I would recommend to everyone). The book does a good job assigning concrete terms to parts of grief that everyone seems to go through at some point. There is one term that she coins as Sneak Attacks. These are small bouts of grief that literally sneak up on you and attack you. For me, this looked like getting a piece of mail with my dad’s name on it or finding a random video of him and my mom on a day I wasn’t prepared.
Grieving is a very active process, so I found myself actively preparing my mind for holidays like Thanksgiving where I knew I would be sad. It was the days where I wasn’t putting up layers of protection where these sneak attacks would happen. In the first few months, I hated the sneak attacks. They made me feel out of control and really freaking sad. After a while, I’ve started to embrace them. They are a reminder that I am still grieving and that I love my dad and all the memories I’ve had with him. I take these sneak attacks as a notice to slow down and reflect.
If you notice your friend is having one of these sneak attacks, or even if you aren’t there, encourage them to tell you about it if they feel comfortable. I’ve noticed for myself that it can sometimes be hard to tell people about these sneak attacks because they happen fast and then I forget about them. In my personal opinion, I’ve liked it when people have told me that I can tell them about these random moments whenever I want. I think it’s also an opportunity to grieve with the person and remind them that they are not alone.
Grief is lonely
I feel like I’ve mentioned this a couple of times already but it’s an important point to reiterate. Grief can be lonely for many reasons. I am someone who doesn’t like to talk a lot, so a lot of my grief was processed by myself in my head. Sadness has this ability to make you feel like you are the center of the world and that you and only you are feeling this way, even though that’s not true. Grief in your younger years can also be lonely because it feels like no one else in your friend group can truly feel what you are feeling because they haven’t gone through it. Grief can also feel lonely because once the initial societal period of grieving is over, it seems like the rest of the world forgets what happened even though you think about it every day.
I’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by a lot of people who don’t make me feel lonely and I think it’s because they’ve actively taken steps to either check-in with me or admit that “hey, I don’t know what you are feeling but I’m here to listen to you”. I’ve also heard that it can be helpful for people if friends put in those important dates into their own calendars to remind themselves to check-in with friends on those days.
Grief can be traumatic
I am not a trauma expert, but I can tell you from personal experience that I still struggle to talk about the day that my dad passed. There are some days where I really do want to talk about it, but I physically can’t get those words out without turning into a puddle that’s wrecked for the rest of the day. For those who lost someone very suddenly, I think this is a fairly common experience.
I encourage you as a friend to always be aware of this fact because trauma triggers are different for everyone and maybe there are certain activities, or places that are especially difficult for a friend who has lost someone.
Grief is a lifelong journey
Grief can be life-changing and it’s a never ending journey. I’ve read stories where people don’t actually process their grief until 20 years after the person has passed. Some people process their grief through their work and end up dedicating their lives to something they learned through grieving. On a personal level, I can tell you that I have completed the very initial stage of grief that comes right after the person has passed away, but I know that I am still at the very beginning.
As a friend, it might be easy to forget about the grief a lot later on in your friendship. For example, a lot of people who have lost a parent at a young age go through another big phase of grief when they reach the age of their parent who passed. For others, that milestone is irrelevant. Regardless, it shows how grief manifests in so many different ways and that as a friend, you should be patient because there might be decisions that your friend is making because of their grief.
Grief is not a linear journey
Going off of this, I think the idea that grief, or any mental illness journey is not linear is being more and more accepted in society. In the book the AfterGrief, the author talks about how the 5 Stages of Grief were actually written to describe the 5 stages that someone who is in the process of dying goes through. These 5 stages have been co-opted to help people better understand their own grief for their loved ones passing even though those 5 stages only really scratch the surface of the mammoth that is grief. From a personal standpoint, I find myself cycling through different stages sometimes on a daily basis. There are some days where I have great days and all my memories of my dad are happy. There are some days that are really tough and I can’t focus on my work. It’s a constant work in progress.
As a friend, I encourage you to always ask your friend about how they are feeling about their grief at that given point in time rather than expecting them to be a certain way because of a societal time frame. It could be 20 years later and the person might be having a tough day and that is OK, that doesn’t mean they are “behind” or “ahead” in their grief journey.
Grief and happiness can co-exist
I felt a lot of guilt after my dad died and I also felt like I couldn’t be happy. There were moments after he died that I felt happy. Yeah, I had moments of happiness go figure. It took me a while to realize that it’s OK to be happy, in fact it’s good for you. If there are activities you like to do that are a positive distraction that bring you some sort of joy, do them.
Encourage your friend to treat themselves from time to time. Remind them that they are important and needed in this world. There have been moments in the past months where I’ve felt like I would never be able to be fully happy and it is my friends and family that have helped me remember that I can be happy and it is allowed.
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I didn’t expect to write so much in this article, so I would like to summarize a little bit. The biggest point I want to make is that grief is a very individual journey and in this article I have written about my journey and generalized certain things that I’ve learned in the past months. If you are someone who is grieving and don’t agree with the things I’ve written, that’s totally OK and normal. If you are a friend of someone who is grieving, keep being a good friend and keep listening to your friend.
This past year has been filled with a lot of grief for a lot of people, and I encourage everyone to be kind to themselves and the people around them. We really never know what anyone else is going through and treating everyone with kindness can make everyone’s lives easier. I also want to say that things will get better, sometimes they get worse before they get better, but the days do get better. Thank you for being you, and thank you for being here.
