The Fury Beneath

“Do not be ashamed of the intensity of your emotion. That’s your humanity. Grief can be feral, wild, frightening. Give it a safe place to live.” —Maggie Smith, “Keep Moving”

In case you think I only write lovely bits of melancholy, I’m sharing a less cozy piece I penned two years ago in a “grief writing” group. The prompt concerned the difference between what we show to others and what we experience inside, hiding intense pain because it doesn’t feel socially acceptable or safe. For me, in that first year there was just so much irrational anger with no place to go. I freely shared this only with my therapist, who always responded, “Let me just normalize this for you, completely natural and expected.” She encouraged me to express these scary feelings in the safety of our sessions as often as I needed, until the power was wrung out of them and they lost their punch. And it worked! Grief-related anger still occasionally crops up, triggered by random stuff, but now it’s not frightening, just tired and spent, old dregs needing to be felt and released. But in that first year, for me, the intense anger of grief was like a wild animal that attacked without warning. 

Not every griever experiences such anger, but I’ve been in enough discussions to know it is common and frustrating. Too often, our supporters project their own expectations and fears onto us, limiting the honesty of our response. If you’ve shown me you can’t handle the intensity of my feelings, I’ll not risk exposing them to you. And the thing is, emotions themselves aren’t good or bad, right or wrong. There is nothing inherently moral or immoral about anger itself. It can feel overwhelming and frightening, and I can weaponize it or respond to it in ways that cause harm, but the actual anger is just an emotion giving me information about what’s going on inside. If I respond to it with curiosity instead of knee-jerk panic or denial, it can help move me forward. Early on, holding that kind of space for myself was impossible, so I relied on my therapist to provide a safe place, and was able to process and release the anger in a healthy way.

My purpose in writing here isn’t to drum up sympathy for myself; I want to tell you what grief is actually like. This piece pulls back the curtain to expose the storm beneath, and it’s not easy to read. It’s raw, ragged, lays it all out there with little elegance, and frankly makes me look pretty awful, but it’s an honest exposure of my experience at that time. If it makes you uncomfortable, then good! Sit in that discomfort for a moment, grow a little empathy. Someone in your life (maybe even you?) might feel this kind of anger and need a safe place to process it.

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Here’s a deep, dark, dangerous secret—no matter what you say to me or don’t say to me, you’re mostly screwed when it comes to my honest inner reaction. I won’t show you that response, because it’s usually pretty ugly and unacceptable, even to me. I’ve learned to admit that to myself, chosen to own it as my own inner contradiction. But just about any words of “comfort” you offer that aren’t simply “I’m so very sorry for this loss and all you’ve had to go through. It was an honor to know and love Lee”—literally almost anything beyond that—just makes me irrationally angry.

Don’t tell me, “I know you’ve been through a lot, but just think of all the wonderful things he’s seeing and doing right now!” (Got that one via text while I was still sitting by his body at the hospice house). That just brushes my feelings aside, and while I may agree with your theology of the afterlife, it doesn’t help or comfort. It just tells me you’re so ill at ease with difficult feelings that you can’t face them even at the most vulnerable moment. You are not a safe person for me.

Don’t tell me, “When we sent our child off for their first day of kindergarten, it was so scary and sad for us to let them go, but they came home half a day later just bursting with excitement about the things they’d done and seen, and that’s how Lee will greet you one day when you join him!” (Threw that letter across the room.) I sat next to my husband and literally watched him die for sixteen days in hospice, and you’re comparing that to sending your kid off to kindergarten. You are not a safe person for me.

Don’t drop off a little gift at my door and then send me a text to go and look for it. You’ve just shown me you’re too wary of pain to even greet me face to face, but needed to do something to make yourself feel a little better about the situation. (Finally had to ask several people to stop doing this.) I need your presence, not your presents. You insist on staying in the shallow end of the pool, not joining me where I’m flailing away in the diving pit.

If you just send a sympathy card or make a comment on social media, and don’t really follow that up with anything substantive—just go on with your shiny life and ignore mine—that hurts, too. That makes me feel invisible. And the worst? Those are the people who know about what happened and never say anything at all, people I thought were longtime friends but never actually acknowledged Lee’s death. (Did you know that the authors of a CaringBridge site can see who visits the page? I was astounded to learn who the “tragedy voyeurs” were among our friends, who couldn’t even leave an “I’m so sorry” comment. They are not safe people for me!)

So, grief is basically irrational and illogical. If you do too much, I’ll be angry, and if you do too little, I’ll be angry, and if you hit the right balance, I’ll still be angry. Because I’m just ANGRY. It’s as much about me as it is about you. There is nothing fair or just in the kind of loss I’ve experienced.

What really helps? Simply sitting with me, and listening to whatever I have to say about what I’m feeling or processing that day without trying to cheer me up or fix me or even give me a big response. Being able to freely and honestly express these emotions is the only way to disarm them. And the very best conversations are the ones where someone is brave enough to ask me what grief is like, what triggers me, what hurts and what helps. The only person I found that I could really unload on without any fear of judgment was my therapist, and that probably saved my sanity. I could be fairly candid with my kids, but had to be mindful that they were also grieving their dad. And I have a couple of friends who have been able to hear the hard things, the irrational things, the ugly things that make me look bad, and just let it be what it is. Those friends have been true gifts, and they are people who have done their own emotional work. They are safe people for me. I have to be careful not to wear them out.

I’ve been surprised at the messiness of grief. I’m sad about the loss of my husband. I’m also angry with him about things that happened years ago and were never resolved. We had some unfinished business, just the kind of thing that comes from 43 years of two imperfect people stumbling through life together, bringing the best they had to any given moment but often finding it wasn’t enough, and maybe not making amends at the time. And I’m angry at his completely pointless illness, a rare cancer occurring in a man who took dogged care of his health. I am angry at the very notion that there could be any divine plan behind it, although plenty of people pushed that nonsense at us. I’m angry at the ways five years of illness changed our marriage.

There are lots of disorienting contradictions in grief—there can be relief that caretaking is over when illness is over, and there can be great sorrow and even guilt along with that relief. There was a specific point about six months out where I realized that I had experienced tremendous and overwhelming loss, and also that for the first time in over five years I didn’t have to worry about or support a sick man, which was very freeing. I’m learning to say “Both of these things are true” to many of my circumstances and emotions. And I’ve learned that most people—generally those who’ve not yet experienced a great grief of their own—just don’t have a clue and are scared to death of finding out. We like to live in denial of our own mortality, so we avoid the unpleasant and uncomfortable, and we say stupid things in an effort to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING, in response to tragedy. And we often unintentionally do more harm than good in that endeavor.

So, I probably won’t show you my true reaction, unless I know you can take it. I don’t want to scare you off. I need all the friends I can get. But I may not let you in, either, if you don’t feel safe to me. I’ll try to remember that you are doing your best with the limited resources and experience you have, and so I will try to extend grace to you, just as I process that old unfinished business with Lee and remember that we were both doing as well as we could at the time even if it wasn’t enough. But I will protect myself and my vulnerability, and I hope I’ll do better by you when it’s your turn to wrestle this monster. More and more, my daily work centers around forgiveness—forgiving myself and Lee for what we did or didn’t do in the past, forgiving others for what they do or don’t say to me in the present. It’s an exhausting struggle.