So here is the deal.
Your mother was sick. Stuff was tough. The house was upside down, your house was a hospital, take-out food was lousy. Everyone snapping all day at each other.
Or it was different. Still terrible, but a different kind of terrible.
Your father died suddenly. A car accident or a heart attack or an aneurysm. And the house was nuts even if the food at shiva was delicious. Thousands of people suffocating you, your friends mute and awkward.
But they are dead now. And a new normal has a descended on the house. There is some routine. Homework, supper, baths, bedtime. Studying with friends. Yom tov coming up and a cooking frenzy in your kitchen with all the married siblings sharing the responsibility.
Things are actually better than they were. There is family. There is fun. There is friends and school and piano lessons and camp memories and plans for bein hazmanim with family and regular life. Well, not really regular because your parent is gone, but regular enough that life in this new normal is, well, normal.
You even find yourself laughing at jokes again, looking forward to listening to music again, acting nuts at your friend’s birthday party some Motzai Shabbos.
And with all of this, you are feeling crazy, feeling worse than ever. Life is getting better and I am feeling worse, is what you are thinking. And when you say this to your friend, she looks at you sympathetically, but she has no idea what you are talking about. Your parent reassures you that it is normal and it will get better, but you are not so sure. You talk to your Links pals and they tell you they feel the same, isn’t that weird? And you do not like feeling this way. If life is getting better, you think to yourself, then so should you!
Right? Yeah, right.
(When did you first find out life is not going to turn out the way you expected?)
Would it help if you would understand why this is happening? Like why of all times to feel awful, you would not choose the time you are really having the most fun, but yet, that is exactly what is happening?
Now isn’t it lucky that you have your very own therapist talking to you through LINKS? Yup, me. So curl up on some comfortable couch. Shut the door. Pretend I am sitting on the chair opposite your couch (and if there is no chair, the same way you are pretending I am sitting there, you pretend I am sitting on a chair. Got that? Good.) and let’s do some talking.
Now really, everyone knows that therapists do not do much talking. Much more listening. But first of all, this is my article so I get to do what I want and if I want to do all the talking here, too bad on you. And if you want to do some talking, then I am giving you some space right here for that: “________” Go ahead, say whatever you want in between those quotation marks. And if you want to talk any more than that, then just look up from the page, to where I am sitting across from you on this great chair you put there for me, and talk!
But secondly, even as a therapist, I do some talking. I call it psychoeducation. It is education about psychology, about how your brain works, how you tick and tock. And that is what my plan is here. Some psychoeducation about why—after a loss—it makes sense that when life is better you can feel worse.
The best explanation is in the words of a colleague, Elizabeth, who wrote to me this:
I lost my father when I was 12 and while with grief, we can only speak from our own experiences, I've found that many of my clients identify with this as well:
I think that when a parent dies, whether they are sick for a prolonged period or they die suddenly, people run on some kind of adrenaline. It is not a happy type of adrenaline, of course, but when tragedy strikes, people do whatever they need to do to simply get through the day. Our minds and bodies are in shock, denial, and while we're obviously feeling broken and sad, something inside pushes people to move forward when they need to.
When things calms down and "things are better"/"life is good", I think the shock and the denial slowly fade away and the underlying depressive-like symptoms surface. Sometimes it can be more severe, and people feel as if they have no purpose in life because the tragedy has passed or the sick person is no longer there to care for. But in the case of teenagers, I would imagine they are now coming to terms with what their lives look like after the loss and if they haven't already, they need to learn how to cope with this.
Here is more.
There are these incredible stories about people who escape from burning houses with terrible burns over their body, but they are carrying their kids in their arms and have the strength to walk as far as they need to to get themselves to safety. And their brain helps them do that by suspressing the pain with hormones that are kind of like anesthesia. But when these people are in a safe zone, in order for the healing to begins, they need to feel the pain. Because otherwise how will they know to be careful of the dressing and their movements? And the pain of those burns are awful!
Grief is kind of like that. We need to be numb to get through what needs to be done but then for healing to be effective, we need to feel the grief. And that burn is awful!
Another part of this is that in the beginning, we are protected. Babied. Like neighbors bring food or help babysit or teachers look away at missing homework or tests. But after the death, after shiva and the shloshim, there begins to be demands for action. Homework needs to be given in. supper needs to be cooked. Laundry folded, bills paid. This demand for action, that was alleviated during an illness and during shiva, brings its own stress. We can’t retreat into oblivion, in non-action. And that makes us feel worse as we are forced to feel.
Sometimes, there is another piece to this. That the death covered many unmourned losses. Maybe you never got along with your father. And now that he has died, you have lost your chance. Or now you realize your mother will never attend another performance of yours again, or graduation. You will miss your mother’s challos and your father’s seder. Things you hadn’t had to think about are surfacing in ways big and small; in your consciousnessness and below it where you do not even realize it. But your brain notices it and your body feels worse for what feels like no reason.
Another thing happens. When good things happen, like a new friendship in eight grade, or a job at school, or a good mark on a test, your brain warns you, “Oh, do not even think this is going to last. Just like your father died, so too will this good thing die too. Next time you will fail the test. Your friend will drop you. You will botch up your job.”
It is sad, but when a child expereinces death at a young age, like yours, because you are much too young for death, then something in the brain gets a little (or a lot) screwed up. And that is why your brain comes up with such dumb things to say. Your brain connects everything to death. Just like death happened, so too will all the other good things die. Crazy, but true. And it is going to be hard to fight what your brain is trying to get you to believe.
Here is another set of quotation marks so you can stick in your own stuff to say. “_____”
I am listening.
Are you finished yet? Because I have more things to tell you.
Anybody heard of guilt?
Nah, right?
I do not know if you are aware, but GUILT is the national Jewish pasttime.
And this is what guilt looks like:
“I can’t believe I am enjoying (fill in) __________ when my mother died.”
“I should not be happy at my new high school/job/friend’s house/on Shabbos/playing Monopoly if my father is not here anymore.”
“I feel guilty that I am happy my father/mother died of a heart attack/cancer. S/he was a horrible person/the illness was taking over my life and the house is so much quieter and calmer now.”
Sounds familiar?
Guilt does not let you be happy. It makes you feel even worse. Especially because life is better now, your guilt reminds you to feel lousy. And guilt does a great job of spoiling everything. Of explaining to you why you are not allowed to be happy without your parent. The parent that you may have loved; the parent you may have hated. Either one makes you feel guilty. For different reasons, but the guilt is the same crippling, dreadful feeling you want to yank off and throw into the incinerator.
Any of this sounds familiar? And if it does not sound familiar, does any of this feel familiar? I am asking, because there is there weird phenomenon that even if we do not know something intellectually, our body reacts with those feelings anyway. So check in with your body and find out if your body is feeling guilt even if your brain is denying it.
And of course, you can be feeling worse when life is getting better because you feel so bad that you parent can not share it with you. It is not about guilt, but about feeling bad for your deceased parent.
Here is what my colleague Judith wrote:
The feeling of grief serves as a link between the one who grieves and the one who is grieved for. When that feeling lifts, recognizing its absence feels like a loss in itself. I think it is useful to know that the movement in and out if grief is part of the grieving process and will even out in time. It doesn’t gradually get better. It gets better and worse and better and worse. Over time, the hard times become fewer and less overwhelming and the good times become easier to hold on to.
There is one last thing I want to share with you.
(Do you know how speakers say, “And I want to say one more thing,” and everyone is so happy the guy is finally going to finish talking because you want to get back to talking with your friends and then he goes on for another fifteen minutes!!!? But I am not like that. When I say I am wrapping up, you know it is true because if not you can punish me by skipping all the way to the last sentence where I say, “Session over. Get off my couch.”)
So this really the last thing.
If you have experienced the death of the parent, then you have been living in some crazy zone for some time. An illness, a sudden shock, a shiva, a year of triggers, people changing, life altered, rules broken, rollercoaster emotions. So here is the deal. You are so used to functioning in not-normal that normal feels weird.
It’s possible, darling, that when all the stuff settles down, and things go back to normal, your feelings go back to normal too. And after living with not-normal for so long, normal feels not-normal. That’s all.
My advice? Take time to process your grief. Accept this as part of the grief process. Share with friends and family when possible. Talk to a therapist if you feel you need to. It is normal to feel not normal when things are finally normal.
Okay?
Session over. Get off my couch.
(I told you that’s the last line of this column!)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LINKS MAGAZINE
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