What's your grief?

 I didn't invent this phrase but it has stuck with me. There is already a great support group running that has this name. I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about grief in my lifetime. I am a therapist and grief is one of the top 5 reasons people come to therapy. Grief can mean so many things, but in essence it's loss. Loss of someone physically. Sometimes they moved, sometimes they changed jobs, sometimes they stopped talking to you or broke up with you or you stopped talking to them, sometimes they changed in a way that makes them not them anymore. There is ambiguous grief, a coin termed by Boss, which is a painful experience of grieving a loss that lacks closure. Usually because the person is still physically preset but psychologically absent or emotionally unavailable. This term has become more common in recent days. Sometimes in couples and families as people are physically present but emotionally absorbed into other things (their phones for example or substances or dementia). Loss takes the form of things, places, memories, community.  Lastly we have grief from death. Final closure on life. I have written about death in another post. Not long after losing my father in law suddenly 9 years ago. 

This summer we rented a house on a lake. It was the first time I had been on a lake in many years. I grew up going to lakes in the summer, the ocean was a four hour trip, the lakes under an hour. I spent most of my summers from 11 to aged 22 at summer camp. I was 19 years old the summer that a camper drowned in the lake in my favorite place in the world. This has lived with me for decades now, I can recall all the pieces of the puzzle that remain in my brain from that night, but I don't often relive it. I sat out on a kayak early one morning this summer enjoying the radiant sun and the sound of loons when I drifted back to 2001. I remembered each and every moment that I could from sound of the whistle for the buddy check to realizing we were missing a camper, from sprinting down the road along the lake calling his name, to being radioed back to the beachfront, to giving CPR to a small 9 year old little boy. I remember my friends being in shock, my fellow counselors who now I think were children themselves. I remember Keith's face as he carried the boy's brother to the main office. I remember calling my parents from the pay phone late in the night sobbing, them begging me to come home. I remember the darkness as I sat huddled in a room with the other lifeguards. Doing and saying the things you do when you are in shock. When you are a group of 18-22 year old young people whose life just changed forever. 

 I can't even write that sentence without crying. I don't share this with anyone. I mean it's not something that ever comes up in conversation. Only my closest people know this story. I remember once being in a group of adults and talking about CPR and someone asked, has anyone ever had to do it in real life? My mouth slammed shut, my head shock no. Those moments live so close to my heart that they are ones I can not share out loud.

We all live with trauma. Whether it was small or large, ongoing or once. It shapes and defines us. It tells the story of our lives, it creates the patterns we make in relationships. I have been fascinated by the brain for a long time. I don't know how I ended up a therapist, but I know that grief is not unknown to me. How do you grieve a child you didn't know. It was the first day of a new session of camp, I only knew his name. I grieved though my sense of safety, I grieved the loss of a place that had been magical. I grieved when I gave birth to my own children what it must have been like and still is like for that boy's family to have received that news. To live to this day without him. I know that my grief over my own loss of safety, of security and the grief I carry to this day is nothing but a ripple in a lake of what his family has had to endure. I never mean to take away from it. Do you ever think about the helpers? Not the ones that lost but the ones that carried the death and dying, that carried the grief for them? The ones that tried to save the child in an ED, who taught in the classroom where they went to school, the ones who run into burning buildings, who drive towards the chaos. I do. I think about them. I have been them. I am still sometimes them. I have carried grieving parents emotionally and physically for years. Maybe its my way of undoing the events of that day. Again trauma shapes us all. 

Grief comes for all of us. 

This month I will attend my fifth funeral, they started on January 6th.  It's been a lot. I also said goodbye to a dear friend as she moved overseas. I recently said goodbye to my co-worker, my work wife as she took a new job. I watched marriages that I was close to fall apart, said goodbye to family because of changing relationships.  I have shape shifted in relationships with my friends, new and old, and my children's friends. I think too often of loss. I think too often of grief. 

It's hard to say goodbye to someone. I have been practicing it for a long time, many of us have. They all played such different and integral roles in my life. Shaping who I am, riddling my memories with their laughter, their stories, their moments in my life. I have so many fond memories of my uncles who died this summer. They're faces, their voices, their laughter, even their handwriting lives on in me. I can picture it all. Will it fade in time? They were not young when they died. (Well ask a 75 year old and they will say they were young, but again who defines that?) They didn't have a tragic accident. I attended 3 funerals following the death of that small boy in the years to come to counselors that worked there, or people I met through counselors that worked there. They all died tragically before the age of 28. When I see them in my memories, when I feel Sean's arms around me in a bear hug, its at camp. It didn't fade in time. I guess they live on in the stories that we tell. In the memories that we hold. 

I grieve for my mom and for my mother in law. I haven't played the piano since my piano teacher died. I can't tell you why. I just haven't. I grieve all the time for the parents who have lost their children to gun violence in our country. It's different but its cut from the same piece of cloth. So what's my grief? I am so tempted to end this blog post by some upbeat message to carry us through, by saying "I'm fine." All's well now. I mean who is reading this anyway? Blogging is so 2009. Now everyone has a podcast anyway or tiktok video or a twitter account. This is way too long to hold anyone's attention in 2025. 

I guess I don't have the answer to what's my grief. I live with it, I live through it. I have learned to keep my stool balanced. I have learned to exercise most days, do 10 minutes of meditation, watch a funny show, read before bed, call my friends, make plans, get outside in the sun, walk in nature. Write online journals that maybe two people will read. I have been practicing "community care" since January. I have made that my motto for the year. I have tried to create community in the settings of my life. As much as we all need self care, humans are dependent creatures and what we really need are relationships of all types. I call on my community to support me in times of need and I lift them up when I can. I hope one day when someone is grieving me they remember this aspect of my being. I hope I leave behind the sense of grace and kindness and interdependence that we all really need and want deep down to keep humankind moving forward towards a better way of being. Although that in and of itself is a whole different blog post (that no one will read either). ;)

I write this post thinking of you. 

In loving memory of Desmond Miller 1992-2001, Sean Brosseau, Sean O'Neill, Alex Reichman, Enrique Pascal, Roald Wilson, Bob Hartigan, Joe Hartigan and Pat Hartigan. 

And to all those that knew them and loved them and hold their grief. 

A poem for Desmond written by my dear friend and talented Poet, Meghan Dunn who was there that day. Who sang for hours on the rec court to hundreds of campers, who was one of the helpers.