The Club Nobody Wants to Join

OK, so some shit has happened.

I’m not talking about the dishwasher breaking down, bad weather, or even a bad health diagnosis — although, obviously, that’s bad enough. I’m talking about the stuff you hear on the news and think, Oh wow, that’s tragic… but that wouldn’t happen over here.

That stuff. The unspeakable, shocking, odds-of-never-happening-to-us kind of stuff.

And so I’m writing about grief.

For a friend.

Something terrible has happened. They have lost their child.

It’s early days. We don’t know what we can do yet, or what will actually help. I imagine there will be a time for that. For now, I find myself thinking about them every day. About my friend’s heart, his family’s hearts, and the people who love them who are watching something completely unimaginable unfold.

And somehow, that has brought me back to grief.

I’ve been curious about grief — and the fact that we are all walking, talking grievers — since the pandemic hit us in 2020. I started to notice how much loss was everywhere. People had lost loved ones, businesses, relationships, routines, plans, security, a sense of who they were. Some were grieving things that never even had a funeral.

A friend of mine had certified as a specialist with the Grief Recovery Institute in the US. I didn’t think it was for me at the time, but COVID changed that. I became curious about the tools and language we might need when life asks us to experience a loss we didn’t choose and cannot change. So I became certified too - I’m still curious, still learning.

This recent experience led me to a podcast by David Frum, speaking with his wife, Danielle Crittenden, about the loss of their child. She has just released her new book, Dispatches From Grief, which I then had in my hands the next day. I read it in two.

She writes frankly and unabashedly about the emotional and physical pain of losing a child. It is horrid and raw and devastating, and I found myself crying through much of it. I’ve experienced my own losses, and there were moments when I recognized myself in her words — feelings I had experienced but could never have articulated that way.

But she lost a child.

I can’t pretend to understand that.

I’m not a mother. Not to a human anyway. Although my friends remind me regularly that I am a mom — just perhaps not in the conventional, push-a-kid-out-of-a-tiny-hole kind of way.

I have loved people fiercely. I have nurtured, protected, encouraged, worried and shown up. So I understand love. But I would never suggest I understand what it is to lose a child.

I can only imagine.

And even imagining feels like too much.

We often talk about grief as a hole in the heart, as though a piece of us has been removed. I think there is truth in that. Because when we lose someone we love, we don’t only lose the person. We lose the version of ourselves that existed with them, and the future we had unconsciously assumed would include them.

We change.

Our bodies know something has happened before our minds can make sense of it. We can become exhausted, distracted, numb, overwhelmed or strangely functional. We can talk about what happened one minute and feel completely unable to process it the next. Grief is emotional, but it is physical too.

And then there is the helplessness of everyone around it.

When something catastrophic happens to someone we love, our instinct is to do something. We want to fix, help, organize, feed, call, sit, solve. We want desperately to make the unbearable even a little less unbearable.

And sometimes there is nothing we can do.

Maybe we just have to be there.

I actually believe writing can be part of that process too. Not because writing fixes grief — it doesn’t — but because sometimes we need somewhere to put all the things that are circling around inside us. The questions. The anger. The love. The things we wish we could say. The things we don't understand.

Perhaps that is why I’m writing this now.

Because I don’t know what to do.

I know that will come. There will be practical things. There will be meals and phone calls and shoulders and moments when someone needs another person simply to sit beside them.

For now, I think about the strange privilege of being the ones who are still here. We’ve heard all the clichés: life is precious, life is fleeting, tell people you love them, don’t sweat the small stuff. We know. But when something like this happens, those words stop being clichés. Life really is precious. It really is fleeting. And none of us gets a guarantee.

So what do we do with the fact that we are still here?

I don’t mean that in a cheerful, go live your best life kind of way. I mean it quietly, and with some humility.

Maybe we simply try to pay attention a little more. Love people a little better. Make the call. Sit at the table a little longer. Say the thing. Show up when we don't know what to say.

Grief is a club nobody wants to join. Eventually, every one of us will know something about it, or worse - we’re a new member.

Some of us will lose someone we love. Some will lose a dream, a relationship, a career, a version of ourselves. And some will find themselves standing beside someone they love, completely unsure of what to say or do.

Maybe we don't always need to know. Maybe sometimes love is simply staying. And maybe, for those of us who are still here, there is a responsibility to keep living — not because we understand why terrible things happen, and certainly not because we have been given some special wisdom.

But because we are here.

And for now, that has to mean something.