I want to write today about grieving. I've done some, myself, and have read a good deal about it since then. I look at the trajectory of my life and realize I'm probably not going to get any smarter about this, so if I'm going to write about it, this is the time.
In my middle sixties, I experienced my first real grieving. My wife, Marilyn, died very quickly from a metastasized cancer. The first month was bad the way being sea-sick is bad. There hardly seems to be a “you” at all separate from the nausea and the disorientation. After that, the real grieving started. I grieved for the loss of Marilyn and I began to cope with being alone.
It's that process, coping with being alone, that I want to think about today. By "alone," I don't mean "without friends." I had wonderful friends; they cared for me wisely and well. I mean "without an intimate of my heart;" for me, that meant "without a wife." That's just me. I'm not knocking other arrangements.
I celebrated Marilyn's life and our life together and grieved my loss of her all at the same time. But grieving is a process; you never really get done with it. You can, with clear focus and hard work, move it from the center of your life to the periphery and that is what I have done.
It took a while to understand how I, personally, needed to work on it and a little while longer to actually get the work done. The beginning of the good part of this process was my hearing an interview on NPR. One of the co-authors of a book on grieving, Terry Martin or Kenneth Doka, was being interviewed. The book, it turned out, was Men Don't Cry, Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief. The point he was making when I tuned in was that there are two distinct styles of grieving: the instrumental and the intuitive Then he went on to make the point that hit me hardest. He said that the intuitive mode of grieving is "the gold standard in the mental health business." We're going to consider the two modes, below, (If you want to assess your own style, I've cyber-appended the survey here.) but I want first to say why this second point hit me so hard.
It meant that if I came naturally to my own mode of grieving, the instrumental mode, and went for help to someone in "the mental health business," I would have two difficulties to deal with instead of one. I would still have the slow heavy toxicity of my emptiness eating away at me. AND I would have the additional difficulty that I was grieving the wrong way! And in learning to grieve "the right way," I would be forsaking all my natural strengths and trying to learn a dependence on emotion of which I had always been wary and at which I had always failed. And the two problems, the grieving and the failure to grieve "properly," would mix together making the mixture more baffling and the outcome harder to bear. That’s why the point meant so much to me.
The intuitive mode of grieving was, in fact, the presupposition of all the self-help books I had found or that had been recommended to me. Now, suddenly, it wasn't a trouble of grieving, but a trouble of grieving "in that way." It was like learning that I wasn't allergic to "food," only to cheese. It was clear to me that I was going to need some help and that the help I needed was to clarify the implications of the instrumental mode and to get on with the job of working it.
What are the two modes like? The intuitive mode accepts the feelings of loss as the crucible where the important work will be done. The feelings of sadness and loss are accepted and processed, are made compatible with other emotional commitments. The instrumental mode regards feelings of loss as something to be grasped, to be comprehended. Understanding what is going on and deciding what is to be done based on that understanding is the task to be accomplished.
The most important lesson of the whole "Mars and Venus" genre is that there are, in fact, two cultures. If you don't know there are two cultures, you will certainly think your friend, whoever it is, is doing "it" wrong. "It" presumes that there is one good way and observation tells you that your friend is not following that way. If there are two ways and if they both work, then you need to know what your friend is trying to do before you can judge whether he or she is doing it well. That makes a lot of difference.
And it's true about grieving, too. If there is only one right way to grieve, you are certainly doing "it" wrong because the process is taxing and the outcome unsatisfactory. But if there is more than one way, the first thing to do is to look at who you are; mostly, at who you have been. When it comes time to evaluate yourself, do yourself the favor of evaluating your progress in the mode that will work best for you.
This is just as helpful if you happen to be married to someone whose style of grieving is different from yours. Many intuitive wives have accused their instrumental husbands of "not really caring" about the loss of a parent or a child or a job. Many instrumental husbands have accused their intuitive wives of "wallowing" in their feelings rather than "doing something” about the situation. But whatever your own style, your job as a loving husband or a loving wife is to help your spouse grieve in the way that works best. If it means listening, fine. If it means taking long walks, fine. If it means getting out of the road or doing a couple of extra chores to make some time available, fine.
This is really why I like Mars and Venus. Once you get out of the notion that your spouse is really trying to do something—grieving, in this case—the same way you are, the implications for actually providing some help are much clearer.
Loving your husband doesn't mean making sure he is confronting his feelings honestly. If he grieves in the instrumental mode, it might mean helping him grapple with the ideas, if you know how to help him do that, and encouraging him to act on the basis of his decisions. Loving your wife doesn’t mean making sure she isn’t hiding from “the real world” in her recurrent attention to the feelings that matter so much to her. If she grieves in the intuitive mode, it might mean honoring the power of those feelings, if you know how to do that, and granting that grieving in her own way will make her whole in the end.
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