Grief: Invisible Pain
My mom died unexpectedly when I was 39 and she was 69. My kids were little - barely 3 and 5.
Nothing could have prepared me for the grief I felt. The anger. The confusion. The loneliness. The devastating absence of her every moment of my life.
I remember a friend reaching out - someone I knew in high school, but had lost touch with over the years. She sent me an email that I still remember over 10 years later.
She had lost her brother and father and knew about grief. She said that she used to read those old Victorian stories about the strict rules for people in mourning - wearing all black, veiled hats, black armbands, and so on for a year or more during a prescribed period of mourning. She remembered thinking how silly and old-fashioned that seemed, but after she lost her dad and brother, she wished she had a way of publicly acknowledging such a devastating loss. Maybe the Victorians got something right after all.
This resounded so strongly with me. Because I remember being wounded hundreds of times by the careless words or actions of someone who had no idea how fragile I was. An impatient driver honking their horn at me when a light turned green would trigger a wave of sobbing so intense I would have to pull into a parking lot until it passed. A mother picking up her child from kindergarten, complaining to a friend about how she was dreading a visit from her mom, sent me into a pit of misery and resentment. Seeing a woman holding hands with her mom at the mall crushed me. And no one knew. I wondered if the world would be more tender if they could see how much I was hurting. I needed the world to be softer.
Therapy won’t give you a black veil or armband that will allow everyone to know you’re grieving, but it will give you a safe place to experience and process your grief. Your soul is battered and bruised and tender and the rest of the world moves on as if everything is fine. But here is a space to hold that pain for a little while and begin to integrate it into a life that can be whole again.
