Vast, Not Uncomplicated
a grief advice column
Hello and welcome to the first installment of the Getting Somewhere Grief Advice Column. I’m humbled and honored to have already received such thoughtful questions, and I’m thrilled to answer as best I can. As a reminder, you can submit your own questions by responding to this email, commenting on Substack, emailing me at ellewarrenwrites@gmail.com, or DMing me on Instagram (@ellewarrenwrites).
As I started writing my answer to this first question, I realized I will often have two answers: one from the perspective of my earlier years of grieving and one from my present perspective, 6.5 years after my mother’s death. I think it’s probably important, in many cases, to give both perspectives.
Before I get into it, I have to make sure you know, reader, that I’m not a mental health professional. I am merely a person who has grieved intensely and lived through to the other side.
Okay, here we go.
Q: How do you manage big events that are supposed to be joyful, like weddings and holidays?
A: One of the hardest parts of grief in the beginning was letting myself be changed. I couldn’t accept that I not only lost the person I loved most, but that I lost the version of who I was before, too. Metamorphosis was unwelcome and in many ways, felt like a true death.
To make it worse, it wasn’t only me, as a person, who would be changed—it would be the external things, too, like holidays, birthdays, births, weddings. For the first 2 or 3 years, I dealt with this by shutting myself off from the joy of these special occasions. I couldn’t wait for them to be over. My body was present, but I white-knuckled my way through them. I was angry at the life I knew being gone. Angry that once-special moments now felt cold and nowhere near adequate. Angry that I felt like I’d walked into a room I’d never been in and couldn’t find the lightswitch.
Looking back now, I’m glad that I let myself shut down. I’m glad I didn’t try to recreate the magic of my mother’s finesse for celebration because I would’ve been disappointed. And although this period of time left me feeling empty, lost, and depressed, perhaps I needed to feel the wall I built in order to know that, actually, I didn’t need, or want, it forever.
Over time, I opened myself up to joy—to the possibility of special occasions once again feeling special. It wasn’t conscious, not really, just the natural thawing that happens over time. I found myself more excited to participate in these special days. But still, mixed with the excitement was dread. I knew that I was ready for joy to find me, but I didn’t know if it really could. I’d spend days, weeks, or months leading up to these occasions feeling angsty, afraid of my own feelings. Would they flood me on the day of and ruin it? Would I feel so sad it’d be unbearable? Would I be a bummer to everyone around me? Would I be comparing it to how things used to be the whole time? Would my mother’s absence be so achingly, distractedly obvious?
After years of this, here’s what I’ve learned: the anticipation leading up to the day often feels worse than the day itself—and whatever feelings it brings. I’ve found that much of my anguish comes from wanting to predict exactly how I’ll feel. In reality, sometimes grief is quiet on these days, and sometimes it’s loud. And there’s no predictable pattern I’ve found to know which it’s going to be. I do think, though, that the less I try to control my feelings, the less I put pressure on myself to live up to the idealized version of how I’m “supposed” to feel, the more ease with which I can feel whatever I do feel. I think the lack of force makes it easier to allow space for more than one feeling.
This question called to me to answer first because I got married a couple months ago. It was very joyful, and I felt present. I felt present while I got ready, while my wife and I read our vows to each other, while we danced. I did not, however, feel present for the month or two preceding the wedding. I was afraid of not feeling joyous on my wedding day. I wanted that for myself, and I wanted to show up for my wife, too Even though she was quick to remind me that I didn’t need to show up any certain way, and that I was enough, exactly how I was, I felt guilty that joy didn’t feel so cut-and-dry. Then, on the weekend of our wedding, as we ate and drank and laughed with our families and friends, I realized that I was okay. That my reflecting on my mother’s absence was not taking from my joy. The fact of it was just also there, another face in the crowd of my feelings.
To summarize, I think what it comes down to is that you have to learn to accept that you might not feel joyous—or at least, not exclusively. It’s okay to be angry about that. You can take time to reject the truth that things will be different. But when you’re ready, maybe you can settle into the idea that the landscape of our emotions is vast and not uncomplicated. And there’s beauty in that—it connects us to every other human who has ever experienced a (very) hard thing. It connects us to all the joy we felt before (these days wouldn’t be hard if we had nothing to miss). It connects us to what’s important to us. And then, over time, I think you have to usher in a new idea of what “big events that are supposed to be joyful” can look like. Keep your expectations of yourself low. Tell your people—or at least one person—how you’re feeling, and let them know that you need their expectations of your feelings to be low, too.
It’s hard for things to change, and it’s hard for things to be complicated. These truths don’t cancel out joy, though. They just become part of our landscape.
With love,
Elle