Download - The Perfect Wisdom Web

Be Not Afraid GriefSix months after Tom’s death, a good friend of hisdied. I felt so much pain. But when I told one of myfriends how I was feeling, he said he was worried forme. He thought I should have been over “all of that” bynow – which pressured me to feel the same.I feel like I mourned my brother and his friend inisolation and confusion. I tried to gain meaning fromtheir deaths, but it was very hard. Everyone just kepttalking about how they shouldn’t have died.In a recent book of interviews on death and dying,author Studs Terkel recounts a conversation he hadwith Myra, a woman who experienced the samelack of empathy after her mother’s death. She feltshe had a right to grieve, but that other people’sexpectations kept taking it away from her. Saying shefelt “disenfranchised,” Myra explained:It means you’re not supposed to feel grief, and notsupposed to show it. I was in my late fifties when mymother died. She was eighty-one. People came up withthe usual platitudes. “After all, she lived a good life.”“You shouldn’t feel so full of grief.” But that’s bullshit.That’s why we can’t handle death very well. We wanta sort of drive-by grieving. Nobody wants you to carry180