The Helplessness of Grief
Maybe your family is like mine. When a crisis strikes, you go into action to make things better. First, you want a better understanding of your situation, so you’re off to search the internet. After a good deal of searching, you go through your mental rolodex (remember those) to ask for additional information and suggestions. After making your contacts, you’re on your way to developing your “to-do” list of how to get a handle on the situation, or better yet, how to whip it into shape.
A good crisis knocks us off balance and perhaps even off our feet. But that’s not going to be the last word for us. We’re getting back up, finding our balance, and taming this wild, unruly thing. We’re willing to work as hard as needed, talk to anyone we can, lose as much sleep as required, and truly sacrifice, if necessary, to get this situation under control. To get our lives back under control.
This is how it goes for much of our lives, and much of the time, maybe even most of the time, this approach works pretty well.
When an Accident Happens
But sometimes it doesn’t. An accident happens and there are consequences well beyond our control. A biopsy comes back positive and we’re in a new world where the old ways of coping are not very helpful. Someone important has died and despite our bargaining otherwise with God or the universe, being dead means you stay dead (at least in this life).
And this is so hard and hard to accept. It is not how we roll in our lives. We are accustomed to solving problems through hard work and marshalling the troops. We don’t like and won’t take “no” for an answer. We’re willing to do whatever it takes and pay any cost to change the conditions we’re facing and the trajectories of pain that they have brought.
When faced with unchangeable losses of health or life and realities impervious to correction, we may feel more angry than sad (although we feel sad, too). What has happened to us is not only terrible, it is not right. That there is nothing we can do to change the fundamentals of our situation can feel offensive to our sense of order and justice. It is not how life is supposed to be.
And yet, here we are.
Helplessness is Human
The helplessness of grief can be one of the most disturbing parts of our experience. We desperately want to change things. We want the accident to have never happened, the diagnosis to never exist, the dying and death to be reversed. It’s human to want these things and human to desire to control more than is possible.
We’re not wrong for feeling the protest of the situation and wanting to snap our fingers and make it all go away. That we want such things just means we’re hurting and we’re human.
Confronted with unchangeable loss, we can feel that there is nothing we can do to make things better, but this is not true. How we respond does matter for us and for others. We want more choices than this, of course, as we most want to change the unchangeable. We don’t want to settle for less.
Helplessness Can be Overcome
We are left with a sorting challenge among three general options. One is to keep trying to change the unchangeable. Another is to give up and stop trying to make anything better. And the third is to work to let go of trying to change the unchangeable and to focus our efforts at the margins where the unchangeable meets the changeable.
So much good in the world and in our own personal worlds is this work at the margins.
At the margins is the father holding the hand of his sick and frightened child.
… the daughter sitting in the waiting room with her mother.
… the friend listening across the coffee shop table.
… the nurse bringing medication to help the nausea and make sleep possible.
… all those who avoid offering cliches and give a hug instead.
Life at the Margins
Maybe your family is like mine and you’ve had your share, or more than your share, of crises and losses. And you’ve fought to control what is out of your or anyone’s control, to change the unchangeable. Then you learned, and you’re still learning, as you put more and more of your precious time and efforts into impacting life at the margins. It’s not all you want, but it really matters, and it’s worth doing.
I’m not glad that your family has had to face such things, but I’m glad that your family and my family are not alone. Not being alone is part of what makes the unchangeable bearable. Another of the consolations at the margins of life and living.
Reach Greg Adams at the Center for Good Mourning: www.archildrens.org
Read more from Greg Adams: Hope is a Muscle – Open to Hope