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

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

More Articles Written by Greg

Read More