Book Excerpt – The Grief Club

The Grief Club: The Secret to Getting Through All Kinds of Change

Courtesy of Hazelden Publishing

Initiating Change:
When a Child or Someone We Deeply Love Dies

The man sitting in the reception room at the doctor’s office looked so forlorn, staring at the floor. I don’t usually talk to strangers, but there was something about this guy. I deliberately moved and sat next to him.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I have migraines,” he said. “Bad ones. They really hurt.” Then his face scrunched and he started to cry. “My daughter died,” he said.

That’s what’s wrong, I thought. The Tibetan monks say there are temples hidden in every city around the world. These temples are in plain view—the best place to hide anything. But only awakened people see them; the temples are hidden to everyone else. That’s what I saw in this man: the Temple of Grief.

I touched his arm. “I don’t know how you feel, but I know how I felt when my twelve-year-old son died,” I said. “It’s the worst.”

He looked up and into my eyes for the first time in our conversation. “Then you know what it’s like,” he said, sounding relieved. I know the feeling. He finally found someone who belongs to the My Child Died and My Heart Is Broken and Nobody Gets It Club.

I wanted him to know I’m wasn’t a “Lookie Lou,” someone who gushes and says, “I know how you feel because last year my cat died too.” “People generalize,” said a bereaved mother. “They compare losing a child to losing a parent. It’s not the same.”

I asked about his daughter, what happened, how old she was, how long it has been. You don’t need to ask how long it has been because when you lose your child, it happened yesterday even if it’s been ten years. But there’s a difference in stages. Year one—stunned, numb, disbelief. You don’t want to be here going through this. Year two—worse. You want to be here even less. Years three, four, and five—you still don’t want to be here, but you keep waking up alive. Five through ten—gradually getting better each day. You’ve learned you can live with a hole in your heart and missing your child so much you think you’ll explode. You start wanting to live again. You’re on the mend. Besides, someday you’ll see your child again. After everything you’ve been through, you can wait. Also, you’ve noticed you’re happier than most people. Something inside you has changed.

A certain freedom comes with going through the worst. You’re not expecting life to make you happy now. Your hand isn’t outstretched anymore. You know there’s no brass ring. There’s only now and that’s enough. You make peace with that, with what is. Surprise, surprise. You came out the other end. What began as coping turned into thriving. You found a new way to live.

The man at the doctor’s office told me his daughter died in a car accident a year ago, when she was twenty-one. He dug through his wallet and showed me her picture. I say how beautiful she is (because she is), then I listen while he talks. Like him, the first words out of my mouth for years when I met anyone were “My son died.” People who haven’t lost a child get afraid when we say we lost a child. They change the subject quickly, thinking it’s too hard on us to talk, harder for them to listen. What they don’t know is that we need to tell our story again even if we’ve already told it one hundred times before. It makes the unthinkable real. It gives us a sense of control. Telling our story is important, whether we’re telling the story of how our marriage went bad, how we stopped drinking, or how our wife or daughter died. It helps if people listen and care.

We don’t just lose someone we love. We lose a piece of ourselves—sometimes more.

“I feel so lost,” the man said. “That’s the hardest thing. The feeling has lasted so long. Is it normal to feel as lost as I do?”

I felt lost other times—when I graduated from high school, when I finished treatment for chemical dependency, when I divorced. But I’d never felt as lost as the week my daughter and I stayed at a hotel in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, the week of my son’s birthday. That year it became the week of his death.

Sometimes we get a clue, a hint about what life is really like. We all know a family whose daughter-in-law got cancer, then died a lingering death. She was only twenty-five. Or the family whose son died in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-three. We tell ourselves, It’s the exception. Happily ever after is the rule. Those horrible things happen to other people but not to us. We don’t want to hear these stories. We don’t want to get too close. We can handle hearing about financial troubles or alcoholism. Those kinds of problems are okay. But this angel of death who rips families apart? No thank you. Take your story and get away.

A month or so before Shane died, Nichole came bounding into the house after school. “Guess what we learned today?” she asks. “Did you know that before the end of the year one child we know will die?”

I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know the child who died would be mine.

Or did I? Sometimes I think part of us knows what’s coming—has known for a long time.

I’m standing on the sidewalk, staring up at the roof of our three-story Victorian house on Pleasant Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “My God, Shane, be careful,” I scream. “How did that boy get up on the roof?” I ask my daughter, who’s standing next to me.

“He climbed the tree next to the house and swung across on a branch,” Nichole explains. “He told me he could do it. He saw it on TV.”

“Shane, stand still. Don’t move!” I scream. “Just keep looking at me. The firemen will be here soon!” He’s not scared. It’s an adventure to him. I’m petrified. The fire engine screams to a stop. I don’t take a deep breath until my son is safely down.

“Mom, can we have a swimming pool in the backyard—just a little one?” my daughter asks.

A wave of terror jolts through me when I hear the words. “No way,” I say. “It’s too dangerous with your brother. Something could go wrong.”

“Mom, why are you taking the four-wheeler away?” Shane whines. He pleads with me to give it back. “You’re not careful enough,” I say. You’ll drive through electric wires or do something careless and hurt yourself. The answer is no.”

There was this feeling about him from the day he was born. The first year, I held him all the time. I wouldn’t share him with anyone else. He was a good baby. Then he started to walk. His feet hit the ground running. He didn’t stop until he died.

We’re at the movies on a Sunday afternoon. Shane puts his feet on the back of the seat in front of him. I start to nag, then stop. Make every moment count. It’s as if someone spoke the words in my ear.

You don’t have to tell me that. Since Shane was born, I know how important each moment is. What I want to know is, do they still count after he’s gone?

We’re at a restaurant: Shane (about to turn twelve), Nichole (fourteen), and a few of their friends. We’re there to celebrate Shane’s birthday. I hold up my water glass. “Here’s to the next year. May it be the best yet. May you have everything you want!” Clink. Clink. Clink.

“I don’t have money to buy you a present, but how would you like to come skiing this weekend with me and my friends instead?” Nichole asks her brother.

Shane’s eyes light. He says, “Yes!”

“Just promise me this,” I say to both children. “No matter where we are on our birthdays, we’ll always get together.”

Nichole instantly says yes. Shane hesitates, then agrees.

Two days later, on Saturday morning, Shane, Nichole, and her friend Joey leave for skiing. Their sitter Chrissie drives them. Joey’s mom will drive them home. “I love you. Be careful. Be home by six.”

“Love you too. See ya!” Shane says.

At eight o’clock the phone rings. A man’s voice tells me Shane’s hurt.

We do a vigil at the hospital. Family and friends pile into the room. The machine pumps air into Shane’s small lungs but it’s too late. He’s already dead. He slipped on an icy patch—a mogul. It knocked his brain stem loose when he hit his head.

Nichole and I stay at a hotel in downtown St. Paul. I can’t go back to our house, see Shane’s vacant room. Not yet. I’m wandering the hotel hallways looking at my key. I can’t find the room. The numbers blur. I walk and walk. The numbers on the doors don’t match my key. I sit down on the floor and wait. Someone will find me, help me. Lost? I’ve never been this lost in my life.

We all have plans about where our life is going. The night before Shane’s death, I closed the deal on a new house. We were moving into a mansion in the city to celebrate our last years living together as a family. I was going to work, write books. The kids would go to college, get married, have children of their own. Isn’t that how life goes? Your children grow up and leave home, then the parents get old and die first?

After Shane dies, I can’t work, can’t write for years. You can’t write when you have nothing to say. “Thank you so much for your work,” a reader writes me in a letter. “Your books helped so much. I’m finally happy after so many miserable years.” I’m glad she’s happy. I’m not. Why are other people’s children alive and Shane is gone? Something I did must have really ticked God off.

People are kind, but they don’t get it. They tire of waiting for me to be myself. I run into an acquaintance at the mall the week before the first Christmas after Shane’s death. He asks what’s wrong. “Shane’s dead,” I said. He steps back. “Aren’t you over that yet?” he asks. I’m furious at him for saying that. Why should I be mad at him? It’s the same thing I tell myself.

“Be patient with yourself,” a friend says. “Your son died. You’re grieving. You didn’t just lose your son. He took a few things with him on his way out.”

Yeah, I think. Like my ability to write. My desire to live. My belief in life and myself. Shane, if you have to go, could you at least give me those things back?

The day before the accident, Shane opens my jewelry drawer and points to a cross. “Can I have that?” he asks. Before skiing he shows me the cross. It’s hanging around his neck. “God is with me now,” he says.

That’s good. He’s not with me. What was God thinking anyway? Does God ever make mistakes?

“I feel numb. Or I cry. Or I sit and stare. I listen to the same songs over and over. I can’t work,” I tell the therapist. “I can’t get on with my life.”

What’s her advice? “If you feel sad, cry. If you feel numb, feel that. Ninety-five dollars, please.”

It’s the best money I ever spent, but it takes time to understand. You don’t eat an elephant all at once. You eat it bite by bite. I don’t want to eat an elephant. I know, but there’s one on your plate. Break life into tiny pieces. A day at a time? No! Smaller than that. I don’t have to accept Shane’s death? Accept what I’m feeling now? I hate it that he’s gone. I can’t stand my life. I don’t want to be here.

Those are the feelings you need to accept. It hurts. Resistance hurts worse. Don’t complicate grief. It’s not abnormal. There isn’t a right way to grieve. Becoming aware of a feeling neutralizes that emotion. That feeling disappears and another one takes its place. Some losses don’t have an ending. We have feelings as long as we live. We still miss the person, but we go on with life.

There’s more. Stop working for the prize. Stop dating to get married. Stop dressing to control what people think. It’s all about control. Control doesn’t keep us safe, even though we think it does. People die in their houses walking down their steps. Do each thing for itself. Be there while you’re doing it. Stop being someplace else. Let life be what it is. Stop looking for Big. The magic happens when you stay small. Ninety-five dollars bought more than the secret to grief. It paid for the secret to life.

Whatever we don’t have isn’t the missing piece. The moments we live for their own sake turn to moments of joy. Something way more profound and lasting than happiness is peace.

Nichole and I move the night she graduates from high school. I need the California sun and surf. In Minnesota, everything I look at reminds me of what I lost. Besides, Minnesota no longer feels like home. California does. We live at the beach. The waves are the only thing louder than the sounds in my head. The waves never stop, but sometimes you don’t hear their sound. They’re like the waves of grief. None are the same. Some are big and angry. Some small. Each one washes a speck of pain away, and no matter how many waves there are, there’ll be more. Don’t kid yourself. The ocean never stops, and if it does, watch out. The only time there are no waves is ten minutes before the tsunami comes.

“Be still and know I’m God.”

“I know that. But look what You’ve done.”

Ten years later, I’m in another therapist’s office. She deals with trauma using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). You blink your eyes, look in the direction she points, talk about what happened, and your trauma emerges, shrinks, then disappears. EMDR neutralizes disturbing thoughts. “Trauma keeps you locked into what you were doing the moment you got slammed with the traumatic event,” the therapist says. “You’re frozen in time, and your body stores the trauma inside.”

I’m like a snapshot of myself when Shane died?

She asks me to show her where on my body the trauma is.

“I walk to the emergency-room door. The nurse is waiting for me. I get hit right here,” I say, placing my hand on my heart. I’m reliving the event for her, but I don’t know if I can go back there and feel what I felt then. Sometimes I travel back there emotionally, but that happens when I’m not trying. I don’t know if I can do it at will. Pain has a life and a mind of its own. I blink, look where she points, and instantly time-travel back thirteen years. It’s like I’m right there at St. Paul–Ramsey Medical Center. In her office I’m sobbing, the heaving sobs that shake your belly and make your eyelids puff for days. “An arrow came out of the nurse’s eyes when she looked at me and asked if I had someone to call. It hit me here, in my heart. I had to hold my diaphragm tight,” I explained to the therapist. I wondered if she’d understand. It barely made sense to me. “My heart was so shattered I had to use my diaphragm to hold my heart in place. If I didn’t, my heart was so broken it would have fallen out.”

“Put your hand on your diaphragm and breathe into it,” she says. “It’s okay to relax it now.”

I don’t have to hold my heart together anymore? The break lines mended? My heart won’t fall apart?

“The way you want to feel again is the way you’d feel if it never happened,” the therapist says. “Trauma keeps you locked in, stops you from doing what you were going to do when you got hit with the traumatic event.”

Oh, yeah, I remember what I was doing that night the ski patrol called. I was having a life. Then the doctors said “no hope,” and everything I have disappears. I’m broken inside. My daughter knows. “Mom, everyone thinks you’re fine. I’m the only one who knows you’re not,” she says. She’s right.
How do I get past that?

“How did you?” the therapist asks. “You tell me.”

I point to the spider plant hanging from the ceiling. “Like the baby plant on the tip of the leaves. I moved to California and grew a new one of myself. I left the other me behind. She hurt too much,” I say. “She wasn’t any fun. She was dark. Unhappy. Always crying and sad. She spoiled everything for everyone. I had to leave her behind. She ruined Minnesota for me. She would have wrecked California too.”

“Do you think you could come and get her now?” she asks. “Take her with you?”

“Only if she’ll behave and stop crying all the time.”

Surrender to everything, even being traumatized. It’s paradoxical. Surrendering means we lose control, but it gives us control too. It restores our connection to ourselves, God, life. We become aligned. Judith Acosta and Judith Simon Prager wrote The Worst Is Over, a book about the power of words to heal. “When you sit down with someone who has been traumatized,” they write, “know that you are entering a hallowed space.”
Here’s a short course in what to say and what not to say if you want your words to help:

“Melody, did you know that in my religion we consider it an honor to be chosen by God to be the mother of a child who dies?” Pin a badge of honor on someone’s chest. Someone loved me enough to do that for me about hepatitis C. Instead of telling me that it was my fault from shooting drugs and that I deserved to be sick, my friend says, “It’s a badge of honor. It means you went through the sixties; you really lived.”

“You and Shane were close, really bonded,” another friend says. “Anyone could see that. When you lost him, you lost a big piece of yourself.”

“Mrs. Beattie, did you know that Shane read to me during lunch hour at school every day? My daddy was away at the Gulf War, my grandma got sick, and my mommy was sad. She stayed in bed and cried all the time. But every day Shane made me laugh.” The little girl with the big brown eyes and glasses had been standing in line at a book signing for over half an hour to tell me that. She wipes her eyes. “I’m sad,” she says. “Mrs. Beattie, I miss Shane too.”

“It’s really hard, the hardest thing you’ll ever go through. But you’re going to be okay. You’ll get through this. I know you will,” a friend says. “I believe you can.”

“Grief is a selfish thing. It doesn’t help your son. You’re only feeling sorry for yourself when you cry,” snips a colleague in the self-help field.

“If you really believed in God and life after death, you wouldn’t be crying. You’d be happy for your son,” a metaphysical relative says.

“Well, at least your daughter’s still alive,” a healer says. “Shane’s happier, better off now,” the minister says.

“Don’t waste time feeling sad. There’s no such thing as death. I had a near-death experience. I saw the light,” another friend says.

“God didn’t do this to your son. The devil did,” a reader writes.

“Oh, he was just a spoiled brat anyway,” a friend says to another friend about my son. “What’s the big deal?”

Which statements heal? You tell me. Better yet, use the words that heal to help a friend who hurts.

“How’d you get through it?” a friend asks. “Did you pray?”

I’m too angry to talk to God at first. Then I realize I’ve joined an elite club.Mary, mother of Jesus, went through the same thing. You can’t tell me she didn’t miss her son. Besides I’m in a double bind. I know God is real. I need Him, even if He allowed this horrible thing to happen. Maybe God didn’t do it. Maybe it was natural law. You hit your head a certain way and you die. But God didn’t stop it, and I know He could have. That means it was meant to be. Another not-helpful thing to say. Let us say that to ourselves—please.

My friend Marge calls big loss—the stuff that changes us and our lives forever—initiation. Initiation into fraternities and clubs are tests you go through to prove you’re worthy. That’s not what she’s talking about. She’s talking about the spiritual lessons we go through as we work our way back to God. The illusion is that we’re separate. Our oneness is what’s real. Initiations wake us up to that.

Loss and change can be sacred turning points. “The same events that cause pain trigger enlightenment,” Mark Epstein wrote in Thoughts Without a Thinker. At first we shut down, become bitter. Later we open our hearts. Gethsemane is the garden of grief. Jesus wept there. I did. Have you? Eventually each of us walks the Via Dolorosa, the Path of Sorrow, writes Max Heindel in Ancient and Modern Initiation. We have a cross to bear, a burden. Maybe some people get let off the hook, but most of us have to carry some big weight through life.We lose someone or something important. Then our job is to feel close to God, love other people, and be happy anyway. We learn to live carrying the weight of that loss.

Elisabeth Haich went deeper than that in her book Initiation. I couldn’t tell if the book was fiction or real. But at the end, where Haich writes that all the trials and tensions of the world take us back behind our ego where the Divine Self is waiting, that part I know is truth. We aren’t the God of the Western world, but each of us is a piece of the Divine. Pain and loss initiate us to our oneness with each other, God, and life. Nothing can separate us from God, no matter how alone we feel.

One day I receive a call from a stranger. He read the book I wrote about Shane’s death, Lessons of Love. His daughter died in a ski accident too. He became involved with The Compassionate Friends (TCF), a group that supports parents and other family members after the death of a child. The man organizes sessions with George Anderson for members of TCF groups.

I watched a special about George on television. George is a medium who sees and talks to dead children. Even skeptics say George is for real; he’s not a phony or charlatan. I tried to make an appointment to see him but gave up after a year because his line was busy all the time. A lot of people are standing in line waiting to talk to people they love who died.

“I’ve got one session with George available,” the man said. Did I want it? Yes! Nichole and David (Nichole and Shane’s father) went with me to see George. At his last birthday dinner, Shane promised we’d get together on our birthdays no matter where we were. He kept the promise he made. The date we got together, the only available appointment, was Nichole’s eighteenth birthday. That’s when we talked to Shane.

Shane said he loves and misses us too. He added that being our guardian angel is more than a full-time job. George said, “That kid is a pistol, a handful.” I said, “Yes, he is.”

Our lost loved ones aren’t really lost, even though we can’t see them. They’re living in another place. Susan Apollon, author of Touched by the Extraordinary, says there are many different ways for our loved ones to make contact. They may communicate telepathically, in visions or dreams. Sometimes we sense their presence. Flickering lights or the smell of cologne might be hello from the other side. Although many people feel a contact, some don’t. Their love is still real.

Whenever I miss Shane too much, I spend time with him in my dreams.

I’m standing at the door of the plane. My skydiving instructor gives me the count. Ready. Set. Falling through the air. I watch the altimeter on my wrist. At five thousand feet, I pull. My parachute pops opens. God, I love that sound. I realize that if I don’t stop living in the past, I’ll miss the rest of my life. Jumping out of the plane teaches me to be here now. There are some beautiful, interesting things going on in my life even though Shane is gone.

I’m climbing a mountain in a village in China, step by step. At the top is a temple. Nothing is forever. Everything comes to pass. Impermanence is the truth. It hurts to learn that at first. Then it sets us free. There’s this thing that moves us through life, a Force. Life happens through us, but not by thinking about it. It happens more naturally than that.

En route from California to Minnesota, what I see is so stunning I have to stop the car and pull to the side of the road. The red spires in the Utah desert take my breath away. At least God did some things right. When did I start feeling happy again? I didn’t notice. Each moment and feeling became the next. There’s not that much difference between feeling happy and feeling sad. They’re all temporary feelings, moments in time.

At the doctor’s office, the nurse calls the man’s name. It’s his turn to see the doctor. “So it’s normal to feel lost when your child dies?” the man asks. He’s visibly torn. I see he wants to keep talking now that he’s finally met one of his own.

“It’s so normal to feel lost,” I say. “You have no idea how normal it is. Like a friend of mine says, ‘When we’re most lost is when we’re most guided.’ Don’t worry if you don’t know what to do next. You’ll find your way.”

My daughter brings her friend to my house a week after her friend’s best friend dies. My daughter’s friend tells me the story of her friend’s death. It was a motorcycle accident. She describes what her friend was like, what they did the last time she saw him, everything he said. She realizes now he was really saying good-bye. Suddenly she pulls her sweatshirt hood over her head, then down covering her face. I hear her crying softly underneath.

“She’s embarrassed,” my daughter explained. “She doesn’t want anyone to see her cry.”

“I understand. I used to feel that way too,” I said. “Once I cried for eight years.”

About 2,500,000 people die annually in the United States.
Children and young adults under age 25 account for
between 45,000 to 50,000 of these deaths.
Source: National vital statistics reports

ACTIVITIES

1. Make a Master List of Losses—a loss inventory. Some people lead charmed lives. They don’t experience much loss until later, when they begin aging, friends die, and their bodies begin to fail. For others, life is a series of losses. It feels like (and they are) losing something or someone all the time. Some losses are expected changes that most people experience. Other losses are sudden and unexpected, but they may not be as rare as we first think. At the end of this book, you’ll find a Master Loss Checklist, a list of most possible losses, changes, and passages that people experience as they journey through life. Review the list and mark your losses. Be thorough. Activities in other chapters will refer back to this list.

2. Have you lost someone you love? Could you use some support? The Compassionate Friends is an excellent resource for parents, grandparents, and siblings of a child who died. TCF groups have chapters in most cities around the world. It is also an excellent clearinghouse for trustworthy grief support resources for other kinds of losses. Contact TCF at www.compassionatefriends.org or by calling 877-969-0010 (toll-free) or 630-990-0010.

3. Keep a diary of any dreams or contacts with a deceased loved one. Jot a few notes about the content of the dream or describe the contact. Maybe you sensed your loved one’s presence or heard a song that had meaning for you. All that matters is that the connection meant something to you. Write about it. As the years pass, I’ve come to believe that I didn’t lose my relationship with my son; the relationship changed its form.

4. Engage in rituals that honor your loss. It helps me to write a letter or card when I start really missing Shane. On Shane’s birthday and death day, I like to make a memorial with his picture, a burning candle, fresh flowers, and a cake. One bereaved mother likes to send her deceased daughter’s picture to friends on her daughter’s birthday. It helps her remember the good times instead of just dwelling on what she lost. A friend suggests making a scrapbook. She says working on the scrapbook gives her a safe place to grieve and gives her some control over the pain. What rituals help you honor your grief?

5. Remember the best. A friend, a bereaved parent, told me that in therapy her counselor advised her to remember the good moments instead of only dwelling on the painful last months while her daughter died. This is valuable advice. It’s important to honor our grief and all our feelings about someone we love who’s gone. But pain doesn’t have to be the sole focus of our memories and the only way we recall the person we love who’s gone. As you go through the grieving process and heal your heart—and when and if you feel ready—how about creating a book of memories of the good times you had? Devote this book to writing about fun, memorable events. Include things you learned, things you or the person said or did, places you visited, trips and activities you both enjoyed. Get creative. Paste photos or other souvenirs in your book. This is a project to work on when you’re missing your loved one that will allow you to spend time with him or her in your mind and heart. (This is a variation of a scrapbook activity suggested by a friend.) Honor how important your loved one was and still is in your life.