TELL ME A STORY

“You’ve got to tell your story,” the counselor said gently. “You may have to tell it ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred times before you integrate it into your life.”

It was the story of Shane’s death. (Shane is my son. He died in a ski accident a few days after he turned twelve, in 1991.)
We’ve reached a place in our culture where many people consider talking about loss the same as obsessing. We’re doing something wrong by telling our story. But I couldn’t help it. The minute I ran into anyone – friend or stranger – the first thing I said was, “Hi. My name is Melody. My son is dead.”

Sometimes at night I’d go over the story, over and over it inside my head, trying to get the feelings out, the pain, shock, horror of that night ending with shutting off the machines, listening to that last gush of air come out of his lungs, then having to walk out of the room and leave my son in it. Dead.

Walking out of that room were the hardest steps I’d ever taken in my life. I knew the journey I was beginning would be long, ugly, and hard. Besides losing him, I knew I’d lose at least a decade of my life. I’d be an old woman before I smiled again.
Losses may come in threes but sometimes the same loss brings the other losses. I wouldn’t get to see Shane marry or have children. I wouldn’t get to see what he did for a living. I wouldn’t get to see him go through his first chemical dependency treatment. Likely he would – his genetic inheritance worked against him. His grandparents and both parents had the genes. My children didn’t stand a chance. I tried not to program my children, but I also believed in being realistic. When they were young I began talking about what it meant to be addicted, the difference between that and social or normal drinking.

“You lose control,” I told my kids. “You lose control of what you do when you use or drink, how much you use, and when you drink or lose drugs. It’s all about loss of control. When that happens, know that you’re not different and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You have a disease and there’s a way to put it in remission – almost a cure.”

I’d never get to see him take his one year sobriety chip.

What I didn’t know was that it’s okay to tell my story as often as I need to. Society was evolving from being politically correct to being therapeutically correct. The biggest transgression for a codependent was obsession about what he or she lost. Ironically, obsessing – or telling your story over and over – is the number one thing that a grieving person needs to do.

So I told the story to myself. I thought it through in my mind, staying with the painful parts – those moments in time that feel like yesterday no matter how long ago they happened. But getting someone to listen? That was almost impossible to do.

Nobody likes a bereaved mother. People are afraid that losing a child is contagious. Of all the things they don’t want to catch, losing a child is number one.

I’d write in my journal about the story. I’d think about it. I’d work with a therapist skilled in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) – an almost magical process. You think about – talk about — what happened. Tap. Tap. Tap. The therapist taps alongside your eyes, has you look up, down, sideways. Talk about the pain, where it hurt, how much it hurt, how it began. Tap. Tap. Tap. Let the pain out. It’s a miraculous therapy for grief, especially when trauma’s involved – when the grief hit you from behind, unexpectedly and in one half of a second ripped apart the fabric of your life, creating a tear that would never be mended. Your life would never be the same again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Talking to that therapist helped heal the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by the sudden impact of Shane’s death. But what I longed and yearned for was to talk to a friend, tell my story to someone I didn’t have to pay to tell my story to, someone who cared and would listen to whatever I needed to say. I now know that was probably too much to ask or expect. Like a child asking a parent to read his or her favorite story every night, the person going through grief wants to tell his or her story over and over again, but most people don’t want to hear a story about a child’s death. It makes them feel uncomfortable and awkward. Most people prefer it if we keep that story to ourselves.
It’s too much pain to dump on anyone else.

People say “God never gives us more than we can handle.” That belongs in the Things Not to Say list. Sure He does (give people more than they can handle). It happens every day – many times to many people. They get way more than they can handle.

I have.

Have you?

“It wasn’t God that took your son,” one woman wrote me. “It was Satan, the Devil.”

That’s helpful, I thought, throwing away the letter. What an awful thing to tell me. Thanks for sharing that idea.
People say a lot of wrong things because they feel awkward, uncomfortable, and don’t know what to say. Before my son died, I was the person saying the wrong and stupid things. We can’t imagine many people’s pain. What does it feel like to have the doctor waltz in the room and tell you that you have cancer or are positive for HIV? What does it feel like to wake up from a car accident and learn you’ve lost both legs? Or go blind?

Yes, Life Is Beautiful like the movie by the same name says. But it’s horrible and ugly too. Don’t try to minimize or get around it.

God is love. But sometimes it feels like He plays the torture/nurture game. He allows the worst to happen, and then we have no option but to go to Him to heal. It’s similar to living with an abusive parent. The same person who beats and whips us is our sole source for survival. We have no choice but to reach out to the torturer for our comfort. We get our nurturing from the source of our abuse. Either that or on the seventh day of each week, God encounters the same statistics that we do with having people work for us – one in every ten people can be trusted; one in every ten people can be relied and depended upon. So for one day nine weeks out of ten, the person taking over for God does an inadequate job. That’s the only thing I can think of to explain all the errors that take place in a perfect world.

Do you want to be a friend to someone who’s grieving? Are you at a loss for what to say? Perfect. How about really listening to your friend or loved one tell the story of what happened that hurt so much? Then listen with all the attention, care, and presence you can muster. Listen like you mean it. Listen like you care – even if it’s the fifteenth time you’ve heard the story. Some small detail may change this time. Your friend may make a small change in the way he or she tells the story this time. Listen carefully and you might hear it. That tiny bit of change in the relaying of the story may indicate a big shift in your friend’s ability to handle what happened to him or her. That change may indicate that your friend has integrated the unfathomable, the unthinkable – at least a little. When we’re talking about grief, a little is a lot.

For some unknown reason, Twelve Step programs knew the importance of telling our story long before psychiatrists and psychologists did. They had people get on stage or sit in their chair in a circle and say what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now. They know (A.A. and the other Twelve Step programs) that telling your story and listening to other people’s stories is an excellent way to heal.

Some people aren’t ready to talk yet. One man went through three significant deaths in the space of one year. He didn’t want to talk about any of them. He didn’t want to see any pictures or belongings of the deceased loved ones.

We each have our own way of going through grief, no matter what the experts say we need to do to heal. The place that knows what we need to do is inside us. Times it’s too sensitive to touch. But it isn’t going anywhere unless and until we act on it. Our journey through grief is a path made from big and small steps. Put them together and it turns into a treasure map. It maps out our journey. Harbor no illusions. It’s long, dark, lonely, and hard, so difficult it made even the holiest people weep. But at the end is the pot of gold.

It’s not money, riches, or fame. It’s more important than that. At the end of the treasure map is this quietly beating, thumping heart. It’s got scar lines running up and down it. But that’s good. It means that we used it for what we were meant to – to love — and in the process it got broken, badly hurt. But it’s better than being at the end of the journey of this lifetime in perfect shape – no scars or bruises anywhere because of all the risks we didn’t take.

If you want to be a friend, learn to listen. Stop waiting for your turn to talk. Don’t get into competition by playing the “my pain is worse than yours” game. Be present. Aware. Listen. Care about the story your friend or loved one has to tell. Yes, they’ll dwell on the details of what happened the minute before the loss. They’ll talk about what happened next – ever single detail. They’ll probably make some magical connections that have nothing to do with reality. Most likely, they’ll find at least three or four reasons to blame themselves. Or maybe they’ll be furious with someone else.

Maybe they won’t want to talk. Have you learned to sit in silence? Be at peace, perfect peace? Can you handle knowing you can’t fix the person, can’t heal someone’s pain? Can you be with that person anyway, in all your powerlessness? When you speak, can you find powerful words of healing, words that reflect your belief in your friend’s ability to make this horrific journey that lies ahead? Can you refrain from looking or being bored because you don’t think the person’s loss is that big or important? That loss is big and important to your friend, even if it isn’t to you. Whatever he or she lost is something the person wanted badly. Now your friend is certain if he or she had it, happiness would return with it. Maybe it would. On the other hand, people going through loss (at least most of them) know they’re not going to get whoever or whatever they want back. It’s not coming. But knowing that may be too much to accept in one moment. People need time to absorb and integrate that kind of bad news.

If you can let people talk and really listen, then you can be a good supportive friend. It’s a worthwhile goal and aspiration and it’s not being codependent to care about a grieving person. You don’t have to listen unless you want to. Doing something we genuinely don’t want to do won’t help anyone – the other person or you.

Be true to yourself and then you be a true friend. Practice learning to listen to your friends by listening to yourself. Listening is an action that will benefit you as much as it helps other people.

ACTIVITY:

For the next month, practice listening to yourself. Listen to your feelings, wants, your don’t wants, likes, and dislikes. Listen as you go through the day. At the end of the day, before you fall asleep, debrief. How much of what you heard yourself say do you remember? Monitor your progress at listening as you go through the month.

For the second month, practice listening to other people. At the end of each day, do what you did in the exercise before: review how much you remember of the things you heard. At the end of the month, grade yourself. With one being the lowest number and ten being the highest and best grade, did you make any progress? How much? If you’re not a seven, do the activity for another two months.

The third part of the activity is putting it together – listening to yourself and other people. At the end of the day, pay attention to how much you heard that you recall. What did you hear yourself say or think? What do you remember hearing from your friends? If you can’t honestly grade yourself at a seven or eight, go back and start over with the first part of this exercise. Learning to listen is one of the greatest parts of being a friend you can learn.

Don’t forget to ask your friend if he or she feels like talking. Then listen to the answer and respect what you hear.