Don't Look Away

Kathleen Fisher, who is featured this week on People and Blogs, wrote about finding her voice as a writer while living through grief:

It was at that time that my husband ended his life. We had been married for 35 years and dated five years prior to that. It was devastating and a shock to everyone who knew him. He was my biggest cheerleader when it came to writing so it made sense that I would write the eulogy for his funeral and then read it in front of hundreds of people. To date there is no piece of writing that I am more proud of than that one. After that I kept writing and writing to try to process the all-consuming grief. What started as a light-hearted and fun blog became a real-time look into the life of someone whose entire life had been crushed beyond repair. I didn’t sugarcoat any of it and I think for many people it gave their own sorrow validity.

Last month, leading up to Thanksgiving, Fisher wrote some advice for living with the grieving during the holidays, advice I echo from experience, advice that will serve us all in the days to come this holiday season:

If you are in the room with someone whose loss is fresh and painful, please do not turn away. There is nothing worse than putting yourself out into the world after a death and feeling like a pariah because it makes people uncomfortable. Will it feel awkward? Yes. Will it be hard? Absolutely, and so maybe this will help. Ask them what their person’s favorite part of Thanksgiving was, what they most looked forward to eating, if they had a tradition that they never swayed from. It’s a neutral question that brings to the surface more happy memories than sad and everyone who has lost someone dear to them loves to talk about them.

Her words remind me of those of my old friend Ken Hone, who I interviewed about activism in the late 1980s:

Ken: And you know, I was thinking today, Passing people downtown on the sidewalk. Those people, you know, the ones who God knows where they sleep and where they eat and maybe they piss in their pants, I don’t know, but I was thinking that, in this homogenized world, talking to those people is a revolutionary act. 

Even, I know it very strongly myself: I want to rush by and ignore them. But who knows that maybe just stopping and talking to them for a couple of minutes and saying, “I see you there. You’re not invisible. I do see you.”

You know, and it’s not necessarily giving money. It’s, it’s giving recognition. That’s a pretty radical thing to do, I think. 

Peter: Do you think that, that not noticing those people, which is what most people seem to do, [is] sort of the natural way of being, or do you think that, that, that we sort of start off being compassionate, giving people or whatever, and we, we learn to be cold? 

Ken: Yeah, I think we learned to be cold. 

Peter: Or are we’re learning to be cold, or are we just, is it, is it a matter of something else? Is it? Is it wanting to ignore a problem we don’t feel we can solve? 

Ken: Well, I think it’s in a large part, I think it’s a defence mechanism. Because you have to be pretty dull not to imagine, you know, “there, but for the grace of God go I.” I mean, it could be us, and maybe it was me a few years ago. The line between them and us really isn’t very, very wide.

There but for the grace of God, indeed. 

We are all going to live through grief in our life, many times over. 

If you know someone who’s living through a “fresh and painful loss” this season, don’t spend a second thought worrying that, by being open and curious and vulnerable before them, you are going to remind them of their grief: they are in it, all the time. Giving them the gift of recognition—I see you there—is precious and human and what we all need to do more of to survive together.