Grief Is Not a Journey, Grief Is a Language We Learn

One of my favorite quotes comes from Natasha Trethewey. She says, “To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.”

Can I tell y’all a story? All right. Can I make a confession? Whether or not you said yes, I was going to tell my story anyway.

I’m not a crier.

It’s not because I don’t think men should cry. I’m a sensitive soul. I was singing “Candy Rain” to my fifth-grade girlfriend.

I’m not a crier because I’m not a good one. I am a very ugly crier. I do not have the Denzel single tear dripping down a chiseled cheek. When I cry, it’s more like Viola Davis in Fences. That’s the kind of crying I do.

So I try not to cry. But all that changed for me eight years ago, in April 2017.

After grieving 10 years of unexplained infertility, my wife and I were driving south down I-85 to meet our newborn daughter. We were in the silver Accord with the gray cloth interior. As the trees passed by, I zoned out and returned to my last, most vivid memory.

It had taken place two years earlier, on April 14, 2015. It is still the worst day of my life.

It’s funny, the things you remember about the worst day of your life. You remember all the unimportant things. I remember it was a Tuesday. I can still close my eyes and retrace the floor plan of the LongHorn Steakhouse in Orlando. I remember the unevenness of the pavement outside.

Most importantly, I remember the way people’s faces twisted between shock, horror, and despair as they looked, and tried not to look, at me screaming into my iPhone, “He’s dead. He’s dead.”

Before you have a chance to pray, barter with God, or do any of the other things you do on the worst day of your life, I found out that my 32-year-old brother was dead.

I was left holding nothing but the anxiety that came from knowing I would have to put my mom, my dad, my three remaining siblings, and every other unsuspecting restaurant bystander in their sphere through the same trauma.

I do not remember much of the next two years, except that I would promptly and quickly excuse myself from every room my tears invited themselves into.

At the lowest point in my life, I was lonely.

Fast-forward to April 14, 2017. I got the chance to meet my daughter.

It’s funny, the things you remember on the anniversary of the worst day of your life. One of the thoughts that sneaks in is that you secretly hope the worst day of your life stays the worst day of your life. You never want another day to take first place.

I remember it was a Friday, Good Friday.

My daughter was born prematurely. I still remember capturing her first smile through the smudged incubator glass. I remember the precise tones, beeps, and pitches that reminded me she was still breathing and that her breathing machine was working.

I remember how uncomfortable it was to hold her because the breathing tube was in her nose and wrapped around her neck, and I didn’t want to crinkle it.

Most of all, I remember the way my heart forgot to beat when all the makings of another April 14 tragedy began.

Before I knew it, the doctor snatched her out of my hands. Before you have a chance to pray, barter with God, or do any of the other things you do on the worst day of your life, I remember the deafening silence as all the beeps telling me the breathing machine was still working went quiet.

I’ll never forget the way I felt when the doctor placed her back in my arms and whispered into my ear, “Today is the day your daughter is going to breathe on her own.”

I wasn’t going to kill her in this story. It’s sad enough in here.

Two years to the day after my brother took his last breath, my daughter took her first unassisted breath. Let me tell y’all, I was crying as ugly as one could cry.

The nurses came over. Tanya Babcock and Vanessa Moore started crying too. I looked at them and said, “Y’all are crying, but you only know half of the story. This is a day of grief and joy.”

Both kinds of tears came out at the same time, and they tasted the same.

Tanya and Vanessa said, “No, John. We know that grief and hope are not parallel streets. They are a winding road that intersects.”

They had their own stories of grief and loss. We sat and shared them. For the first time in two years, something clicked for me.

The loss remained, but the loneliness didn’t.

Ten years later, I think one of the most important lessons I have learned about this thing called grief is that metaphors matter.

Metaphors do not just help us grasp concepts. They help us navigate reality. A bad metaphor for something as important as grief is more than unhelpful. It is harmful.

The predominant metaphor people use for grief is that grief is some kind of journey. The problem is that journeys have beginnings and endings.

Grief starts, but it does not have an earthly end.

It is a cruel thing to send somebody in search of light at the end of a closed tunnel. When we do that, we give them the only thing in the world worse than real pain, and that is false hope.

Raise your hand if you have ever heard of the five stages of grief and had someone present them as a path we are supposed to move through.

This is a room that knows this. Raise your hand if you know they were originally the five stages of dying.

They came from studying terminally ill patients who were approaching death, rather than the people they would leave behind. So if you do not fit into that suit, I want you to know those stages, when presented as a pathway toward completion, are a custom suit made for breathless bodies.

If your chest still moves in and out when you breathe, you were not made to complete grief that way.

If that is the wrong metaphor, maybe it is more helpful to think of grief as a language.

The goal of a language is not to finish. It is to become fluent.

If humanity were a country, grief would be the official language. Even though it is the official language, it is nobody’s native tongue.

My parents are from Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people, with hundreds of dialects and tribes. Do you know the official language of Nigeria? English.

It is a learned tongue. If you are going to navigate across that landscape, you have to learn it. The same thing is true when it comes to grief.

Here is the thing that either trips people up or unlocks something for them: language is not just about vocabulary. Language is also about dialects.

When it comes to grief, there are at least two.

There is tangible grief. I have a loved one. Their body is lowered into the ground. Tears sprint down my cheeks, chasing their body into the ground.

When people see that, they can connect my falling tears to a fallen body. You are surrounded with hugs, handshakes, and casseroles, if that is your sort of thing.

We all speak that dialect.

The other kind of grief we do not speak as well is ambiguous grief.

This is the death of a dream, the death of a friendship, or the death of a marriage. It is the diagnosis of a parent with dementia, when they are still here, but you talk about them using past-tense verbs.

These are deaths with no funerals and funerals with no caskets.

Your body and brain physiologically respond in the same way. Those same tears chase your fallen dreams into the ground. But people look around and cannot connect the two.

At best, you get questions. At worst, you get contempt.

When we recognize the ways our grief work has failed, we find that a problem well defined is a problem half solved.

When we embrace grief as a language, we realize that it is meant to solve a different problem.

The biggest problem of grief is not the initial loss. It is the eventual loneliness.

It has been 318 days since the Palisades fire started. One of the things you learn when a friend’s house burns down is that after the fire department comes, water splashes everywhere, and the fire is finally put out, you might walk up and say, “It’s great that the fire was extinguished.”

But as your friend walks through the smoldering remains of their house, they might say, “What the fire didn’t destroy, the water did.”

We know this about grief and loss. What the loss does not destroy, the loneliness does.

When we share our deepest grief, people sometimes think the way to put out its blazing fire is to splash us with a bunch of “sorry for your losses.”

It becomes a cul-de-sac where our loved ones are reduced to lost ones.

Maybe there is a better way.

Can I tell y’all another story? I’m going to tell it anyway. You know that, right?

Two of my dearest friends in the world, Jordan and Jessica Rice, are 44 years old. They have been married for 12 years. It is the second marriage for both of them because they were each tragically widowed in their twenties.

When Jessica was 26, two and a half months into her marriage, her spouse died in a tragic motorcycle accident.

When Jordan was 28, 10 months into his marriage, a doctor pulled him out of his wife’s hospital room and said, “Your wife has a form of brain cancer so rare that I had to Google its pronunciation before I came to talk to you.”

Ten months later, his wife died.

Jordan and Jessica buried their spouses before the arrival of their first gray hairs. Eventually, they began dating again.

As they started dating, people would say, “I’m sorry for your loss. I know your spouse died.” Then it would turn into, “Is there any room for me?” and “You sure do talk about them a lot,” and “But I’m here.”

Sooner or later, all those relationships fizzled, and Jordan and Jessica were alone.

Then Jordan and Jessica were set up on a date. They met at a bar, and for the first time, each of them met somebody who was fluent in widowhood.

They did one thing differently. This is the cheat code, y’all. I learned it from my dear friend Barry Liner.

The punctuation of their condolences changed.

When we think about the language of grief and condolences, we think about words. One of the things I loved about my failed attempt to learn Spanish is that punctuation matters.

When it is written on the page, if something is a question, the question mark appears at the beginning. You already know from the first symbol that you are being invited to respond.

When Jordan and Jessica met and talked about their spouses, Jordan said, “I lost my wife.”

Jessica did what Barry Liner taught me to do. She asked, “What was her name?”

Most of the time, when people have lost a loved one, we are content for that person to remain a lost pronoun.

“My spouse died.”

“My brother died.”

But Jordan said her name.

She was not just a spouse. She was Danielle.

Then Jessica started to talk about Jon.

Do you know what they said next? They did not say, “Sorry for your loss.”

They said, “Would you tell me a story about your love?”

When you let me tell you about them, then for a moment, my loved one is no longer just a lost one.

They are a loved one. They are resurrected. They are here. You see more of me as I tell you more about them.

Do you know what took place between Jordan and Jessica?

The loss remained, but the loneliness didn’t.

The loss is the tragedy. The loneliness is the trauma.

Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald says trauma is what happens when your emotional pain cannot find a relational home.

When we treat grief as a language, we are saying that we are trying to address the loneliness, rather than only the loss. We do that through stories.

“Tell me a story about your love.”

That story is an act of narrative love. The grieving person does not receive an answer to their grief, but in sharing the story, they are reminded that their own story, however terrible, is still incomplete.

Can I tell y’all one last story?

My daughter is eight years old. I used to say that my daughter was scared of the dark.

She would have these terrible nightmares and burst out of her room. She would sprint down the dark hallway and come into our room. She would pass my wife because my wife is a little sterner than I am. She would come to my side of the bed and say, “Daddy, can I snuggle with you?”

I would look into those big Pixar eyes and say, “Yeah, sweetheart. Of course you can. You can get in the bed.”

It would be fine for about three minutes.

After 90 minutes of getting kicked in the back and the throat, we would say, “Ava, fam, you’ve got to go back to your bed.”

She would get up and start walking. On her way back to her room, she would say two things, a statement and a request.

The statement was unsurprising. The request gets me every time.

The statement was, “But Daddy, I’m scared of the dark.”

Do you know what she never asked me to do?

She never asked me to turn on the lights.

She said, “Daddy, will you hold my hand and walk me back to my room?”

I used to say that my daughter was scared of the dark. Now I think my daughter is scared of being alone in the dark.

She does not need silver linings. She needs to know that she is not alone in the dark hallway of grief.

Grief is an everyday problem that everyday people face every day. When we treat everyday problems as though they only have expert solutions, society halts.

If the transmission breaks in your car, that is an expert problem. If your car runs out of gas, that is an everyday problem.

If everybody took a car with an empty gas tank to a mechanic, society would halt, and the Los Angeles traffic y’all are about to be in would be even worse than it is right now.

But we know that when a car runs out of gas, everybody has the ability to do something about it.

Spaces like this give me hope that we can reach a place where anybody who sees someone with a broken heart can find the right words when there are none.

Thank you all.