For What Do We Grieve?

Guest Post by Mary Christine

The obvious answer to that question is the loss of a loved one. Grief is not reserved only for the death of a loved one. We grieve over all kinds of losses. Our pets, our health, a body part, a house, a job loss, our dignity. The grief, and how we walk through it, will be different depending on the type of loss.

A few weeks ago, I had to go to the DMV to get a new drivers license. Going to the DMV is never fun but I was prepared for a wait. My license still had a year to go before it would expire but I needed an updated license with the correct address on it. It was correct in the database so I didn’t even consider I would need some additional piece of ID with the new address. After an hour wait, I was informed that I would need to produce that piece in order to get the new license. Fortunately, I could run to the bank not too far from there and have them print out the first page of my statement with the address and that would be sufficient. They gave me a place holder so that when I returned, I could jump to the front of the line. Slightly inconvenient but no big deal, really.

In my state, you have a choice to get the REAL ID compliant license or a regular license. In October of 2020, REAL ID will be a requirement in order to fly domestically, enter certain Federal Buildings, military bases and nuclear facilities. While I was waiting, I picked up the brochure that listed the documentation needed to acquire the REAL ID compliant license. If you already have one, then you know the requirements: birth certificate or passport, social security card or some legal document with ss number on it, two documents to show proof of state residency, and if applicable, documentation of name change. Basically, this is the same documentation that you would need to get a passport.

On the way home I was overtaken by a bit of road rage when someone sped up behind me, flashed their lights and hung on my tail until I moved out of the way into the right lane. I was in the process of passing, obviously not fast enough for them but I could not get over until I got around the cars next to me or dropped my speed and slipped behind them. I usually just shrug off these types of incidents, get over and out of the way. Not this time. As soon as they passed, I pulled out behind them and gave them some of their own medicine at which point they slammed on their brakes…in the fast lane…during the rush hour time of day.  This type of behavior is not like me but today I was not myself. I followed them like that for 10 miles until I needed to turn.

As I drove down the country roads that lead to my house, I burst into tears. Believe me when I tell you that I am not a crier and my better half will attest to that. More behavior that is not like me. By the time I reached my driveway the tears had passed. But I was agitated and unable to pinpoint the reason for it. My husband was out of town on business and when I talked to him later that evening I told him what had happened, including the road rage incident. He wouldn’t scold me because for one thing, he knows that type of behavior is nearly unheard of coming from me. And for another, it would be the pot calling the kettle black. I emailed a friend to relate the same story. It bothered me that I could not pinpoint the reason for being upset.

The next day, out of the blue, more tears. “This is ridiculous!” I kept thinking. “What on earth is my problem?” Then as quickly as it started, it stopped. But wondering why it started in the first place kept me thinking about it for the rest of the day. I slept on it.

Sometime after I woke up the next morning it suddenly occurred to me what my problem was. As weird as it may seem, I was grieving for my country. The trip to the DMV was the trigger. To be exact, it wasn’t the DMV. It was reading about the necessary document requirements for the REAL ID that was the trigger.

I hate to use the word “trigger” because it has been co-opted and used improperly by the media and academia. I’ve had some training as a lay grief counselor. A grief trigger is anything that will remind us of the loss we have endured, whether recent or not. It can be a big thing, like a birthday or anniversary. Or it can be something you would not even expect such as walking down the cereal aisle in the grocery store and spotting a box of oatmeal. Because your loved one always ate oatmeal you are overcome with a wave of grief.  Months, or even years can pass, and you can still experience moments of grief like this. They seem to pop up out of nowhere.

On my way home from the DMV that day I kept thinking about how we will be required to show the REAL ID drivers license or a passport to fly domestically. This is supposed to keep us safer. The suspicion is that this will not stop with airline travel. It will eventually have to be shown for all kinds of travel. Unfortunately, it won’t be necessary to show it in order to vote. But this is not specifically about that particular issue. Others have written extensively about our incremental loss of freedoms over the years. I have no idea why this particular issue was the trigger for me.  Loss of freedom is not one of the losses I ever expected to grieve but there it is.

Maybe a review of what the 5 stages of grief are is a good idea. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

“ While these emotions and experiences are common in those grieving a loss, the term “stages” is misleading. There is no straight path or progression of emotions that mourners follow. There is no timeline. Grief is unpredictable, with good days and bad days. We never “get over” the loss of a loved one. Each individual and each loss will have its own unique process for healing.

What a mourner is experiencing today may fade and be replaced with other reactions. It is not a linear process. Mourners may circle back to emotions. The bereaved may go through a period of time when they feel at peace and then return to sadness. All of this is normal.”

The 5 stages link is a good reference for anyone dealing with a loss, also for those who want to support someone dealing with a loss. Personally, I would quibble with using the word “depression”. In my opinion it should be changed to “profound sadness”.  There may be days where it feels like depression. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep or you sleep all the time. You can’t manage simple tasks because they seem overwhelming. But it should be a “bad day or few days” situation and should not continue for very long. If it does it can turn into classic clinical depression. Pay attention if someone says they are worried about you.

Is it a proper thing to grieve for one’s country? Is it the country I’m grieving for or the way of life that I have had that I fear my children and, particularly my grandchildren, will not have? Are they one and the same?

We have had more than one discussion about how we ended up in the place we are at now. Lots of blame gets thrown around.

In trying to come up with an analogy, I settled on a family dealing with a loved one in the throes of substance abuse.

A family member that has serious mental issues compounded by substance abuse will cause an uproar for the rest of the family. The 5 stages of grief will apply in this instance. Since everyone goes through those stages at different times the person continues to get worse while the family argues about the problem. There is always an enabler who makes the problem worse. Nothing gets accomplished when someone is still in denial about the substance abuse and mental issues. Sometimes the enabler never stops enabling. They stay in denial until someone, either the enabler or the substance abuser, dies. In cases where all of the functioning family members have entered the acceptance stage, a plan can be made to get help for the dysfunctional family member. When they are all cooperating, recovery can restore the family and things get better.

This is far from a perfect analogy but on a micro-level it can be compared with how the rest of our countrymen are dealing with the problems we have in this dis-United States. How many times have those of us who are past the denial stage been left frustrated and perplexed when we try to convince friends and family how dire things are at this point in history?

Everyone moves through these stages at different times. You can throw all the information in the world at them and if they are not ready to face it, they can’t be pushed through them. It doesn’t help that The Powers That Be would like us to stay in denial forever. We are so much easier to manipulate when we are in that state.

In my opinion, there are still far too many people in the denial stage. Even people with whom we can agree on what our problems are still are convinced we can vote our way out of this. It’s the classic definition of insanity. How many times does it take to see that no matter who the President is, we still end up worse off than we were before? We can argue over the reasons why our current President hasn’t kept the promises he made on the campaign trail in 2016 but it doesn’t matter. I won’t make a list of how much worse off we are now than four years ago. Jim Quinn has just done a fine job of that in his most recent 2 part essay.

Some will say that I’m a pessimist. I will insist that you are in denial.  Powerful people are anti-bill of rights. Our three letter agencies are corrupt and need to be dismantled. Case in point, last November, one of them released this report. It is designed to try to predict crime based on past incidents.  It’s full of charts and graphs and bases its conclusions on a study of only 52 incidents between the years of 1972 and 2015. I don’t blame you if you don’t read it but it’s not really that long. This tells you who they think the enemy is. Here are a couple of highlights.

A message written by Christopher Wray states:

“Bystanders need guidance to recognize concerning behaviors and overcome natural resistance to reporting.  Just as important as early recognition by bystanders is the need to have well-trained, skilled, and competent receivers of that reporting – individuals who can assess potential threats and share information with other stakeholders so that they can gather additional information, further assess the threat, and take action to mitigate that threat. “

Further down you will see this as part of the conclusion:

“The offenders in the anti-government violent extremism category (n=13, 25%) adhered to a range of ideologies, from those that endorsed the belief that the current government was corrupt to those that were against the idea of government itself.  Many of the anti-government extremists in the study shared the conviction that part or all of the United States government had been corrupted.  Offenders sometimes expressed belief in a global conspiracy, or “New World Order,” which purportedly seeks to seize property and rights away from citizens”

However, in the introduction they admit:

“Predicting lone offender terrorism incidents is not possible, but prior research and operational experience support the conclusion that acts of targeted violence, including lone offender terrorist attacks, may be preventable through early recognition and reporting of concerning behavior.”

Remember “If you see something, say something”? Thank you, Janet Napolitano for spreading this worldwide but leaving it so general that “something” can be “anything”.  Other agencies thought this was such a good idea they have expanded upon it.

I said I wasn’t going get specific but in my research, I accidentally came across this while looking for something else. It’s just one of many reasons to grieve which is the topic of this essay, so I shall further try to refrain from being specific.

Where was I? Oh yes, denial and our frustration with our fellow citizens who are still in it. Denial can be a very useful tool when we are processing through grief. In the first stage of dealing with a loss, denial allows us to function. In the case of the loss of a loved one there are immediate funeral arrangements and the subsequent mounds of paperwork to get through.

A week before Thanksgiving 2015 I received a breast cancer diagnosis. In between that time and Christmas, I had CT scans and consultations with 2 surgeons.  A bi-lateral mastectomy was scheduled for January 5^th, two days after my birthday. Denial served me well during those weeks. I didn’t whine and cry and mope around. We had lots of fun during those holidays. Friends and family kept saying things like “You sure are taking this well!”.  I really didn’t know what to say when someone said something like that to me. I just laughed it off.

Sometimes it takes a punch in the gut, so to speak, to push you into the next stage. For me, it was looking at myself in the mirror a few days after my surgery. Yeah, it was pretty jarring. I did experience anger. I bargained, knowing I had some rough chemo coming up that I really didn’t want to go through. I don’t think acceptance came until after I was done with the chemo and I was getting some of my strength back. You can’t move on with your life until acceptance comes. And, remember, no one can push you through those stages. You move through them at your own unique pace.

When we have a loved one who has been given a diagnosis of “I’m sorry, there is no cure”, we all have to go through those stages at our own pace. Family members argue because they are in different stages. Our country is our “loved one”.  By country, you all know I mean the one we grew up in; the one that gave us a paper driver’s license that didn’t need a picture. Well, maybe a picture isn’t such a bad idea but originally, it was just a piece of paper that said we could drive a car responsibly and knew the local driving laws. That’s all it was for, period. Even longer ago, there were no certificates of live birth. Families recorded births and deaths in the family bible.

While denial is a useful stage, it becomes a problem if it lasts too long. Any of those stages becomes a problem if we get stuck in them. Grief counseling is useful when that happens. But what kind of grief counseling is there for our fellow citizens who are stuck in denial and refuse to believe we are living in a country that is suffering from death by a thousand cuts?

Is grief appropriate or am I just weird? Don’t answer that. I found I wasn’t alone in my grief. This lady cried, too. And after hearing this story I can understand why.

I don’t expect people to burst into tears after going to the DMV like I did. That was my trigger. My “oatmeal” so to speak. We have some hard times ahead of us. Just as there is no way to prepare ourselves mentally for the loss of a loved one, I don’t think there is any way to be mentally prepared for what is to come.   I do think that it will bring more grief. It would be nice if most of us could be on the same page at the same time but that’s not in any way realistic. I don’t have a solution to this dilemma other than to wait until more people start to realize that that the patient is terminal and hope it doesn’t take much longer. Because we are running out of time. And I feel the need to stress that acceptance does not mean that we just give up and accept the future that The Powers That Be have in mind. It means that we can make a plan for where we should go from here.

For now, we should enjoy what time we have left. I don’t mean that we should shift back into denial, if that’s even possible. But getting away from the bad news we tend to wallow in is a way to keep ourselves healthy. Indulge in some guilty pleasures. Help out your neighbors.

I have a couple of my own guilty pleasures I will share. I have a soaker tub that I fill up a couple times a week with really hot water. I drop some lavender essential oil in it and soak until it gets too cool for me or my skin turns pruney, whichever comes first. I know, hot water is bad for the skin. Lots of lotion gets slathered on afterward.

My husband and I have a “happy hour” about once a week. We turn on music, make cocktails and hang out with our two dogs and two cats. If it’s warm we are out on the patio, if it’s cold, we are in the shop. The animals don’t come in the house, so we go to them.

To get away from bad news, I listen to a local afternoon radio show that is “news talk” in name only. They avoid politics unless it local and they make me laugh more often, than not. It tends to be sophomoric in humor which fits my sense of humor quite well.

Just one more thought for those grieving the loss of a loved one and wondering why God took this wonderful person and leaves horrible people still here seemingly enjoying life. Scripture is mostly silent on this issue, but I did find it addressed in one place some years ago and bookmarked it because I knew I would need it in the future.

Good people pass away;

the godly often die before their time.

But no one seems to care or wonder why.

No one seems to understand

that God is protecting them from the evil to come.

For those who follow godly paths

will rest in peace when they die. Isaiah 57:1-2 (NLT)

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