You Don’t Get Ownership of Grief When Someone You Love Dies
This is an uncomfortable yet necessary sentiment.
This is hard to say — and I wish I had said it when this situation originally happened.
I had a friend who lost her husband about nine months ago. I wrote about this, documenting the fact that I felt I could not talk about my love life in front of her because she had lost her husband. I edited my words and did not mention my husband so as not to upset her.
I concluded in life and the article that, quite often, those who are grieving the loss of someone usually want to be treated ‘like normal’ instead of with a pair of kid gloves. My friend had expressed that she wanted to be treated as she’d always been and without extra sensitivity to her situation.
Well, as you’ll find out, that sentiment changed — and seemingly on a dime from my perspective.
My friend and I recently got into a texting argument over my daughter getting taken off a sports team event that she performed with some other kids, including her daughter. This was an event both of them had been doing together for almost two years.
And that’s when it happened. At the end of our texting exchange, I used a word that deeply offended my friend. I said that my daughter just needed some time to get over what had happened and that she was still grieving the loss of the team event.
The text I received back to that was, I really wish you had not used the word grieving. The loss of a sports event is not something to grieve over.
Ouch!
Oh, how I also wished I hadn’t used that word. As a writer, dramatic words often come out in my articles and texts. Of course, I hadn’t meant to offend her. I was just trying to express that my daughter was devastated by the recent turn of events and that her sadness over it was palpable.
I texted my friend back that I had made a poor choice in wording and meant no offense.
I certainly didn’t want to make things worse. However, as the day went on, I started to get angry about how my friend had implied that my daughter shouldn’t be grieving over what she considered to be a loss.
Additionally, who was she to tell me that I could not use the word grieve? The insinuation was that because her husband had died, any loss she considered to be less tragic than that could not be classified as something worth grieving over.
But — grief can be relative. The loss of a pet, the loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity, the loss of a friend, the loss of a husband — these are all legitimate things we can grieve over, though they may not appear to be on the same scale.
The loss of my daughter’s sports event also meant the loss of practicing and enjoying competing in that event with her friends. She wasn’t just grieving the sport itself — she was grieving the future absence of time spent with her friends who meant a lot to her.
So — in light of all this, I did a little research on grief.
When you lose someone you loved to death, grieving is generally what happens next. It can last weeks, months— an entire lifetime.
According to Healthline, In 1969, a Swiss-American psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote in her book ‘On Death and Dying’ that grief could be divided into five stages. Her observations came from years of working with terminally ill individuals but these 5 stages can also be applied to breakups, divorce, and job loss.
According to Kübler-Ross, the five stages of grief are:
denial
anger
bargaining
depression
acceptance
My daughter was going through these stages of grief. She experienced denial that the team had dropped her — thinking they’d change their minds at any second. She then became angry that they thought they could do any better without her and went through the unhealthy phase of hoping they’d fail without her.
Then, there was the bargaining phase, where my daughter questioned her overall performance and wondered if she’d only performed better, would this have happened at all?
Next, was depression. Feeling lost on those days when she would have been at practice but was now at home — aimless.
Then, the final stage. The acceptance that this is the new reality — the new normal — and that it’s time to move on.
Whether you have lost your soulmate, your lifelong pet, a friendship, or access to an activity you love, the right to grieve is valid for everyone.
Whether the loss of something or someone is catastrophic or relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a loss.
Perhaps the word I used was unintentionally insensitive. However, maybe we all need to respect the relative differences in our tragedies — and remember to have compassion for all losses — great and small.
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My daughter competed on multiple teams and in multiple sports growing up. We would call your daughter’s experience “soul sucking sports heartbreak.” Is that overly dramatic? Perhaps your friend might say so. But every young athlete I’ve known has experienced at least one very painful episode similar to your daughter’s.