08/17/2014

   As a society, we Americans are not particularly well-prepared to deal with grief. Some cultures don't  even expect a grieving person to be ready to re-enter society in any meaningful way for up to a year or more. The person or family is given that much time to process and deal with all the numbing effects of grief. I went back to work three weeks to the day after my son's death. Mostly I did that because I was afraid that the longer I delayed the inevitable, the harder it would become to ever go back. I also wanted  something besides grief to occupy my time and energy. I had been back only a couple of weeks when it was time on our school calendar to hold Parent-Teacher conferences. All of the parents with whom I met were sympathetic to a point, but one parent remarked that I must be over it all since I was back teaching. I was incredulous. It took all of my self-control to not scream at her. This was my son's death we were dealing with not a pet goldfish. How insensitive could she be? In hindsight, it was probably much too soon for me to have to deal with people in that kind of setting, but, again, our culture does not look favorably on grieving for too long, especially not for men. We are raised to be strong, physically and emotionally. We are the providers, the guardians, the protectors. We are taught from an early age that big boys don't cry, that we should get over it (whatever "it" is) and move on. We are supposed to "fix" whatever is wrong and move forward. These kinds of attitudes are especially not helpful when men are dealing with grief. They are among the reasons that many men seem to get "stuck" in one spot
many different times in their journey through grief. Often when I would be faced with a new obstacle
grief had set in my way, my first reaction was to avoid it somehow, to try and go around it or pretend it wasn't there. I tried to lose myself in work. I tried to pretend that I wasn't really feeling what I was feeling. I would try to push away what was making me feel so bad. That only made things worse. As I stated previously, grief demands to be dealt with, but much of the time, I didn't know how to do that. I was feeling guilty that I had failed to protect my son in the first place, and now I was constantly faced with a situation I could not fix, not for myself, not for my wife, not for my surviving children. I was frustrated and angry about the entire thing. How does a man learn to deal with grief?