Grieving Rules

Part 1: Introduction

After someone I loved died, I couldn’t believe that everyone wasn’t talking about death all the time. Alongside the sadness and confusion came frustration that the rest of my world seemed at best disinterested and at worst actively in denial about the fact that death was constantly around us — random, merciless, and permanent — and nobody was doing anything about it.

I think many of us spend the majority of our time trying not to think about that fact that everyone we know could die at any moment. When my friend died, I became painfully and constantly aware, like an exposed nerve.

My friend Rory* died suddenly earlier this year. She was a year younger than me and I’m about to turn twenty-four. Hers is not the first death of someone close to me I’ve experienced, but it is the most recent. My friend Amelia* also encountered death and the grief that follows this year: Two of her grandparents died within two weeks of each other, one on each side of the family.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that Amelia and I are privileged in a lot of ways to have grown up in a place where it is even possible to have such limited experiences of death. We’ve been in relatively healthy families in relatively stable areas of a country that is not currently fighting a war on its own soil. Many people are not so lucky. That said, I don’t think there is an ideal age to confront the fact that death is inevitable for us and for everyone we know.

I’m sure many of y’all are familiar with how uncomfortable conversations get when someone mentions a person who has died or how hard it is to know what to say. We’ve seen how unprepared school administrators are to address the death of a student or how unforgiving workplaces and schools can be toward bereaved employees or students. The US, obsessed with youth and perpetual growth, does not make much room for deaths.

This isn’t an article about being #tooblessedtobestressed or about telling you to be grateful for what you have. Losing a friend is different from losing a grandparent is different from losing a sibling is different from losing a pet is different from losing a parent. I don’t have any authority on how to grieve or any particular insights on the death of a friend. This is more about how death separates us from the living as well as the deceased, and a story about how I started to find my way back.

Part 2: Friends Die Two years before Rory died, one of my other friends lost their friend to a freak accident. I googled what to say because I didn’t know, and every website I saw was full of eye-rolling platitudes, religious sentiment, and appeals to “common sense,” which, in a culture so divorced from death, is an unrealistic expectation. Eventually, I ordered flowers online. This year, my friend died. It’s hard to say much more than that because this isn’t really something that happened to me. This happened to her and to her family, and I’m just here sort of on the side.

She wasn’t a person I saw every day, or on major holidays, like relatives. She was someone I would text on Tuesday afternoons or when I came home for fall break or saw a Twitter meme. The reminders of my friend aren’t linked to otherwise significant anniversaries. It’s, like, an Ed Sheeran song, a picture of a dog; opening Snapchat to tell a joke and not being able to send it. She wasn’t going to walk me down the aisle at my wedding, but she was going to be...around.

Part 3: Being the Buzzkill Sources indicate that first experiences with death are early and extremely common. If we are lucky enough to get old, certainly by the end of our lives, we all will have known a lot of dead people. So...why are we so bad at talking about it? Take, for example, a recent Zoom call I had. This was an in-person (as “in-person” as you can get in 2020) meeting of people who all knew each other. Banter flowed easily. We took turns sharing what our year had been like. Seeing as it was one of the more significant features of my year, I shared that my friend had died and I was — perhaps predictably — met with uncomfortable silence. Maybe I could have assuaged some of their discomfort if I had prefaced it with a joke, which I know I shouldn’t but often do. I don't know if that would have worked, but maybe it would have given them permission not to have the perfect response ready. But they didn’t, so they just didn’t say anything.

At first this non-response was incredibly frustrating. It’s easy to interpret that silence as disinterest or fear. A compassionate reading of it might indicate that they said nothing because they love me and they didn’t want to say something that would make me feel worse. Rosianna Halse Rojas is a writer who makes beautiful, thoughtful Youtube videos about many things, including death, grief, and loss. She characterizes these kinds of interactions: Often, especially in the earlier years of this...experience, I guess you could call it, [the discomfort] was often because people had never known someone who had had someone close to them who had died. (....) It was just very new. It was very new and the default response from a lot of people was just like, “Oh, she probably doesn’t want to talk about it,” you know? “We can’t bring it up, ‘cause then she might remember!” She explains how frustrating it is that so many of those conversations ended with her comforting someone else to accommodate their uneasiness, rather than them comforting her.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear about grief from a young person and not an older theologian of some kind, or a poster, or a bookmark. I’m sad that Rosianna experienced the loss that she did, but I am grateful that she is willing to talk about her grief publicly so that others may feel less alone. There is comfort in communing with a peer when friends don’t know how to engage with it head-on.

Part 4: Grieving Rules I came across disenfranchised grief while doing some preparatory reading for this article. The term is based on the idea that, structurally, the odds are stacked against the bereaved: “The concept of disenfranchised grief recognizes that societies have sets of norms — in effect, ‘grieving rules’ — that attempt to specify who, when, where, how, how long, and for whom people should grieve. These grieving rules may be codified as personnel policies. For example, a worker may be allowed a week off for the death of a spouse or child, three days for the loss of a parent or sibling. Such policies reflect the fact that each society defines who has a legitimate right to grieve, and these rights correspond to relationships, primarily familial, that are socially recognized and sanctioned. However these grieving rules may not correspond to the nature of attachments, the sense of loss, or the feelings of survivors and hence their grief is disenfranchised.”

Ask anyone undergoing bereavement and they can probably tell you what it feels like they are and aren’t “supposed” to be doing. Losing Rory was sort of like that, and sort of not; I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

Perhaps some indication of what I’m talking about can come from how difficult it has been to find written work on the topic of bereavement following the death of a friend. In my preparation for this article, I also read a study on the coping strategies employed by young adults whose close friends had died. One of the things the study measured was the lasting impact on these young adults years after the initial loss. The participants reported various kinds of behavior changes in response, and there were many who felt that “the directions of their lives were dramatically altered by the death of their friend.”

Let’s take a look at that: dramatically altered the directions of their lives. My friends easily talk about the other ways in which the directions of our lives change: trying to get a new job; moving to a new city; switching majors; finding or leaving a romantic partner. All of these things dramatically alter the directions of our lives. But we don’t talk about how death does it, too. It’s so quiet.

After a previous bereavement, I attended a support group with my mother. She identified one of the differences between her experience and mine: While she had received a dozen condolence cards via snail mail from her friends, I had received very little formal comfort from my friends. It wasn’t that my friends didn’t care about me and hers did, but we just didn’t have the same rituals for loss that my mom’s age group had. Her friends showed support in a formal way with a physical card with a stamp. Mine sent very kind texts. This is no “old man yells at cloud,” but it is hard to put a collection of nice texts on the kitchen table.

Part 5: Paul and Winston If you’d like to see an example of what a more successful version of the “my friend died” conversation can look like, I recommend watching New Girl season 1 episode 6, “Thanksgiving.” Let me explain.

In “Thanksgiving,” Jess invites fellow teacher Paul over for Thanksgiving at the apartment she shares with three roommates. During the halftime show of the Thanksgiving football game, Paul changes the tv channel to the Macy’s parade, which reminds him of his recently deceased grandma. He shows Jess a picture of his grandma on his cell phone. They used to love watching the parade together. Seeing this, Winston pulls out his own phone (a flip phone because this show is from 2011 and time isn’t real and we are all hurtling toward oblivion) to show Paul. “That's my grandpa. Died last year.” “I'm so sorry. Sorry, Winston.” “Thanks. Thanks, man,” Winston says. He shows Paul several more photos. “What was his name?” Paul asks. “His name was Nelson.” Later, another roommate, Nick, confronts Winston about how nice Winston has been to Paul (Nick hates Paul because Nick is in love with Jess, who likes Paul). “Do you really like him, Winston?” “Yes, man. He asked me my grandpa's name. You've never asked me my grandpa's name.” “I always just thought he was your grandpa. You don't know my grandpa's name.” “Mason on your dad's? Or Charles on your mom's?” “Yeah, it's Mason and Charles.”

I have watched these scenes an astonishing number of times. Arguably the most notable thing about it is that out of all my searching the thing that actually hit home wasn’t a grief blog or a faith practice or a journal study, but New Girl. I have attended a support group and talked to my parents and called my therapist, and all of those things definitely helped me process my own grief, but when it came to understanding how to apply my experiences to connecting to another person, the thing that stuck with me was a tv episode from nine years ago that I found completely by accident.

The exciting thing in this scene to someone like me is that Winston invites Paul into more conversation about loss by bringing up his own grandpa rather than shutting Paul out by changing the subject. Paul, in turn, shows Winston that he cares by asking for more information. Winston and Paul met that day, and they connected more over their loss than Winston and Nick could even though Nick and Winston had been friends since they were children.

Here’s what I wish I had found when I was looking online for what to say to my friend whose friend died two years ago: “I’m sorry”; “Thanks for sharing”; “Do you want to watch this episode of New Girl with me? I heard it’s really good.”

There are a lot of things you can say, but my real favorite is “Do you want to tell me about them?” Often, the answer will be yes. I wanted to tell people all about how Rory and I went to prom together, took foreign language classes together, and spent an afternoon filling water balloons with paint. Amelia told me all about her grandfather’s toy car collection and burial and a childhood letter from her dad.

The bereaved may not always be prepared to advocate for themselves. We know it makes the living feel awkward to talk about this dead person that they didn’t know. Reaching across that aisle between the actively grieving and everyone else is easier than it seems, though. This New Girl episode, of all things, captures one of the most helpful connections through grief I have ever seen on screen. And all this in the same episode that features a frozen turkey in a tumble dryer. The turkey’s name is Hank, for 'Hanksgiving.

Part 6: The Art of Letter Writing

So, death makes things awkward. It doesn’t have to, but it often does. Sometimes it feels like, for the grieving, that death is the elephant in the room. After Rory’s death, when the Snapchat messages from high school friends stopped coming in, the Facebook posts from her family became less frequent, and the Livestream funeral was over, I felt a little lost. There was nobody else to tell. I was in the post-memorial window where I didn’t want to call my friends because I didn’t want to talk about anything but Rory, but I also didn’t want to wreck their afternoon. Also, more importantly, I didn’t have a lot more about her to say. The people who went to school with us knew all the things I might tell someone about her, and the people who didn’t know her had no reason to ask.

But then Amelia’s grandparents died, and it was like all of a sudden we were both out of the Matrix: looking around, covered in goo, and dying to talk to someone about what we had seen and how scary it was and what we were supposed to do with all this fucking goo. When Amelia’s grandfather died in the fall, I responded in the usual way: “I’m so sorry,” lots of heart emojis, etc. But when I sat down to write a card, I realized that I had more to say. I got notebook paper instead and wrote what turned out to be a four-page letter. In it, I told her what it had felt like for me the last time someone died and how lonely it had been and how maddeningly unaffected the rest of the world had seemed. It felt good to do: writing a letter by hand, talking about death with my good friend, I felt like Virginia Woolf corresponding with Vita Sackville West (granted, lacking the historically contested lesbian love affair). With other friends or on other topics, I would feel like I was imposing or being too formal or making it too much about me, but I hoped Amelia would get it. And she did. She loved it. “Treasured,” she said, actually.

Now, it’s not just our shared sadness that made this connection possible. Amelia is very good at being a friend and has been for a long time before this. But death has changed our friendship. In the simplest terms, we didn’t talk about death, and then we did. Some changes are obvious: We talked more in the days following her first grandparents’ death, and then less because she was attending a service. Amelia has less energy and her fatigue translates to more insecurity about work. I take too long to respond to messages and then bombard her with self-satisfied advice. I wrote this article about us.

We ask for reassurance about the constant fear of losing other people. We don’t know how to answer each other’s questions, so we basically take turns saying, “Look at the terrified, selfish, irrational, and frankly tedious emotions I’m having.” And then we say, “Yeah, me too.” I haven't fully thought myself through the Penrose triangle of loss and gain. My grief over losing Rory brought me closer to Amelia, which relieved me from the isolation I felt in grief, but I wouldn’t have needed the support if Rory had not died. But I’m choosing to see it as one more gift Rory brought to my life through her friendship. I don’t think there are really silver linings to death, just things that also happen. One thing that also happened when my friend died was I got to tell a friend about it. *Names have been changed.