Grief: The Greatest Isolation

On how we respond to grief, and what we owe each other in its wake

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

I am not a grief counselor. I don’t have any credentials in grief. But I’ve known a lot of it.

And how isolating the act of mourning can be.

In my experience, most people really don’t know what to say on this subject. We fumble for words and offer empty platitudes. Not out of any malicious or neglectful intent.

In that sense of: what in the hell could I possibly say that will make this person feel any better?

I know… I used to be one of those people that wrung my hands and felt deeply that nothing I could say or do would help.

Ah, the good ol’ days. Blissful ignorance.

The days when my loved ones were still here and I was still busy chasing cheddar through a rat maze.

Before the first tremors.

My Story.

In rapid succession, I lost two close work buddies.

Both were in their prime, both in arguably good shape. Or so I thought.

Attending their funerals, only months apart, I thought:

Things can’t get worse than this.

Here’s some free advice: the second you think that, duck for cover. Knock on wood. Say three Hail Marys.

Because yes. They absolutely can.

And often do.

Anyone intimately familiar with the idiom “They come in threes” or the adage of “Murphy’s Law” can attest to the veracity of my assertions.

Less than a month later, my middle brother had his first heart attack. He insisted my mother was wrong and didn’t know what she was talking about, as he lay in the hospital bed, still disoriented.

My words were the only ones he would hear.

He knew me too damn well to think I’d lie to him.

But memory and ego are funny, fickle things. By the time he was up and around again, he’d chalked it up to some aberration.

A snag in his fabric. Something already smoothed over; nothing to see here!

When, in reality, it had been snipped. And we all know what happens when you snip a snag in your favorite sweater…

The whole thing unravels.

Not immediately. Not at once. But, like a slow-moving train wreck, that shit is going down.

His second heart attack happened a month later.

Quiet. In the dead of night. No one awake to notice in time.

Gone, just like that.

This marked the first truly irrevocable deep loss of someone I thought would always be in my life.

How naive I was.

Three years later, my oldest brother passed in the same house, same manner. This time Mom was there and tried with all she had to save him.

To no avail.

Two down.

Two years later, my father passed. Cancer.

On my birthday.

By this time, I’d gone so numb from trying to walk through the wreckage of our lives, I’d almost completely isolated myself from everyone, including him.

But the truth is this: the isolation started long before I helped it along.

I felt the last threads holding me here start to slip away… and part of me was relieved for that.

People don’t know what to say or how to respond with empathy in the face of loss.

With the first loss, people were kind in the way they donated leave, in the way they showed up for his funeral, in the way they didn’t actively harass me for a few weeks.

Different part of my story. I’ll hold that piece for now.

But one thing I noticed was that everyone said the same thing: Sorry for your loss.

But no one wanted to talk about it or listen to me talk about him.

And I really needed to talk about him. It hurt like hell, sure.

But I felt the need to keep him alive in my memory. To tell of his humor. And of his struggles.

To witness for him the whole of him.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Liora, you already said you were in a shit place, what can you reasonably expect?

This was true even of my closest friends. I would see their eyes glaze over. Notice the shifting in their feet or hands: clear indications of deep discomfort and a longing to exit the conversation.

So, I’d close down. Not with anger or resentfulness, more like resignation.

I’d try to shift to something they did want to talk about. But slowly I began to notice something else.

People I’d been there for countless times really didn’t want to be around me anymore.

I was really hurt for a long time. But I’ve since realized something that my brother’s death had caused in me: I’d changed.

My mask had slipped.

I no longer had the wherewithal to make polite talk, to joke outrageously about the inanest things, to tell on myself in stand-up comedian form.

I no longer performed for them. I had my own shit to deal with.

For me, at least, his death was the beginning of me dropping the charade that everything was okay.

But it became a very lonely road indeed.

Most people are deeply uncomfortable with death.

Are you sure you weren’t just in the wrong crowd?

I possibly definitely was. However, I do think there’s something universal there.

I won’t say all people, there are religions and spiritual systems which revere death as a door or the next plane of existence or at the very least exercise a much healthier frame of belief than modern conservative religions which, let’s face it, dominate our country.

Most people fear death, the last great unknown.

We do anything to avoid it.
Just look at the pharmaceutical industry or the wellness industry.

We do anything to reverse aging.
Look at our modern healthcare science: we have extended the average lifespan twice over in just a couple centuries, let alone the abysmal figure for ages prior to that.

We treat grief like a glitch in the matrix: something to be patched, silenced, or bypassed entirely.

Grief is not on anyone’s timetable.

People also tend to grow fixated on the amount of time it takes for another to “get over” a loss.

Like it’s clockwork. A-to-B-to-C… and voila: all better.

There is no prescribed amount of time for grief.

People process loss in their own ways and in their own time.

What may take you months may take another years.
And the truth? That person will never truly be the same again.

They will have to make room for a new version of themselves, one that includes this new reality that they’re living which doesn’t include that special person.

And if you’re really there for them…

So will you.

Loss like that never really leaves.
It lingers.
Forms scar tissue.
Changes a person in ways they cannot yet foresee.

But with time, they can learn to move forward with it.
Write a new way of being. Make room for the unexpected moments that hit them hard, sometimes many, many years after the fact.

They won’t always be sad or angry or bereft. But sometimes they will.

Some moments are still hard for me too.

But they are fewer now.

Farther between.

So, what do you say to someone who has lost someone precious to them?

I think the most helpful thing is just presence and witnessing.

Not turning away. Not averting your gaze.

You may not have the words, but intent and genuine empathy bridge the divide that words can’t.

Simply saying you’re there for someone. And then being there for that person.

People who are grieving generally don’t want to just be “left alone with their thoughts”… at moments, sure, but not as the default.

I’m not saying you need to hover or feel like you can’t leave them alone.

But checking in, making that something that you do. Not as a chore, but as a guidepost: “Hey, I’m here, wanna chat?”

Let that person cry if they need to, without any judgment on your part. Sometimes that’s the only way to shed some of the weight they’re carrying: through honest tears.

Let them talk about whatever they need to. Let go of the need to fix things or to move forward in that space.

Sit with discomfort for a bit.
After all, it’s the ocean that person is swimming in.
You won’t drown by dipping in a toe.
But you might come away feeling a bit lighter.
Like you touched something pure.

Let that person process their feelings about the loss the best they can in their own time.

It’s not up to you or society to decide when that time should be up.

And it doesn’t make them less of a person. It just means they need the time they need.

It won’t ever truly be the same, but you shouldn’t lose someone you care about because they lost someone they care about.

Not to isolation. Not to despair. Not to silence. Not to the fundamental changes that grief brings.

I have absolutely no doubt that the deaths of my oldest brother and my father were accelerated by their own deep grief and by the weight of carrying it alone.

In silence.

The pain they never felt safe enough to speak aloud.

What that person really needs more than anything else is to be seen, truly seen, even in a flawed state of mourning…

And still… to be accepted.

—Liora

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These pieces are born from the same fires I’m still walking through, grief that remakes you, losses you carry like phantom limbs, and the stubborn refusal to go under even when life leaves cracks in your bones.

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