by Alex in Toulouse
Tue Jan 3rd, 2006 at 04:18:32 PM EST
This is kind of a personal diary entry, in which I'd like to invite any of you to write something just as personal.
Late this evening, a friend of mine visited. He is at his parents who live nearby, on holiday from Croatia where he works. He told me that he had just seperated from his wife after only a few months of marriage, and though accepting that an intense moment of personal problems had prompted the seperation, was still feeling some grief at what could have been. We had a couple of beers, it was nice to see him. He was naturally shaken, seperations are always painful.
I always seem to find the right words to say to a friend who's been seperated. I say what I need to say, naturally, without hesitation ..
However I don't do as well with unexpected grief ...
After my friend visiting from Croatia left ... I went upstairs and checked my emails. One was from a friend couple of mine in Paris, and entitled "sad event". My stomach felt kind of weird, as the mail came from both of them jointly, and I knew she was due to give birth soon.
The email said, briefly, that my friend's baby was given birth to January 1st, 2006, fully knowing that the baby had been dead for two days in the womb. They gave the little girl a name, and said adieu to her at the clinic. They also said that they would now be retiring from social life for a few weeks but would need us friends in the future, needing to deal with this on their own for now. They also mentioned that we could all reply to them by email as they wouldn't be answering the phone.
So here I sat for about an hour (this was a couple of hours ago), trying to write an email. By the end I was puffed red and my eyes were blurry, of course, and I still had only barely come up with one sentence. I eventually managed to write a short paragraph, but thought fuck this and added at the end of my email that I was sorry for writing such a pasteurized message in which words were handpicked, when all I really wanted to do was scream and cry and take their grief away, while sharing beers at a bar we sometimes go to whenever I see them in Paris.
So I was wondering if any of you have experience in helping close friends deal with unexpected grief. Or in dealing with it personally.
I'm not talking about expected grief, if there really ever was such a way to call it anyhow, as all grief strikes unexpectedly, in a sense. But if there is then let's say that I am somewhat familiar with it (example: the grief of a friend whose dying mother eventually passes away). I find it naturally in me to help or empathize with a friend who has to live through one.
It's the unexpected grief that I find difficult to handle, and that I am asking about. I've been confronted to it a few times (suicide, car accident ...), and have never found the right thing to do to help people living it ... I have always just sat there, wondering about the cause, angry at the injustice, afraid of saying the wrong thing, of doing the wrong thing, and so ending up doing very little.
Do you have any personal stories to share here? Please feel free to write anything that comes to mind. Replace the "I" in my story by some other pronoun or name if you want, it would still be the same story.
