If grief is a normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind, why does it feel like you are plunged into isolation when someone you love dies, as if your emotional pain is contagious? Grievers everywhere experience the common and hurtful pulling away of those around them. While family and friends often struggle with what to say and what to do, to the griever it just feels like they have been quarantined.
Grief is the ultimate social distancer…you can be sure the further away people can get from it, the safer they feel. Like somehow you can catch the sadness, the helplessness and the despair like an airborne illness. You can see how they carefully manage their proximity to the griever to ensure those emotions don’t spill over into their own lives. They often suggest to the griever that they will catch up when they “feel better in a few weeks”. But grief does not have a timeframe; it is not like you just “get over” this like recovering from a cold.
There are some that will step over the threshold, but they will do everything in their power to avoid talking about what has actually happened. They’re the ones that change the subject at every opportunity. They may ramble on and take up all the room leaving no gaps for the messy reality of loss to take root. Like human Dettol, killing 99.9% of uncomfortable emotions on contact, they scrub away any risk of discomfort and tears.
Amongst the people who dare to get close there are those that turn up and they seem to have all the platitudes memorised, wearing “they’re in a better place” like an emotional shield – the PPE of toxic positivity. They don’t offer comfort; their offering is containment. Their need is for you to “be strong” and “keep busy” so you don’t infect everyone else with your sad.
Then there is you, the griever, learning such harsh lessons in the most devasting time, witnessing these reactions and feeling responsible to wear a mask, to hide your pain and discomfort for the sake of everyone else around you. Trying so hard to hold it together, being held at arm’s length when all you crave is for someone to hold out their hand, breathe the same air. You are acutely aware you are the walking contagion, everyone trying to keep clear of the thin boundary that lies between their safe world and your fractured one.
Unlike most actual contagious diseases, there is no vaccine for grief. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you are not immune, and you cannot inoculate yourself against it. You cannot catch grief or the painful feelings associated with it by being around someone who is grieving, even though it might feel uncomfortable. You won’t manifest death or loss by talking about it, the same way you don’t get pregnant just by talking about sex.
No, the thing about grief is you never know when it will present and how it will infect every aspect of your life.
And if you cannot handle someone else’s grief, how will you deal with your own when it presents….yes I said WHEN.
The only way to guarantee immunity from grief would be to never love anything you could lose.
And that’s not immunity.
That’s emotional quarantine.
