If We Share the Same Loss, Why Don't We Share the Same Grief?

Years and years ago, I taught prepared childbirth classes in the wilds of Wyoming.  Generally, that was joyful work, and I was privledged to share with many couples at the moment of their child's birth.  Sadly, there were occasions when things did not go as expected, and joy would turn to grief as an infant would die.  Learning to sit with grieving parents, I learned a bit about the vagaries of trying to navigate the grieving process inside of families. One thing that I came to understand is that sharing the same loss does not mean that we share the same grief.  It is particularly difficult, in the face of overwhelming personal grief, to support others in their own grieving.  It is not at all uncommon for families to fall apart in the passage. 

I don't intend here to imply that what our family is experiencing is at all the equivalent of losing a child, but we are surely grieving.  The events of the last few weeks have left us all devastated, hurt, angry, fearful -- and grief stricken.  We each get swept up in a series of events that happened in the same space and timeframe, but for each one of us the impacts of those events feel different -- and that difference has driven us apart form one another.  For the three of us, wrapped up in one another for all these years, the sense of being pulled apart from one another -- of sometimes pushing one another away, is a devastation added to all the other pain we've experienced.  I feel completely bewildered, and I imagine I am not alone in that.  One particularly good description of the challenges of shared grieving in families is here.  Kathleen Gilbert's paper describes, in detail, how members of the same family, experiencing the same loss, may find themselves entirely alone in their grieving. According to Gilbert,only an individual can have a belief or value or world view or an understanding of something.  She writes: 

"Families do not grieve.  Only individuals grieve and they do so in several 

contexts, one of which is the family.  In the process of grieving in the 

family context, each family member makes certain assumptions about others 

... one of which may be that ... their grief should be the same. 

Alternatively, some may also assume a shared view that their loss is more 

significant than that of others, that they have suffered more ..."

We are holding on, as best we can, to what is left of our family and our love.  We each want to find a way through this awfulness.  These last weeks have been a lot like three drowning people in deep water, clawing away at one another just trying to get above the water and breathe for a minute.  I think we are coming to understand, just a little bit, that while we have all had a part of the experience of these last weeks, our experiences are different and our grief is parallel but not exactly shared or, in any workable sense, "the same."  We are learning, slowly, to be a bit gentle with one another, and to at least try and believe that the other parts of the family are doing the best they can. 

Sue