By Dixie 
I saw an article the other day that said Americans do not do grief well anymore. We bring rules and expectations like speaking softly at the funeral home, telling the family “If there is anything I can do…” and bringing fried chicken and casseroles to the house. There are cards, phone calls and visits for the first few weeks, then a few people may leave messages like “how ARE you, I hope you are doing well, and, again, if there is anything I can do…”
For the first month or so, people will walk across the grocery store aisle to offer hugs and stories about the person who died. After then, a squeeze of the shoulder, and a “How are you?” but eventually some will look away quickly in the checkout line or post office and pretend they didn’t see you.
It’s OK. I understand. I have been there.
After a few times of seeing the sadness still lingering, it is hard to know what to say. You get frustrated that the grieving person doesn’t seem to be moving on and you want your old friend back. The unspoken rule is: grieve, then get over it. We’ll give you about 6 months max to go back to normal.
But the problem is that normal will never feel normal again to the person left behind. Your friend will not be the same person. Grief changes everyone. There are dreams that died and a future that will not happen. There are ‘what if’ questions and loneliness. There is also a softer person left behind.
I never understood really deep grief until my sister in law and my Daddy passed away. My parents were the younger siblings in their large families so I grew up going to funerals of older Aunts and Uncles and Grandparents. It seemed common to attend a funeral every couple of years and it was like a family reunion. Everybody laughed and joked and told funny stories about the person who had died, then we went home and everything was normal again.
But it’s not normal now. We laughed with our remaining family and friends, wrote thank you notes and tried to be normal. We watered the peace lilies and brought silk flowers to the gravesite.
Every holiday, every sporting event, certain foods, smells and changing of the seasons brings a fresh wave of ‘not normal’. There is the jolt of realizing Poppy is not here, and the remembering of last year, and the reality of ‘never again’ are like tearing a Band-Aid off a wound trying to heal. Over and over.
Should we stuff those feelings down? Should we just ‘get over it and move on’?
How do you do that? How do you keep up your guard against grief in the middle of the night when the feeling overwhelms your sleep? How do you smell Listerine or see his electric razor and his dental floss still in the bathroom drawer? How do you make breakfast, fry baloney for lunch, make the crispy flat things only he could make out of cornmeal? How do you see his enormous shoes still in the closet, his shirts, his socks? How do you sit down to a meal you don’t want to eat because he is not there to share it with?
Instead, we continue to walk forward, day by day and sometimes hour by hour and we try to create normal again. We try to find joy and hope in the future and we remember.
I know now that grief doesn’t actually end. You just learn to move forward as best you can and in your own time. That is our new normal.