Where ya gonna go?

It is ridiculously difficult to sit with a person who is grieving. It is ridiculously difficult to be a person who is grieving, for that matter. It may be easy at the beginning when the grief is fresh, and you as an onlooker are also fresh. But when the initial public fervor ends and all the out-of-town visitors move off the couch, reality sets in and it's difficult to be one of the friends who sticks around for the long haul. Grief is ugly, messy, and confusing, and it's easier to ignore than to deal with.

The reasons that we avoid grief are genuine and realistic. Grief is detrimental to our routines. Nothing else matters, even eating, when your child dies. How can a person work when they can't get out of bed? How can they feed the cat, pay the bills, make sure the kids make it to school in the morning? When we avoid grief, we avoid the complications that it brings to our lives.

I don't want to stick around. I don't want to see my friends in pain, not knowing when it will end. Yet at the same time, I am hurting too; I need hugs too. Maybe I need them for different reasons, but the sentiment is the same. We can help eachother in our pain, even if each person's pain is different. I may be in pain because I'm having huge life changes and feeling alone. You may be in pain because your brother died. But we can hug one another. We can eat together. We can sit and pet the cat together.

So recognize that grief is a part of life, an ugly, awful part of life, and be the friend that you yourself want to have. Look them in the eye. Recognize that your mere presence is evidence of grace. Repeat often.