"Should"

The first thing began to understand about grief is that I knew so little about it. As a concept I thought I understood the emotion and effects, I had seen it portrayed, read about it, experienced losses close to me but until my father died I didn't understand that grief was a totally invading force that was so alien to me. In my experience as a relatively young person going through this I quickly realized that in American culture there is such an avoidance of death and the only real exposure to it is often in media. Death is sensationalized and heart wrenching in movies and TV. We are hit with extremes and manipulated emotions before going to commercial break. That version of death and grief is fantasy. You are lead to believe that if you aren't sobbing for days on end laying on a bathroom floor, or spiraling out of control that you aren't grieving "correctly". I never saw someone sitting on the couch, vacant, empty and silent. All sense of taste gone, all motivation slipping away, trapped between the living and the dead. That wouldn't make for good television.

I decided quickly that I was not going to include the word "Should" in my vocabulary or inner monologue. I was bombarded by "Shoulds" and often "Should nots". Friends and family were full of ideas of what I should do, when I should do it or what I should not do. I tried not to be angry but it certainly can be exhausting. A perfect example is how people would often feel that shielding me from any upsetting content was an act of kindness and honestly I don't hold that against them. When someone is in pain we want to protect them from the source or reminder of that, but grief is different. It's not a physical wound and we don't want to avoid the source because the source of the pain is the same source of the love we have for the person who is gone. It's a terrible double edged awareness. We want to cherish the memories but in those early stages of grief the sense of loss hits harder than the sense of remembrance and the pain can be overwhelming.

I recall a moment when friends came to watch a movie and while scrolling through Netflix, trying to decide what to watch we came across a title (I honestly don't even remember what the movie was or even what we eventually watched) and Kienan quickly moved past it and said to our friends "Oh we shouldn't watch that, the dad dies", his voice dropping so as not to alert me to the reasoning. Of course I heard it and I was appreciative of the protective intuition but at the same time I wanted to yell "It's not like I could forget that my father is dead!" I managed to avoid saying that but it certainly shot through my head.

Those early months were full of moments like that. Trying to navigate a minefield of normal interactions and helpful advice. "You should sleep more. You should sleep less. You should shower. You should eat. You should cry. You should go outside. You shouldn't stay in bed." There were many conflicting "shoulds" and it took a lot of time for me to really look at where these "shoulds" came from. Now there is a difference between self care and harm. There were absolutely times that I needed to stay in bed, but it is equally important to get back up.