There Is No Good Card for This

by Dr. Kelsey Crowe

  But Alexandra wasn’t back to normal; there was no normal to go back to. There was just this new reality in which everything she did felt inappropriate: she was fine one minute, then crying uncontrollably as a sudden wave of grief hit her. (Bonus points if it happened in a really public place, like the fruit section of the grocery store.) She didn’t know how to relate to anyone, and she didn’t know how to talk about it. When friends called, she could hardly stand to hear her own bullshit: I’m okay, I’m fine. Worse, though, was hearing the truth: she felt hopeless and alone. At a certain point, it was easier to just not answer the phone.

  WHAT DOES GRIEF LOOK LIKE?

  For starters, grief usually comes with some kind of tangible primary loss. It can be loss of mobility, energy, or appearance if dealing with health. It can be loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of a marriage. Even in depression, there is loss of the ability to feel just about anything. Caregivers of people who are ill lose companionship they counted on. People who experience miscarriage and infertility experience the loss of a dream of the future. These are the key primary losses a person may experience during grief:

  •LOSS OF IDENTITY

  We often underestimate how much we rely on easy narratives about who we are in the world until we’re blindsided by a primary loss that strips us bare of them.

  •LOSS OF COMPANIONSHIP

  Our most difficult times often, at their core, are about a significant loss of companionship. Losing someone really close to us to death or significant illness or divorce can radically shift the make-up of our interior, intimate lives and our days. When the person we talk to the most, confide in, get opinions from, and love the deepest is gone, the hole that is left behind is vast and aching beyond measure.

  •LOSS OF COMMUNITY

  Loss and transition affect not only our most intimate relationships; they change our community as well, and that change usually feels really lonely. We may lose the friends and family of our loved one that is gone. We may lose people we thought we were close to because they don’t know what to do or say. We can also isolate ourselves because we fear what our community might do or say, or because we don’t have the emotional or physical energy to engage.

  •LOSS OF CONFIDENCE

  People who’ve been fired, who are dealing with a new illness, who are getting divorced, you name it—loss can create some of the most demanding responsibilities in our lives about our well-being, medical and legal options, our finances, where we’ll live, or how we’ll raise our children, exactly at a time when we have the fewest emotional reserves to learn and cope.

  •LOSS OF ECONOMIC SECURITY

  Loss can create economic stress—like increased health-care costs, the cost of divorce attorneys, loss of income, child-care costs, and a host of other expenses. One woman struggling to carry the costs of infertility treatments put it this way: “It’s hard to accept a dinner invitation when what it will cost would pay for my blood draw.”

  Accompanying these primary losses are secondary losses that are more subtle, and often more difficult emotionally to deal with. However, and this is great news for our purposes, the emotional effects of these secondary losses can, with the support of friends, feel less hurtful over time. Here is a list of secondary losses, which are emotions, we experience when life gets hard:

  HOPELESS: THE THING ABOUT GRIEF IS THAT IT CAN SEEM LIKE

  IT WILL NEVER, EVER END.

  And in a number of ways, it doesn’t. As anyone in the grief world knows, you don’t get over loss. You learn to live with it. But until that happens, the light at the end of the tunnel is not a thing—or if it is, it’s just barely visible on the best days.

  SCARED: Fear often accompanies loss, illness, divorce, or any kind of transition, because you have no idea what’s ahead of you. You end up worrying about the worst that could happen (and, thanks to the magic of the Internet, worrying is easier than ever before).

  VULNERABLE: If your illness or treatment has caused you to look different, your appearance elicits concern (and questions, and strange looks), turning your rituals of everyday life, like grocery shopping, into a public spectacle. Even if you don’t look different on the outside, news of a change, like divorce or job loss or fertility struggles, invites speculation that can make your life feel like fodder for gossip.

  ASHAMED: Grief, fear, and our deepest feelings of failure can make us blame ourselves for causing what happened or, at least, failing to cope with it. Shame makes us feel unentitled to our own grief and fears. It looks like this:

  What does experiencing loss, hopelessness, fear, vulnerability, and shame mean about receiving help?

  “ASKING MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A BURDEN.”

  When in the thick of our rough times, we can feel utterly undeserving of love and attention and think we’re just taking and taking, being a burden. Even if we’re comfortable asking for help in normal circumstances, many of us would rather suffer in silence than reach out for help at our worst.

  “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WTF I NEED.”

  People who are suffering may not even know what they need until it sneaks up on them, and they realize they’ve been surviving for three days on Diet Coke and Twizzlers. Often, when we’re suffering, outsiders see our work projects suffering, circles under our eyes getting darker, and dishes piling up in the sink more quickly than we do.

  “I’M OVERWHELMED.”

  Crying for days on end, feeling numb, not sleeping for weeks, pretending to not be grieving so other people feel more comfortable around you—it’s all exhausting. Keeping a lid on the chaos we call “life” is hard enough as it is, but then when we’re at our lowest, and possibly consumed with a host of additional responsibilities related to our difficult time, life becomes one big tornado of unmanaged to-dos like laundry, shopping, cleaning, kids, and so on. Projects at work and at home don’t stop just because your world did. Figuring out what needs to be done, and then, who can do it—which means assigning and coordinating jobs, managing people’s feelings around jobs they’re given, and dealing with the occasional lack of follow-through—is enough to make anyone want to crawl into a hole and do nothing.

  THE UPSHOT?

  IF A PERSON IS SOBBING OVER A PILE OF DISHES AND A PILE OF BILLS—

  AND WHAT FEELS LIKE A PILE OF RUBBLE THAT WAS FORMERLY THEIR LIFE-

  IT CAN FEEL PAINFUL AND EVEN POINTLESS TO ASK FOR HELP.

  This means that as a caring bystander, you have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to show up and offer help without being asked. Yes, this can feel really awkward and uncomfortable when you’re not used to it. But if you’re worried that you’ve screwed up in trying to offer support, said the wrong thing, or felt like the biggest idiot—remember that you’re not feeling half as terrible as the person at the center of it.

  REACHING OUT AND FUMBLING IS OFTEN FAR BETTER THAN NOT REACHING OUT AT ALL.

  PART TWO:

  THE THREE TOUCHSTONES OF

  SHOWING UP

  CHAPTER 3:

  YOUR KINDNESS IS YOUR CREDENTIAL

  “Having a serious illness can feel very isolating. The worst thing someone can do is to do and say nothing for fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. That just deepens those feelings of isolation.”

  —Terry, who had stage 3 colon cancer

  Well, this is what this feels like, thought Maddie, as she cleared her desk of paper clips and dumped the box of glitter pens into her computer bag. (With all the years of service she had given, she figured she deserved some freakin’ pens.) I’ve seen this happen enough times, I should’ve known it would happen to me eventually. She spent a couple of hours writing down important contacts and looking at examples of work she was proud of before slipping them into her bag. But she couldn’t escape without first enduring the dreaded walk of shame.

  Keep your head up, like it was any other day, she told herself. She walked through the corridor of glass offices on the eleventh floor, each one filled with colleagues who, under normal circumstanc
es, would probably look up and nod, smile, give her some kind of hand signal about getting drinks later.

  As she walked out, Maddie wished she’d understood what getting canned felt like sooner, because she was pretty sure she had been one of those avoiders. And she wished she had known that it wouldn’t have taken much to offer a small gesture, a token of kindness—anything instead of this whole lot of nothing.

  Billionaire businessman and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg was asked about being fired from Solomon Brothers. He said he still remembers every person who reached out to him when he was let go. On the other hand, he said, he can’t remember any of the people who called when he was promoted. That experience taught him to take an admired colleague who’d been fired out to lunch, in the most visible part of a restaurant.

  Maybe because our lives can get more and more mundane the older we get, we find that what sustains us over the long haul—past all the breakups and professional screwups and weight gain and hair loss—is not the glittery connections we make when feeling on top of the world, but those we forge when we’re at our lowest.

  At its most basic, being supportive is all about having concern for our fellow human beings, a concern that leads to some kind of comforting action. With that,

  MEET OUR FIRST TOUCHSTONE OF SHOWING UP:

  YOUR KINDNESS IS YOUR CREDENTIAL.

  WHY KINDNESS MATTERS

  The value of simple kindness can be hard to accept when you’re trying to learn the Perfect Way to comfort someone, especially when you’re anxious about what not to do or say. This is why Dr. Charles Garfield, founder of the Shanti Project, which trains volunteers to care for the sick, opens up his training with the following: “Everyone wants skills. How to say this? How to do that? But when people are dying, no amount of skills will earn you trust like the kindness that brings you to them in the first place. If you take nothing else from this training, take this: Your kindness is your credential.”

  HOW DO PEOPLE WHO CARE

  GET PAST THAT STIGMA AND ACTUALLY SHOW UP?

  At its core, kindness is a total absence of ego and self-interest in doing something for someone else. The defining feature of kindness is that it comes unsolicited, and in its most awe-inspiring moments, it comes to the aid of those who are shunned. People who experience loss through suicide also experience stigmatized loss, and many of them have participated in Kelsey’s research.

  Their examples of support show that when it comes to reaching out, smooth talk isn’t a requirement. As one woman described:

  “It wasn’t easy for people to speak to me about my mother’s suicide. It certainly wasn’t easy for my cousin, who was clearly reading her condolences off a script she wrote. In fact, her demonstration of effort mattered more to me than whatever it is she said. Every gesture was like rain falling on drought-stricken land, because I was just deprived of the wealth of condolences that people usually receive when someone dies.”

  ALL OUR DIFFICULT TIMES INVOLVE SOME DEGREE OF SHAME, FEAR, AND LONELINESS. AT TIMES LIKE THAT, WE DON’T NEED ANYONE TO IMPRESS US OR SKILLFULLY TALK US OUT OF OUR PAIN.

  WE MOSTLY JUST NEED THE KINDNESS THAT COMPELS ANYONE TO TRY.

  WHY KINDNESS?

  Kindness comes from a basic social emotion: compassion. But what is compassion, exactly? There are a ton of competing definitions and theories about compassion (and empathy and altruism and sympathy and, yes, kindness). A definition of compassion that we like comes from researchers at the University of Michigan’s Compassion Lab:

  COMPASSION IS TO NOTICE, FEEL, AND RESPOND.

  First, we have to notice, and as simple as that sounds, we miss opportunities to show compassion all the time, because we can easily fail to notice someone’s pain or fear. Seeing or anticipating someone’s difficulty is a clear first step in providing them comfort.

  We also have to feel for that person. This is what emotions expert Dr. Paul Ekman calls EMOTIONAL RESONANCE, and it is not to be confused with “identical resonance,” where someone feels the exact thing as someone else. That person’s support would be highly unhelpful. If you see someone’s hand on fire, for example, and feel your hand burn just as intensely, then your capacity to fetch some ice and treat your friend is greatly diminished, because you’re focusing on your own flaming hand.

  INSTEAD, EMOTIONAL RESONANCE IS WHEN YOU FEEL ENOUGH TO BE CONCERNED, BUT NOT ENOUGH TO REQUIRE GETTING YOUR OWN SUPPORT, TOO.

  And finally, when you notice and feel for someone’s pain, you respond with a supportive emotion or gesture. Political scientist Kristin Monroe, who explores the development of moral courage in her work, gives us valuable steps to understanding the act of compassion. To summarize, Monroe suggests a compassionate response is something we do, not just think about. Its benefit is solely for the other person, and the act might even diminish our welfare without any expectation of recognition on our part.

  That’s a pretty heroic list, which is why Monroe defines this set of qualities as “heroic compassion.” To be clear, such diminishment is not about forking over our savings, our home, or quitting our jobs to help anyone in need at any personal cost. It is, however, about inconveniencing yourself for someone else.

  We’ve all fallen short of being heroic in our compassion. Emily may “feel” for her neighbor’s exhaustion after having a second baby, but she hasn’t actually done anything that has positive consequences for her. Why? Because Emily is overwhelmed with work right now and hasn’t made helping her neighbor a priority.

  please don’t judge her.

  Sometimes, we just can’t do the right thing. Sometimes it’s because we don’t care enough about the welfare of a particular person to inconvenience ourselves, and sometimes it’s just because life gets in the way. The way we see it:

  1.WE DON’T HAVE THE CAPACITY TO REACH OUT TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN NEED.

  2.BUT, IN REALITY, WE CAN USUALLY REACH OUT MORE THAN WE THINK, AND IT GETS EASIER WITH PRACTICE.

  Compassion gets easier because it’s rewarding, and just like little rats that learn how to navigate their way out of a maze with treats, we humans are motivated by positive reinforcement too. You don’t have to believe in karma to understand that physiological, neurological, and hormonal changes occur when we do something kind for someone else (they are scientifically proven). We think that by noticing these physiological and psychological (and we’ll throw in moral) rewards of compassion, we’re more apt to do good for others, because we are more likely to do what feels good.

  Sure, your aunt Gail may have noticed you didn’t send a thank-you note for her wedding gift. But if you haven’t spoken to Aunt Gail in twenty years, and you find out her second husband, Harold, has died, you may wonder if you should reach out. She wouldn’t necessarily notice if you didn’t, but the point is: What would you feel if you did?

  And, finally, while it’s pretty obvious, it’s worth stating because it’s so important to our happiness: being kind in your relationships makes your relationships stronger and makes you a happier person. All that knowledge should help tilt the scale away from the cons of reaching out (fear, inconvenience) toward the pro side (happiness, better relationships).

  WHAT COMPASSION FEELS LIKE

  So let’s say you are feeling (heroically) ready to be compassionate. Fantastic. In chapters 4, 5, and 6 we explore what compassionate behavior looks like. For now, we explore the nature of compassion: the thing that compels us to inconvenience ourselves, maybe even skip that one really good yoga class with the really good teacher, in order to help out someone we care for.

  At its core, compassion is the acceptance of suffering. That does not mean full detachment, in which you don’t give a damn, like “hey, stuff happens, move on.” And it’s not an intellectual acceptance of suffering that has you looking at someone’s personal tragedy through a cold haze of statistics. “Well, you know, only one out of five wind up . . .” Rather, compassion is the acceptance that awful stuff can happen to any of us. In fact, that bad thi
ngs happen to good people all the time.

  At the same time, compassion does not mean having a freakout or wincing at somebody’s suffering, which feels more like pity than compassion.

  ACKNOWLEDGING SOMEONE’S PAIN BY FEELING FOR THEM, BUT NOT ACTUALLY FEELING WITH THEM, IS THE OPPOSITE OF SUPPORTIVE COMPASSION.

  People with disabilities and the elderly get this a lot too, as though they have suffered a permanent, chronic, and entirely negative change that makes them someone different. As if their whole personhood has vanished in the face of this awful, horrible thing that they’re now living with.

  COMPASSION ≠ PITY.

  When you recognize that bad things happen to good people, and also, that bad things actually happen to you—it creates a connection around suffering that is a two-way relationship between equals. Compassion is not a relationship built on a notion of one always-messed-up person matched with one always-saving-the-world person. It is built upon each of us being messed up in many points of our lives.

  EMPATHY WORKOUT:

  GETTING IN THE WELL

  The greatest comfort comes when we’re able to climb down into the “well of suffering” with a fellow human being. Here are two mental tricks to help you get down in there and feel with instead of for:

  •Every time you feel for someone else’s pain, imagine a time when you were feeling similarly. Don’t dwell on that feeling, but touch upon it briefly and then let that personal pain go, returning to your focus on the other person.

  •Remember the person you feel sad for is a whole person, made up of way more than their current situation. Conjure up their positive qualities, like their tenacity, their humor, their work drive—things that you believe will help get them through this shitty or scary time, and that continue to make them a remarkable person. And if you don’t know them well, imagine they have these qualities. Because chances are, they do.