grief, ur doin it rong

Before I begin, can I just say, Mother Nature is doin it rong too, because I had to cancel my plans for tonight due to impending blizzard conditions and I didn't even make the plans I was planning on making for tomorrow because I thought travel might be bad. However, if it stops snowing early enough tomorrow and I can get dug out, I might therefore be able to switch tonight's plans to tomorrow afternoon/evening, other plans not having been made. Got that? But, nevertheless, f u, atmospheric conditions. I got places to go and people to see and presents to exchange. Also? It snowed the Sunday before Xmas last year too. I remember it distinctly.

Now, on to other business! I've been reading a lot lately about people criticizing how *other people* grieve or express their grief or deal with their feelings around grief, to which I say, WTF? That's a little (ha!) presumptuous. Two particularly egregious examples were criticisms in spades about mothers grieving their dead children.

One of them you may have heard about. There's a woman who is apparently a well-known blogger and twitterer. Her husband is deployed and that's her target audience: women like her with kids whose husbands are in the military and overseas. She's built up a following. Well, recently her two year old drowned in their pool. She tweeted just before it happened (raising criticism, of course, that "if she didn't spend so much time online" her kid would be alive, which is ridic; the time it took her to type two sentences about the weather is less time than it would take her to go pee or make a sandwich, but I suppose moms of toddlers aren't allowed to do those things either unless the kid is in restraints). But the criticism is even more virulent that she tweeted from her cell at the hospital, asking for prayers, and then after she was informed he was dead, letting the people who were praying/sending good thoughts know. Apparently, reaching out through the internet for support in the midst of a horrible tragedy is at best evidence of mental disturbance and at worst, evil. I'm not sure what people thought she *should* be doing when trapped in one of those horrible ER or ICU waiting areas they stick you in when your loved one is trying to be resuscitated or otherwise worked on. Your options are wait and cry or cry and wait. Basically, that's all you can do. That she was able to also use that time to reach out to thousands of people and say, basically, something awful has happened, please think of us, would be to me a good thing. But then, y'all know I use my blog to shout out to the universe when I am scared or sad or anxious or in any other way in need of support and positive energy. I suppose that makes me mentally disturbed (shut up) and evil (shut up) too.

The other case was the woman on Hoarders whose clutter got way out of hand after her otherwise normal and healthy baby was stillborn because the cord wrapped around his neck. Even the most callous and critical of internet posters have to pretend to be sympathetic about a stillborn infant before they then, y'know, viciously excoriate the mother for her selfishness in wallowing in grief when she had two living children to take care of and the inexcusable sin of still being depressed three years after the fact. See, if something like that happened to *them*, they'd get immediate psychological help, which *would* help (perfectly!), and in 4 to 6 months, they'd be all over it like it never even happened. Or, they'd be nobly grief stricken but they'd still go through life perfectly, not letting it affect them or anyone else in any way. STFU.

That different humans process death and grief in different ways seems beyond the ken of these people. Let's take me, for example. When my grandmother, whom I was very close to, died, I grieved in what's probably the "socially accepted" way. I cried at the wake and funeral. I missed her terribly. I had vivid dreams about her for months afterwards. Eventually those dreams stopped, the missing her became less acute, I "got over it." When my mother died, it was different. I was numb. I didn't cry at the wake or funeral. In fact, one of my cousins whom I had been very close to as a young woman, kept me laughing through most of the wake. I think we probably got the side-eye from a few people for being inappropriate, but it was what I needed then. And then the rest of that summer I was still numb and, I dunno, acting out. Going out a lot, uncharacteristic casual sex, that sort of thing. It wasn't until September, near her birthday that I finally cried for my mom. I was in a store, I saw a cookbook by a TV chef that she always watched, it occurred to me she would have liked that for her birthday, I broke out crying in the store over the fact that I'd never buy her a birthday gift again. Numbness thawed. Began to process my grief. Eventually got past it.

Two different griefs, two different grieving processes. Both what I needed at whatever particular moment. Is it bad that one of them did not follow the prescribed social script? I don't think so. And a hearty f u to anyone who gave me the side-eye for laughing at the wake. Another hearty f u to self-righteous people who dare to criticize how anyone else handles their personal tragedies.

That's all I've got to say about that!

xoxo