After the loss (16 years ago) of both my parents within a period of six months, I was hit with the sudden reality that my sister and I had become orphans. Yes, we were fully grown and with families of our own, but suddenly the previous generation was no more. We had become the old ones, and there was nobody that we could fall back on.
My grief was a little more pointed, and poignant. For a couple of decades, my mother had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and my father devoted most of that time to her care - and eventually to visiting her every day in the care facility. Just as they were able to ease back from the hard life of a first generation migrant, and as their children produced the grandchildren they were so keen to know, neither of them really had a chance to enjoy them, nor for their grandchildren to really know them. This was despite my father living with us for many years prior to their passing.
Grief is often described as something to “work through”, as though it were a difficult passage with a clear exit. Elizabeth Gilbert’s conversation about love and loss allows for a messier truth. A person can be functioning, grateful, busy and still caught by absence, and by sorrow about the past, at an inconvenient moment.
That should make us more careful with one another. The bereaved do not always need instruction, optimism or a lesson extracted from what happened. Sometimes they need room to speak of the people who have gone without being hurried towards a brighter subject.
Loss changes the scale of ordinary things. A song, a chair, a phrase once used in passing can suddenly carry more weight than a formal anniversary. Friendship has a role here: to remain available when the public period of sympathy has passed and the private work - the day to day necessities of modern life and society - continues.
Grief rarely follows the timetable other people expect. Staying present after the first wave of sympathy has passed can be a quiet form of friendship.