Tag Archives: Cindy

Terminal Cancer, Day by Day

The Circle of Grief

2 Comments

My homework for meeting #2 of my bereavement support group is to read the first 19 pages of Alan D. Wolfelt’s Understanding Your Grief: Ten Essential Touchstones for Finding Hope and Healing Your Heart.

Page 18 says this:

… if you avoid your pain, the people around you will not have to “be with” you in your pain or experience their own pain. While this may be more comfortable for them, it would prove to be unhealthy for you.

Dr. Wolfelt’s point is that grieving people often repress their grief due to peer pressure from folks saying “buck up! Get over it.”

But my experience has been the opposite. If anything, reading this makes me see that my own numbness after Brock’s death made it harder (maybe impossible) for our friends and family to mourn, at least when they were with me.

Because: the circle of grief.

What is the circle of grief?

I (think I) first read about the circle of grief in a blog post by my amazing writer friend Cindy, who has chronicled her and her husband’s difficult experience with infertility. The circle of grief (or “ring theory”) model looks like this:

circle of grief model
I did not draw this graphic. I borrowed it from the Interwebs. Thanks, Interwebs!

The idea is that the person most affected by a horrible event (say, Brock when he was diagnosed with cancer, or me and Isaac when Brock died) is at the centre of this model. The next ring out would be our family, then our closest friends, then more friends, then colleagues and farm customers, etc.

Wherever you are in the model, you are allowed to “dump” on the people in rings outside of your own: you can lean on them for support, cry and rage. But you can’t “dump” on someone in a ring closer to the centre than your own. Your job is to support those people. So if the person at the centre is, say, at a 0 emotionally (on a scale of 0-10), then you have to be at least a 1. If they’re having a good day and are at a 6, you have to be 7+ when you’re around them.

I’ve found the circle of grief model very helpful in understanding how to behave in emotionally difficult situations (e.g. funerals) and also when comforting friends when they’re going through hard times, but it was a tricky rule to follow when Brock was dying. He was the centre of that event, and my job was to support him, not to “dump” on him, but he had been my best friend, confidante and life partner for 11 years and it was very hard to break that habit. I had to separate myself from that 50-50 partnership in order to be his caregiver and support person. The loss of that partnership was yet another loss to grieve.

So! Back to my point: when I was the centre, after Brock died, our family and friends were standing by, ready to support me. And they did this in many ways, through the memorial service and helping us move to the East Kootenays. But because I was numb and not grieving in an expected way, that left my rings of supporters a bit stuck. I was (usually) functioning at an 8, so that forced them to be a 9 or 10 around me.

As Patti said one evening, when a group of my lady friends gathered, and I cried briefly, my crying “gave them permission” to cry themselves. (On our 0-10 scale, I dipped to a 1, but only for a few minutes.)

But by not crying most of the time, my friends and family didn’t have that permission most of the time.

Which is not to say that they didn’t grieve when they were apart from me. I sure hope they did, and are working through their own grief at losing Brock.

As you know, I felt self-conscious and awkward about my unexpected, numb response for months. I wanted to set the tone for how Brock’s loss impacted our community/world (it was such a loss!), but I wasn’t able to do that, because my brain and heart didn’t know how to handle that huge magnitude of loss.

So if I’m the centre of this particular catastrophe, the catastrophe of losing Brock at age 38 to cancer, then I want you “ringers” to know that my numbness is thawing. I’m trying really hard to figure out how to let myself feel the sadness (despite my default perky nature) and make a future where Brock can still be part of my and Isaac’s lives, in a good way.

I think of Brock every single day. And lately I’ve been able to cry every single day too, because everything reminds me of him, even though we’re now living in a different town surrounded by different people.

So, if you haven’t already, you can turn around now, and lean on the people in the next ring.

Brock & Heather get hitched (April 9, 2012).

#

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please post a comment below, share this post online or read more posts on this website.

To join me on this epic adventure of being a writer, subscribe to my monthly email newsletter: click here to sign up.

A Year of Re-Skilling

A Meeting of Minds

Leave a comment

I was so nervous before our first meeting. There would be speaking in front of a group. This group was comprised of some of the most remarkable women I’ve met in my three years in Duncan. They were all superstars. I didn’t want to be in charge, to tell them what the rules were and the lofty achievements I expected from them as participants. I wanted it to be a collective effort, a shared experience.

They were so gracious and supportive, reclining on the cosy couches of Affinity Guesthouse, sipping their Teafarm tea and praising the bizarre food I’d brought them. Green tea cookies, baked an hour before. Sprouted wheat bread — “manna bread,” as Vanessa called it. Garlic scape jelly that Cindy had made and given me. Cheese made from yogurt, a byproduct of the whey extraction necessary to make the fermented sodas that they bravely drank. The kombucha in a pickle jar. The menu theme was “things I learned to make in 2010.” Not-so-subtle inspiration for our year ahead.

I lurched through the notes I’d made, explaining what I thought the group could be, the commitment I was proposing, the guidelines that I thought would keep us on track. Heather K. nodded encouragingly, Maeve backed me up on the “women only” rule. The two requirements for our group were:

  1. commit to learning a new practical skill as a group once a month in 2011, and
  2. commit to sharing your experience through your art, whatever that may be.

I’d invited writers/bloggers, two photographers, an audio artist, jewellery makers, print makers, and numerous Jane-of-all-trades, or “dabblers” as Vanessa self-identified.

A print by Tanya, Renaissance Woman

We brainstormed the skills we’d always wanted to learn: how to milk a cow, how to make bread from a sourdough starter, how to shoot a gun. How to back up a trailer. We used up all the poster-sized sheets of paper I’d brought, taping them to the large windows along the North wall. Who knew there were this many skills to learn? Most of us are in our 30s: what have we been doing with our lives?

Then we voted with markers, “x”ing or checking or smiley-facing 10 skills each. I felt powerful, selecting what I would do over the next year. Literally choosing, with every smiley face.

By this point we had become a group. I didn’t want to interrupt the conversations that had started. Many of these women had heard of one another. Some knew each other, but mostly superficially. In our introductions we’d shared our names, what kind of art we did, and any practical skills we had. It was an inventory of superpowers, and we were a powerful bunch.

Eventually I read out the skills that had received the most votes. These were our top 10 skills, and would be our priorities for the months ahead:

  • make, distill and use essential oils
  • make fermented sodas and other fermented drinks (kombucha)
  • make yogurt
  • milk a cow/goat/water buffalo
  • cheese making & wine appreciation
  • sew from a pattern
  • identify wild, edible plants and mushrooms
  • use sourdough starter to make bread
  • make ice cream, without an ice cream maker
  • make soap

We also had four “runner up” skills that would be our back-ups, in case we couldn’t find a cheesemaker teacher or get together enough sewing machines:

  • beekeeping
  • build a cob oven
  • make paper
  • kill a chicken & process it

With five vegetarians in the group and only four votes being cast in favour of learning the skill, the chicken workshop was relegated to the bottom of the list.

Some of us then volunteered to organize a workshop: our February meeting now depends on who confirms a workshop first.

At some point in the discussion the name “Renaissance Women” was suggested, which was generally adopted despite my inability to spell it without help. I promised to set up a group emailing list to facilitate private group communication and a Facebook Page to share our experiences with our friends.

And so: whew. I made it through our first meeting thanks to two cups of herbal tea, a cookie that Katie had brought, and a piece of Heather K.’s amazing olive oil, rosemary and chocolate cake to calm my anxiety. Now that the ship has launched, I can relax on deck and get to know my fellow passengers. And I will have to start writing again.