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:

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.

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