Telling off the Girl Friends and Finding out this is Grief

Yesterday I was miserable with pain: angry, pissy, complaining to my friends. Work feels impossible and wherever I am I am in the wrong place. If I’m at work I want to be home with John. If I am home I think I should be at work managing the small organization where I am the director. When I watch TV with John I think I should be writing, when I am writing I think I should go see a friend or do errands or make a nice meal for him. I can’t do it all and I am frustrated. But last night I also learned—even as I got really angry at my friends—that I am also grieving. John was diagnosed six weeks after we moved in together. WE didn’t get a honeymoon or a chance to fight over the TV remote or where his clothes go in my apartment.

Here is the email I sent to my friends late last night:


Be my friend and listen to my pain. Hear me. See me. Support me. Stop trying to fix me stop trying to make my pain stop. My pain is real and authentic and devastating. Let me be a bitch. Let me howl. Let me say how horrible and awful this is without trying to hurry and make it go away.

I am grieving. I am grieving the loss of the man I left my marriage for and I am grieving the loss of the relationship I thought I was entering in February. In April that man and that relationship disappeared. It shifted dramatically. I am still with John and still in a caring relationship but it bears little resemblance to the love I was looking at in February and the relationship I thought I was entering.

Yes all relationships change and yes all people turn out to be different but that doesn’t mean I have to give up the grief.

You of all people should understand grief and have the moral courage to let someone be in their grief with out platitudes and without trying to fix.

I’m a manager. Being told to delegate is crazy. If there was a puppy left at my office he’d be typing right now…I don’t need ice cream or management advice at least not from my friends. I need to have my grief be validated. I need to have my friends say "Yes, You really got a raw deal and this is exactly as horrid as you think it is". I need my friends to say, "no wonder your heart is breaking. It’s because your heart is being smashed to tiny pieces every day and we get that, no wonder you have anxiety and fear and panic and sadness".

I need my friends to remind me that. I can go deeply into the pain not run from it, not cover it up in ice cream and new shoes and martinis and distractions. I need my friends to remind me that I have strength and my deepest hope is that my friends have the strength to witness this without trying to fix it. There is no fix. Only grief and howling terribly as long as the pain lasts.

I have been awake all night. Mad at you but that led me to walking and howling at the moon—for real. I am so lonely. Not for chatting or pep talks but deeply lonely because the man that I love cannot see me and he cannot see the loss of the relationship because he has to believe he doesn’t have cancer and he has to believe that he is not dying so now the very person I most want to share my pain and grief with has the dilemma of his very psychic survival preventing him from being able to help me. I talked to John last night about some of this but finally realized he needs to NOT believe he is ill or dying. He needs to be positive and treat this like a problem to be solved. He needs that mind set for himself but that of course leaves me out and sadly lonely.

I need my friends to get that. Not fix it, not absolve it, not give me suggestions but to really get the depth of this pain.