Our ineptitude for grief

Today the Go Fund Me page will be taken down for the survivors and families of the Humboldt Broncos tragedy. Smart move by Kevin Garinger. He seems like a very intelligent man.

Every day I’m seeing posts on Twitter and the news about services being held for the victims. We’re learning about the whole person, rather than the hockey player, the background to the names and faces that have been etched into our minds over the past two weeks. It’s hard to believe it’s only been two weeks! Slowly, other news items are creeping in, and a nation’s attention shifts back to mindless scrolling through political tensions, racism, sexism, any other kind of ism that manages to find someone to offend. As the services are held, and the casserole dishes get returned, the families of the fallen make an attempt to pick up the pieces of their shattered hearts as they search for a “new normal” to stabilize their world.

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed yesterday and saw an acquaintance post that his mother had passed away. I don’t know this person exceptionally well, and I certainly didn’t know his mother, but I knew, as a friend, that I should at the very least acknowledge his loss. Do I hit the sad face emoji? The heart? Do I post a comment saying how sorry I am for him and his family, only to receive 50 notifications over the next hour of everyone else’s feeble attempt to say something? Do I scroll through the posts of broken hearts and a hug emoji that have become today’s ways of communicating because words escape us? I wondered in that moment – how many people just scroll past? Does he feel loved or some other weird feeling when a someone he barely knows acknowledges his grief? Do all of these questions rolling around in my brain influence my decision to be authentic and loving towards him?

When I was in breast cancer treatment, I learned that on a mass scale, people simply do not have the capacity, nor the social awareness, to deal with grief or pain. Time goes by, and moments slip past, and what at one point would have been an appropriate acknowledgement suddenly seems weird because too much time has passed. We have missed our imagined window of opportunity to say something. I think of the families of the Humboldt players, who right about now will start to see people -some of whom will have that have stepped up in enormous ways – slowly fade back into the fabric as they “leave you to your grief.” It’s too painful to endure. It’s too heavy, too big. My heart breaks for them for the thousandth time, as I know from personal experience that the next phase of “finding out who your friends are” will be like a death of a million paper cuts – a new wound opening up each time someone pulls away.

When you encounter someone’s grief, what is your reaction? What is your process? Do you drive past the accident, secretly so thankful that it’s not your own life in the wreckage? Do you think to yourself – they have so many people surrounding them, they’ll never notice if I recede?

I have often told my boys – it’s better to say “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to say” than to say nothing at all. Acknowledgment of the awkwardness, of our futility and helplessness, is an important step to healing. Our own discomfort is a very very small price to pay when someone is going through hell.

I want to encourage you. Say the thing. Be responsible for your own actions. Do not create significance on imaginary barriers or social niceties or rules of engagement that don’t actually exist. It is only when we are honest about our ineptness that we can truly show love to the broken.