On Grief and Gratitude: Part 1
The month of gratitude is officially here. I have a lot of thoughts about grief and gratitude – so many that I’m going to focus on gratitude in a series of posts over the next three weeks. As we move into the holiday season, I hope you’ll find something that resonates.
Today, for week one, here’s what I want you to know: You aren’t obligated to feel grateful in your grief.
About 10 days after my sister died, I was talking with a friend who had known me and my sister for decades - someone who understood the true depth of my loss and who understood all the ways in which my sister and I were deeply connected. The conversation was so comforting, until my friend said, “At least you can feel grateful that you and your sister were so close.”
I still remember the feeling that arose within me when she uttered those words, and the wall that went up inside me as soon as she said them.
It was five days before Christmas. My beloved sister, bright and beautiful, was gone from this world forever. My entire world was shrouded in darkness, and I couldn't remember how to breathe. I knew that soon I was going to have to muster the will to wrap the Christmas gifts that she had bought for my children, knowing that these were the last gifts my kids would ever get from their Aunt Melissa.
Grateful? No. I did not feel grateful. Nothing that my sister and I had together before her death felt like a consolation for the pain I was feeling and for the life I would have to live without her.
I would wager that almost everyone who has experienced loss could tell some version of this story, of someone trying to fast forward them to the place of gratitude. One of the first things we tend to do in the face of loss is try to get people to focus on being thankful - for happy memories, for all the love that we shared with our person, for all that we still have left. We offer up gratitude to each other as though that is all we need to move through our pain.
To be clear, gratitude and grief absolutely can - and do - coexist. It is beautiful when grief and gratitude can sit alongside each other.
But if you aren’t feeling grateful? You aren’t obligated to feel that. You don’t have to try and bypass your pain or force yourself into the land of happy memories. You are allowed to feel however you feel in your grief - heartbroken, angry, anxious, jealous - without forcing yourself to manufacture gratitude.
And if it pisses you off when someone tells you that you should feel grateful, you aren’t wrong to feel that way. When someone is saying to you “at least you can be grateful,” what they are effectively doing (intended or not) is telling you to cheer up and not be so sad.
You are allowed to be sad. Perhaps even more to the point, you need to be sad if that’s what you’re feeling. Even if you haven’t experienced a recent loss, there are a lot of reasons for gratitude to feel complicated - our season of thankfulness is an extension of a holiday that represents a painful history of violence, colonization, and oppression. On top of that, it’s a heartbreaking and terrifying time in the world. It makes perfect sense that gratitude may not be at the top of your feelings list, regardless of what the calendar says.
Gratitude comes when it comes. Like grief, gratitude shifts and changes over time, and your relationship with it will change too. When gratitude knocks on your door, by all means invite it in, but don’t feel that you must go looking for it.
It’s okay if you don’t feel grateful.
Next week I’ll share some thoughts about the coexistence of grief and gratitude (because I’m here for that too!). Until then, take gentle care of yourself.
