No Resonance with "Roles"

What I want to talk about in this post is a little bit how to navigate information when you are exploring resources on grief navigation.

The thing is, as you explore, some things will be helpful, some things will not be helpful (in a lukewarm way), and some things will not be helpful in a deeply affecting way, like you feel just completely misunderstood by them or maybe even offended.

This is normal and okay.  Sometimes we will experience all three of these things within the pages of one book.  It's okay.  My advice is to use what's helpful and discard what's not.  Who knows? What's unhelpful now may prove helpful later.  Or it might not.  It doesn't really matter.  If you are seeking help with your grief, you need to focus right now on what is helpful and soothing and makes you feel understood.

We are conditioned by society and our subcultures to think in very black and white terms, like everything fits into either "this" or "this." The older I get, the more bizarre this seems to me, since there's almost nothing in life that actually fits into two categories.  And yet the phenomenon persists.  

We do this with grief resources, too.  We try to fit it into "helpful" and "unhelpful." But it's really okay if something was just a little helpful.  Or if five chapters of a book on grief are helpful, but the other five were not particularly helpful.  We glean the good and shrug off the not so good.  It's okay to do that. 

One major example of this for me was that I really appreciated the book "On Grief and Grieving" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, which I read in the summer of 2020 as part of a grief group led by a friend of mine.  I have since recommended the book to many people and even given away a few copies.  I helped me to feel so understood (in the grief world of feeling constantly misunderstood) and validated.  I was also so thankful to hear them address all the misconceptions around the "stages" of grief and to clarify their intentions in laying out grief that way.

But there was one chapter called "Roles" that just did not resonate with me at all.  The gist of the chapter is that when you lose someone, you lose the roles they played in your life (I don't know, like travel buddy, bridge partner, shopping friend, lawn mower, handyman, etc.). And now you need to confront the loss of the roles and explore who will now fill those roles for you.

Maybe I should re-read the chapter to be more fair. But, my gosh, I just could not embrace this way of thinking about people.  It seemed truly so bizarre to me to think of people only in terms of the roles that they played for me, as if they were just actors in a play I was directing or robots I keep in a closet until I need their services.  I also can't see thinking this way about re-filling those roles.  

To me, if you lost someone, you grieve them and you grieve all you lost with them about your relationship.  To me, losses have always left these huge holes in my life.  I can almost visualize them as these huge chasms that I'm peering over the edge of into an abyss.  

But those holes are sacred.  I do not try to refill them and God help anyone else who tries.  There are few faster ways to enrage me, actually, then to try to somehow replace the person I lost. They remain like a shrine in my psyche. 

There will be men in my life that may be sort of fatherly to me, but no one will ever replace my dad.  That is a sacred hole.  I hate that it's there, but the only way I can see making it worse now that it exists is for someone to try to remove it.  It's there because it's there and I have to work on accepting it and moving forward with the hole. 

In the almost two years since Rebekah died, I am continually working on accepting that she is gone and that a friendship that endured nearly 30 years has come to an earthly end.  I am thankful that I have other close girlfriends in my life that have been such a deep source of comfort to me in this time...but never in any way would I want them to feel like they need to now fill the hole that Rebekah left.

And I don't want anyone trying to be Rebekah.  No one can be her.  No one knows our jokes, our history, our rhythms, no matter how much of it they were nearby for.  No one knows how many laughs, tears, and prayers held our friendship together for 30 years.  Our friendship was hard-won.  There were plenty of times either or both of us weren't sure it was worth the work.  But for love of each other, often in spite of our goofiness, we pressed on.

This friendship is not transferable upon death to someone else.  Friendship doesn't work like that.  Friendship is a custom-made garment, knit together stitch by stitch over days, weeks, years. It is not a one-size-fits-all or a hand-me-down.

When someone dies, you cannot replace that person nor can you expect someone else to replace them. You are not that person and you will never be that person and God didn't place you here on earth to be their replacement.  God is not asking you to be someone else and he's not asking you to simultaneously be two people.  You may acquire some new responsibilities in this situation, but you have not acquired a new personhood.  He created you with your own things to do, to be, and in relationship with him, you have the rest of your days to figure that out.

In my case, I am my own person.  I have my own life with my own responsibilities and priorities. I am not an extension of Rebekah.  I am not a backup Rebekah.  So (though it shouldn't even have to be pointed out) I will not try to be Rebekah for anyone in any way.  I am not her.  I will not fill her roles and I will not ask anyone to fill her roles in my life.

My friendship with Rebekah met its earthly end and was sealed with goodbyes on her deathbed.  It's my personal work, painful as it is, to make peace with that.  Part of that work is coming to see that commitment of time, heart, and energy as done for now. My friendship with Rebekah doesn't oblige me to take care of anyone else the way we cared for each other.  It doesn't mean now I transfer the banter, the sharing, the jokes, the gifts, the attention to someone else now. It doesn't give anyone else automatically the access to my time, my emotional energy, or my heart that Rebekah had.

If you think of people in terms of their roles in your life, that's your deal.  And good luck with maintaining any kind of relationships like that.  (If you're wondering why people don't respond to you the way you want, here's a huge clue, btw.) 

I do not think like this.  I think of people as a uniquely designed creation whose presence in my life may be a great gift to me (conversely, it may be a huge annoyance to me, but that's another blog post - ha!).  I may benefit from their presence, but the whole of who they are is not just what they bring to my life. They're a person with their own thing going on, and sometimes in some ways that thing might intersect with my thing in ways we enjoy. We co-exist; we do not coerce, control, or co-opt.

When I lost three people I loved over the course of just 12 weeks in 2019, I felt a lot of pressure from the eulogizing.  I started to question all my life choices and my head swirled with what it meant to carry on someone's legacy.  Should I get certified as a teacher and carry on Rebekah's legacy in that way?  Should I begin a Facebook prayer ministry like Jeff had?  Should I rethink hospitality and have the open-door policy my grandmother had?  I felt very overwhelmed, largely by guilt, by the contrast of who I was and who these people were.

By the grace of God, I soon began to realize that the best way to carry out someone's excellent legacy is to live out my personal giftings and callings and experiences in the same excellent way that these beloved ones did...and that is how I can honor them.  Not by becoming them, but by being the most excellent, generous, confident me in my things the way I saw them being in their things.  This gave me a lot of peace and at least a little guidance on how to move forward with these dear people as an enduring part of myself and my story.

For as much as grief is a confusing time, it can also be a clarifying time.  It can clarify what is helpful and what is not helpful.  It can clarify who is demanding too much of you or the wrong things from you and who is walking beside you without judgment or expectation.  It can clarify what you should and should not be spending your time on.  As much as I would prefer some other way to learn all this, grieving has afforded me all of them.