During hiatus week, I traveled to Austin to spend time with an old friend, and to attend a memorial service for his wife, who passed in November. While there, I had a lot of time to reflect and think about grief. At the memorial, I chatted with my friend’s sister, Maria.
She lost her young adult daughter to leukemia about 4 years ago. Her daughter always struck me as having this ageless wisdom and ability to see right through people, if that makes any sense. Her loss affected that family in countless ways, of course.
One of the sad truths about grief is that if you do the work that healing requires, it lends to a tragic expertise. Maria does just such work, and is a warm, honest resource on the topic of grief.
I wrote not long ago about how among estranged parents, our ambiguous grief renders our experience so different from the grief associated with death that I feel it deserves a different name. I’ve been thinking of it as “para-grief.”
As estranged parents, I think our desire to be heard and to not be alone prompts us to compare our ambiguous grief to unambiguous grief in some sort of desperate one-upmanship. We speak in exaggerated, absolute terms in many realms of our lives to drive a point home and try to be heard. One might argue that it is understandable and even normal. However, it puts estranged parents in a precarious position, because our efforts to be seen and heard via such comparison runs the risk of being offensive to members of other grief communities.
Maria is a member of a peer support group that is specifically for parents who have lost children to cancer. She explained that such specificity is needed because much of the resultant trauma from losing a child to cancer originates not only from the loss, but from the illness-related events leading up to it.
Like estrangement, the loss can cause grief and trauma. The similarities really end there though. I told her that I suspected that if she had a chance for her child to still be alive yet choosing to end parental contact due to a conflict, she’d make that choice every time. She agreed. From her position, the idea of the child remaining alive, no matter the interpersonal circumstances, seems better than what occurred. From our position, the finality of death of the child can seem better than living with the torture of ambiguity. She added that a discussion about this between the parent of an estranged child and the parent of a deceased child would surely be offensive to everyone involved.
How you and I handle the reality of estrangement, ultimately, is an individual choice. For me, what I need to do is refrain from making such comparisons, as they are risky and do not accomplish anything helpful to anyone.
