The most
difficult part of the grieving process for me was the anger. It is also the most difficult about which to
write because it requires that I dig deep in my heart for some answers, even
thirty years later. Such soul searching
is always a challenge.
I think the
reason the anger was so overwhelming was two-fold. First, anger blind-sided me. I understood instinctively that I would feel
sorrow and even some regret, but I didn’t expect anger. I know nothing about dealing with that kind
of loss and every book I found on the subject dealt primarily with telling me
that Carmon was in a better place and I would see him again one day. That made me even angrier. I already believed that! I already knew that! What I didn’t know was what I was supposed to
do with me and our children for the next twenty years! How was I supposed to raise four children
alone? I put up with a lot in our twenty
years of marriage, in part, because I didn’t want to be a single parent and there
I was – right where I did not want to be.
I was furious!
The second
problem was that I had no reference for my anger. When I was a little girl growing up in 1950s
small town America, nice little girls didn’t get angry. Ever!
When I showed the least bit of anger or even autonomy – probably from my
first tantrum as a two-year-old – my mother shut me down! The consequence was immediate and painful and
there was no court of appeal. I therefore had gone through my life up to
that point in time apologizing to everyone and anyone for hitting them in their
fists with my bloody nose. I felt that getting
angry was tantamount to a sin and I certainly had no means for dealing with it
when it threatened to consume me after Carmon died.
Because I
couldn’t accept my anger, other than with guilt and depression, I
struggled. I still feel sorrow for
anyone who had to deal with me then, particularly my children. In essence, I had an adult temper tantrum for
almost eighteen months. My poor bishop would
see me coming on Sundays and I could almost see his sigh of resignation as if
to say, “Oh, no. Here she comes
again.” My feelings were like the
proverbial sore thumb and everything bumped them.
It helped
when I took a class at the community college about death, dying, and
bereavement. I then understood that grief is
not self-indulgence but psychological necessity. That helped me to understand that anger was
one of the “stages” of grief. It also gave
me permission to feel what I felt and that was a huge help. But at the end of the day, I was still
feeling it! It took my going back to
school full time to find some real answers.
I had my
teaching degree when Carmon died, but I hadn’t worked full-time for years. Therefore, I started at the bottom of the pay
scale. It didn’t take me a year to
figure out that I couldn’t afford us on the money I was making unless I got a
master’s degree. I had a little bit of
insurance and decided that, rather than trickle it out to supplement our income
for the next couple of years, I would use it to go to graduate school and leap
several notches up the pay scale. While
the original plan had been a master’s in education, given the trauma
surrounding Carmon’s death and the life changes if placed in front of us, I
switched my field of study to counseling.
I learned
many things that altered my life forever during those years, but the thing I
learned that is most germane to this discussion is that feelings are neither
good nor bad: they just are. It’s
what we choose to do with them that can be attached to a value. That included my anger.
As the
years have passed, I’ve found some things that helped and some things that didn’t. First, it is never okay to hurt yourself or
anyone else when you are angry. It is
also wise never to destroy property when you are mad because I can promise, you
will regret it.
Second, it
is not wise to deny your feelings and “stuff” them. Anger turned inside becomes depression and a
variety of somatic complaints from headaches to ulcers. Someone once said that feelings which are
buried alive don’t die; they just come out somewhere else. Trust me: that is true.
Related to
that is the third fact that strong emotions produce a physiological
response. Fear and anger both trigger
what doctors call the “fight/flight” response.
When hit with an intense emotion, the body experiences over 100 physical
changes from elevated blood pressure, to rapid breathing, racing heart, release
of sugar into the blood stream, a dump of adrenalin into the blood as well, tense
muscles, clenched fists – the list goes on and on. The adrenalin alone will require a full 20
minutes to clear the system and that is after
the stressful emotion that produced it is alleviated! You need to plan some physical activity every
day to work off the energy that can accompany strong emotion. My choices were daily jogging and a
thrice-weekly aerobic exercise class. Do
something you enjoy and really work it!
Fourth is
the fact that irrational thinking can keep those emotions alive and well long
after they could have been put to rest.
I will give you a personal example.
I kept waiting for life to be “normal” again. Every time I realized that it wasn’t yet, I
got angry – which was several times every day.
It took my finally realizing that if, by “normal,” I meant "same," things
would never be “normal” again. What I
had to do was to create a new “normal” for myself and for my children. It took a long time, but we got there and the
anger eased. I rarely get that upset anymore and
when I do, it is about something in the moment and I deal with it in the moment
and put it behind me. Seek help if you have trouble deciding what is or is not rational.
How do you
deal with anger? I used to teach my
students a little acronym from the children’s book, An Elephant in the
Living Room. The butterfly in the
story was named RAS. His name meant:
· R
= Recognize. Identify what you are
feeling while you are feeling it. This
is not always as easy as it sounds and you may need to get help because adult
emotions can be very complex and interconnected and you may not know exactly what
you are feeling unless someone else points it out to you.
· A
= Accept. Accept that your feeling is not
bad or good, but just present. Beating
up on yourself for feeling angry isn’t going to help you feel less angry. It will just add guilt to the smörgåsbord of
emotion. You may even feel angrier.
· S
= Share. Find an appropriate way to share
your feelings. The choices are similar
to those we discussed when we talked about depression: talking, drawing,
writing, and the like. I kept a journal of
my feelings during those years. Anyone
reading it today might say, “Wasn’t that woman ever happy?” Of course I was, but I didn’t have trouble
RAS-ing my happy feelings!
Believe it
or not, angry feelings can give us the energy and strength to do things that
need to be done. Just as a frightened
person might find superhuman strength to lift a car off of an injured child, an
angry person can channel that anger to something productive. Many wonderful non-profit organizations were
founded by people who were angry about something and set about to change
it. I wrote my book, The Living
Half (published in paperback as All Alone: Surviving the Loss of a
Spouse) because I was angry that I couldn’t find a book like that when I
needed it!
Finally, I believe
in a personal God; a God of body, parts, and passions. He created me in His image. I have emotions because He has emotions. Part of my task here on earth is to learn to
understand those emotions and to school them to His will, knowing that He is
there to pick me up when I fall trying to do so.
Picture from www.123rf.com
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