Sadness and joy in the same instant: the paradox of sharing our grief

Since my son Corey died in late February, so many kind and compassionate people have reached out to me with lovely emails and texts, heartfelt cards and phone calls.

I’ve also met many people in person, many more than I usually do. Some encounters have been by chance, some have been weeks in the planning, and others have arrived like gifts from God.

About a month ago, a high school classmate sent me a text. I was surprised and delighted to see it. He wanted to ensure that I knew about a fundraiser for the football program at our alma mater. “Let me know if you’re interested.” I was.

Immediately, I knew a text would not do. I needed to phone him. And tell him about Corey.

I had reconnected with him four years ago after about a 40-year gap. As we got caught up over a few beers, I asked how’s the family?

He told me that his young adult son, his only child, had taken his own life about seven years before. Oh my. I felt a shock of sadness, then a wave of shame. How could I have been so cavalier and clueless? Shouldn’t I have detected something?

As I drove home, I thought that I should have stayed in touch, that I owed it to him. But he stayed in our home town, I moved to Toronto.

After attending a public elementary school, I went into Grade 9 at a Catholic high school. I didn’t know anyone. He was the first to invite me to his house on a Friday night, although we couldn’t go inside.

“Why not,” I wondered.

“My sister and her boyfriend are making out.”

I phoned him. I told him we had lost Corey to suicide.

Of course, he was floored. I’m sure it triggered him big time. We fumbled our way through the call. Then he laid this on me: Another classmate also lost a child to suicide about five years ago. After hanging up, I was drained, nailed to my chair.

The next day, I received a text from each of them inviting me to dinner with them. They explained they get together two or three times a year.

As the evening of the dinner approached, I was strangely excited. As I walked toward the door of the restaurant, my heart pounded.

We each arrived around 5:30. We were soon reminiscing—about the hairy classmate who bought us lemon gin in Grade 9, the classmate who ended up in a Michigan jail, who took who to semi-formals, football games, a fishing trip, favourite tunes. We smiled mile-wide smiles and laughed like hell.

At some stage, we intuited it was time. As each man took his turn, the other two listened with rapt attention, never interrupting, our eyes riveted on the man’s face. We told our stories, detailing how our child began to struggle, our attempts to help, the depressing spiral, the sense of helplessness, the circumstances of how our child died, and how we responded.

I’ve met with several friends in public places and cried big tears, but the sustained intimacy was surreal, so sad and so sweet. My words flowed freely, slower and more steady than usual, a soft and gentle unloading; a strange alchemy of tears, grief and joy.

My classmates revealed how they struggled to cope and what finally helped. And they corroborated their greatest shared experience about the sadness and the longing. That it never ends. But you keep going, somehow.

Sitting tightly together in that booth, our elbows nearly touching, our heads in a perpetual tilt toward one another, we eventually realized the restaurant was dark and quiet. Even the omnipresent background music was turned off.

It was 10:15. We’d been there for nearly five hours.

For the next few days, I was energized, and more content than I’d felt in weeks. It occurred to me that we experienced something that night that we couldn’t have expressed back in the day.

I don’t think we realized what we felt for each other in high school was far more than just shared shenanigans, cafeteria tales, football huddles, and more.

It was and is love.

This is one of the blessings of grief. We experience our love as sadness. Beauty and pain co-exist. That grieving is love. *

I’m learning that sharing our grief is essential, inching us forward, drawing us closer to our families, friends, and most of all, to our lost loved ones.

*One of the best books I’ve come across on grief is Grieving Is Loving: Compassionate Words for Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore. I drew upon it for this post.