Grief, says my aunt Fran, is a tricky thing.
Sarah, a work friend of mine, died last week. We don't know why. She was young, early 30s, and pregnant with her second child. She was the school psychologist for my elementary school, though she kept her door wide open to both staff and students. She was a shining light and a force for positivity in a place where it is easy to become jaded and cynical.
I was hit hard by this. I didn't know her well, though we were on friendly terms and chatted whenever we ran into each other. She was there when I had a panic attack at school, coming down with the school nurse to sit with me until I felt more together and my husband arrived to pick me up. She even picked me up and drove me to school the next day, as I had to leave my car at the building.
At first, I felt shocked... Sarah was younger than me, healthier than me. How could this be? Then, the sadness... the loss of two lives, one entirely unlived (and tangentially it strikes me how subjective the whole abortion debate is... when Sarah died and her son with her, it's the death of an unborn child. When a woman who doesn't feel like having a child wants to dispose of an unwanted pregnancy, it's not... even if said unborn child were the same age as Sarah's son.)
The guilt followed soon after. I have a very loud and very nasty critical inner voice, and it began hammering at me... You barely knew her. You weren't REALLY friends. You don't have any business pretending that you feel loss. How can you honestly feel sad? You're a fake, a poser, an imposter, and people will know and then what will they think of you?
I rebelled against this, of course. I got angry. Grief is grief. You feel what you feel. I discussed it with the school-provided grief counselors, with my own counselor, with my aunt, who teaches grief classes. All of them agreed that I was right, and pointed out that if a friend were to say the same things to me, I'd tell them to fight it, that they had every right to grieve, that what they felt was justified and perfectly okay.
The critical inner voice doubled down. You horrible person... you're making this about YOU, not HER. How dare you?
And I froze. I couldn't help wondering if the voice was right... was I making this loss about me, not about Sarah? If I was, how could I refocus on the truly important epicenter of these feelings? The fact is, two lives were unexpectedly ended far too soon... and there's a hole in many, many lives now as a result.
Sarah was the epitome of a good person. She cared deeply and honestly about the students she served, the district she worked for, the colleagues she worked among. She was selfless and giving... everything a school counselor should be. She tried her best to make the school a better place to be, for everyone within its walls. She touched a countless number of lives, some deeply and intimately, some with a feather-light brush. I was one of those light brushes... and I'm deeply grateful to have known Sarah, even briefly and at a coworker's distance.
In the end, I think, what I need to do is ask myself, how did knowing Sarah make your life different? How can you continue on in a way that honors that change?
Those are questions I'm still pondering.