Clarissa's Blog

The grief counselor who was with us at the hospital called this morning to explain why she hadn’t called before. It turns out that she has been worrying about something she said while she was talking to me before the operation. She felt that this comment might have been inappropriate and could have hurt my feelings.

When the grief counselor started apologizing for the supposedly unfortunate comment, it took me a while even to remember it. I told her (with complete sincerity) that her presence at the hospital had been enormously helpful and that I was in no way upset with her.

My analyst (who, for the time being, is treating me psychotherapeutically and not psychoanalytically) warned me that many people will start feeling awkward around me and might start avoiding me as a result of the tragedy. And it’s true, I am seeing this happen. People are afraid of making things worse for me by saying or doing the wrong thing.

Many people who know me in RL are reading this and I want to tell them: it’s OK, you are not being judged on how well you support me. I always hated these obnoxious “How to Treat a Friend Who Is Grieving / Is Depressed / Is Sick / Has Suffered a Major Loss, etc.” lists that get published on blogs and in magazines with scary regularity. They always sound like they were written by a pouty, tantrum-prone eleven-year-old who never experienced any serious hardship and imagines trauma as an excuse to bully everybody into submission.

These days I hate such lists even more than ever and I promise never to compose one either on this blog or in my head. As judgmental as I am of everything that happens in the public realm, privately I am the most non-judgmental person in the world. Once I accept somebody into my life, this means they have been accepted just as they are. I don’t try to improve, lecture, or castigate people in my life. In short, if I never judged you before, I am even less interested in doing that now.