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.
Clarissa's Blog 
People are very strange about tragedy that happens to people they know. The more horrible the tragedy, the stranger they are.
My father was murdered when I was very young, and my mother lost many of her friends because they couldn’t deal with interacting with her at all. Probably, you have better friends than that 🙂
To this day, (decades later) I avoid telling people about it because it makes them so uncomfortable, and I end up comforting them about the whole thing, which is just so bizarre.
Do you think this is an American phenomena, or does this phenomena exist in other cultures as well?
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This is horrible about your father! I’m very sorry. Was the murderer ever found?
One person who started avoiding me after what happened and doing so in a very pointed and obvious way is Latin American, so I guess this must be an inter-cultural phenomenon.
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Yes, he died a columbine style shooting, so there were many witnesses and he got life in prison, so that’s good I guess!
Hm, interesting, I was thinking it might be a U.S. thing because grief is more internalized and taboo here.
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What a tragedy. I’m very sorry this happened.
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Are grief counselors there for people who lose old parents too? Have never heard of them existing before your post.
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I’m sure there are such grief counselors, too. This particular woman trained to help people who experienced stillbirth because it happened to her and she found it very hard to deal. So now she is helping people.
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