Heads up: this article is about loss and might be triggering for some. If someone in your life has recently passed away and this is not what you want to be reading, don’t. Instead, consider forwarding this email to your partner or close people in your life, as it might help them understand and support you better. Sending my love.

When someone loses a spouse, a parent, a close friend, or a family member, they can push away the things and people they love the most. 

It’s important to remember that everyone has their own way of grieving, and the grieving process can be long. Unlike our short attention spans would like it to be, when you’re in a state of grief, you can’t just move on to the next thing. 

There was a couple I worked with whose mom died. She had a complicated relationship with her mom but still loved her. And the loss hit her harder than she had imagined. 

Throughout her grieving, she ended up pushing away her partner while simultaneously feeling abandoned by him. 

She pushed him away because the fear of losing another person she loves so much was unthinkable, but at the same time, she needed him to come close and resist her pushing away. 

But when you’re being pushed away, it’s hard to stay close, right? And yet, that person needs you to check-in. 

I’ve seen relationships end because the spouse who didn’t lose someone feels so hurt by the turning away of the spouse who did. 

Here’s what I invited this couple to do and what you can, too, if you find yourself in a similar situation: 

For the one whose spouse is grieving: 

• Have regular check-ins with your partner. Maybe not daily, but every other day, you can ask, ”How are you feeling about your mom?” 

• Know that anniversaries and birthdays and holidays will be hard, and might be for a while. 

• Remembering the day your spouse’s person died is important, and it’s something you should put in your calendar so that you’re thinking about it in advance of the date. 

• Don’t take it personally when your spouse is pushing you away. The first year will require a tremendous amount of patience and continual practice of not taking things personally. It’s one of the kindest things you can give your grieving partner. 

• Be mindful that your delayed response to a text or phone call or not being on time might land much larger than it normally would under non-grieving circumstances. 

• Someone who is grieving wants to be part of life continuing on, so you might want to share something funny or silly with them. You also might find yourself resisting sharing something funny or silly out of fear it might go wrong and hurt them. You’ll always run that risk, but the opportunity isn’t to stop sharing; it’s to be open about how you inadvertently impacted your partner and be grateful that they told you. 

For the one who is grieving: 

I hope these two quotes from Martha Whitmore Hickman in her book Healing After Loss (which I highly recommend reading) capture the impossible bind that grief brings into relationships: 

“Sometimes, with the best of intentions, friends don’t know how to help. They may feel that to bring up the subject of our loss is to risk making us feel worse, so they avoid it and talk of other things while the presence of the unspoken builds up to an almost intolerable pressure.”

“As for inflicting our sorrow on other people, one does not want to go around blathering and crying all the time. But perhaps it is our gift to others to trust them enough to share our feelings with them. It may help them deal with some of their own.” 

Sending my love and support,
Andrea