My dear friend has had two tragedies in her life. Her husband died in a car wreck and several years later her daughter died very tragically. During her grief journey she realized that she was not comfortable being around her oldest and dearest friends. The ones who walked with her through the death of her husband were not the ones she turned to when her daughter died. The friends had a difficult time understanding her distancing herself from them, and she had just as hard of a time trying to understand the reasons herself. She did not feel comfortable in the old circles. She tried to maintain the relationships and still felt great love for the people, but somehow felt discomfort in their presence.
She enjoyed going places where no one knew her story. She enjoyed one group in particular until one occasion when she was not there someone told her story to the group. The story was told with the best of intentions, but she never went back to the group again.
There seemed to be a contradiction inside of her. On the one hand she needed someone to talk to and recognized how much help such talks brought, on the other hand she felt like crawling into a hole and hiding from the world.
As we explored these feelings together she came up with the insights needed to understand. Most of us grew up thinking or sort of believing that bad things happened to bad people. Some of that was our own wishful thinking devised to make us invincible. We used such thinking to relieve our fears. "Nothing bad is going to happen to me, that sort of thing happens to people who somehow deserve it." In spite of all evidence to the contrary, we had the tendency to judge people or wonder what they did wrong when bad things happened to them. As we matured, we realized how wrong such thinking was and is. Bad things happen to good people with the same regularity as they do to anyone else. Deaths are not caused as punishment for someone nor to teach some lesson to us or even to make us stronger or deeper. I cannot believe in a God who would parlay one life against another and do something bad to a child to punish a parent.
None of that makes any sense and thinking people know better, but knowing better does not remove the inner fears and the subconscious wondering and questioning. When bad things happen to us, we wonder if our friends are thinking these kinds of thoughts. Are they making judgments about us? Do they wonder if we have some kind of hidden life that caused this pain to come? Even though we have grown past such thinking and there have been books written and discussions led to defeat the old idea of bad things only happening to bad people, my friend, and others like her, feel like every eye is on them any time they are in a room full of people who know their story.
Discovering the cause of her discomfort did not bring an immediate cure. It did help her to know the feelings are normal and that she was not overreacting or being overly sensitive. Understanding the cause kept her from feeling like she should not have the feelings, and helped her give herself permission to avoid such encounters without guilt until she felt more comfortable in these kinds of settings. Over time, she became increasingly more comfortable and was able to return to full involvement with her old friends.
Her story left me wondering how many others feel the same kind of embarrassment after the death of a loved one. It made me want to shout from the housetops that there is no connection between bad things happening and what kind of people they happen to so we can rid ourselves of any remnant of that kind of thinking or feeling. It also made me more careful not to pressure people to go to events or participate with people until they are fully ready to do so. I am very careful not to say, "You need to get out more and be with people." I now say, "The day will come when you will again be comfortable with people, until then, do what you need to do and do so without guilt."
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