A woman called my office and left a lengthy message on the answering machine. Her mother had just died and she was very upset. The message was so lengthy my office warned me to return the call when I had plenty of time to talk. Our office deals with grief on a daily basis. They are well schooled and compassionate with anyone who calls, and spend a great deal of their time just listening to people as they tell their story. This call brought out a different response even from them. The mother who died was 99 years old.

The natural response to such a call would be, "Why are you so upset you had her for 99 years. What did you expect?" Matter of fact those are the responses the woman had gotten from everyone she had talked to. She was so tired of hearing those words and so desperate for someone to understand, that she called our office. I must admit that, for a few seconds, I had the same reaction. Then I began to understand how this woman really felt. Just because her mother was 99 does not make her loss any less. The length of life does not diminish the grief when a person dies. It may even be that the longer you have them, the harder it is to give them up. 

When we talked, she poured out her experience in great detail and I could almost sense her waiting for me to join the long line of folks who trivialized her grief simply because her mother lived so long. She must have expected me to point out how lucky she was to have had her for so long. To hear me explain how she could not have expected her to live this long much less many more years. I did just the opposite. I said, "It must hurt very deeply to lose someone who has been such a part of your life for such a long time. I am sure your love for her grew deeper with the years and that makes the loss so much harder to bear. I could feel the tension lessen and a sigh slipped from deep within her. The conversation was not the lengthy one I had expected. She got what she wanted in a very brief span. She wanted someone to simply understand instead of explaining.

I learned once again, that, even though it seems to be second nature to want to do so, explanations do not relieve grief. They may make perfect sense and be so logical no one could deny their points, but people who hurt aren't interested nor helped by our explanations. Most of the time, we start out to explain, and end up trivializing the experience which is just the opposite of what folks want or need.

Many who read this will identify with the woman. The death you suffered may be completely different... not many will have lost a 99 year old parent...but, no matter how your loss came, you probably experienced a barrage of explanations. The folks mean well and are trying to make you feel better, but they miss by a mile and every miss hurts.

A dear friend whose daughter died eight years ago summed it up for me just the other day. She said, "The bottom line is she is not here. All the thoughts of her now being in heaven, all the philosophical answers trying to explain why she died, all the efforts to help me deal with my feelings and move on, do nothing to remove that one fact. She is not here. I have learned to live with her being gone, but the pain is still there and will always be there, because the pain does not come from me not having an answer to some question, or not having faith in life beyond life, or not having done my grief work. It comes from I am here and she isn't." That is the bottom line for a young daughter who died eight years ago, and that is the bottom line for a mother who died after living for ninety nine years.