The Rules of Grief
By Caroline Leavitt
Illustration by Rebecca de Araujo
I was in my twenties when I first encountered devastating grief. Two weeks before I was to be married, my healthy, young fiancé woke up in the middle of the night and then immediately died of a heart attack in my arms. I collapsed into hysterical grief. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t look when I crossed the busy New York City streets sobbing, because if a truck rolled over me, what would it matter?
I spent a small country’s GDP going to psychics and mediums, looking for hope and meaning, yet finding none. My family and friends desperately tried to help me with the usual platitudes. People told me to be like Jackie Kennedy: serene after the assassination of her husband, well dressed, not asking for anything, and certainly not talking about it over and over the way I was, but instead carrying myself like a queen rather than a rumpled wreck.
Advice was sprinkled like salt. Get over whatever it is fast. You are allowed three months of sorrow for a death, but then move on and get back to life so time can heal you. Do your sobbing in private the way Jackie did. Don’t burden others with your sorrow.
Trust me — I tried to follow those rules. When I sobbed in private, I was so loud that a neighbor called the cops who knocked on my door to make sure I was okay. When the three-month mark appeared, I still was knocked out by grief.
I grew more desperate with each subsequent month because the loss was even more real. I could barely get up in the morning, so how could I dress coherently? I went to a grief counselor and when I told her about the Jackie Kennedy model of bereavement and how I wasn’t successful at it, she actually rolled her eyes. “Oh no,” she told me. “Your role model should be Yoko Ono.”
Yoko, she said, had screamed and thrashed around on the floor when she heard John Lennon, her husband, had died. She had cried the whole story over and over again to everyone, because she had needed to in order to process what had happened. Like me, she had totally come apart, and for a long time, too. The only difference was she had done it unapologetically.
“And so can you,” the therapist told me. “That three-month rule? Forget it. Not repeating the story over and over? You tell it as much as you need to. The only way out of grief is to dive headfirst into it.”
And so I took that dive, even though I was sure I would drown. I had no idea what to do, but I listened to my inner voice. I depleted my savings and flew all over the country talking and crying to anyone who would listen, not worrying that I was burdening them.
The only way out of grief is to dive headfirst into it.
I talked to a nun in full habit on a flight to Denver, met with a psychic in California, and spent a week with my friend Jo in Santa Fe. She took me to her job every day and sat up with me at night bearing witness while I cried and cried and cried.
I began to feel better. But grief wasn’t done with me yet.
Fast forward eight years. I still felt scoured by grief every now and then, but I knew that was normal. My normal.
My life had changed. I now was happily married and four months pregnant with our first child. But then our baby died inside of me. I had to go under anesthesia to have the baby removed and autopsied, and there I was again, wrecked on the shore.
I couldn’t get out of bed. I depended on my husband, who was lost in his own sorrow. I knew enough about grief then to ask my friends to come see me, to tell them I didn’t want them to do anything, just to be with me. And they did. And like before, that helped.
But the grief was different this time. Even the conversations were different than the ones I had had with people after my fiancé died. People had eventually talked about him with me; they had shared memories, too. But people acted as if my baby had never existed, attempting to reassure me by saying things like “at least you hadn’t known the baby.”
One day my friend Peter came to visit, bringing a handmade booklet he had written and illustrated for me. It was full of snappy answers to the comments I was getting, all from the baby’s mouth. Everyone had told him not to give me that book, that it was in bad taste, that it would shatter me, that the best thing to do would be to help me forget so I could move on.
Peter somehow knew that I needed to remember the event, and that book was the first thing that made me laugh. My friend Jo told me gently, “We’ll always consider that baby as your first baby,” which was like a sun-shower illuminating what was true. I didn’t keep any of the sympathy cards I received, but I still have that handmade booklet. And I still consider that baby my first child.
Here’s the funny thing I’ve found about the rules of grief: there are none. What works for one person could devastate another. I’ve learned to look at grieving differently, to try to figure out what it is I need, even if that need changes minute to minute.
I’ve learned to ask loved ones who are grieving what it is they need, to pay attention to whether they seem to want to talk or to just be silent and have me bear witness to their loss. And then that’s what I do.
Grief is overwhelming, like having a layer of life ripped away. I know the so-called rules were devised with good intentions, meant to control something uncontrollable, to help.
I’ve grown to realize that every tragedy I’ve had, including the year when I was dying from a rare blood disease, the terrible estrangement of my beloved sister, and even the pandemic cancelling life along with my book tour, has somehow deepened me, made me more compassionate, more open to possibilities, more grateful for every second I have.
After my fiancé died, I risked falling in love again. I sobbed through my wedding ceremony because I was afraid my soon-to-be husband would die during it. But he didn’t, and my bliss and my love for him was more intense and full of gratitude for having known loss.
Here’s the funny thing I’ve found about the rules of grief: there are none.
When Covid-19 seemed to have killed all opportunities for my novel With or Without You, I co-founded A Mighty Blaze with Jenna Blum to save it — and it saved me, as well as a passionate community of readers, writers, and indie bookstores that all banded together with us. Loss has taught me something extraordinary: that I can find meaning in loss and that it can shape every valuable second of my life.
I think the true lesson about grief is this: Don’t worry about grieving the right way. Instead, dive in. Find your buried treasure under the murky dark waters, amidst the sharp-toothed sharks, and then swim to your safe shore, catching your breath until you can go forth and share what you’ve experienced with others.
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Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Is This Tomorrow, Cruel Beautiful World, and With or Without You, which was a Good Morning America Online Pick, and which will be released in paperback June 29, 2021. The cofounder of A Mighty Blaze, she is also a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow and a Sundance Screenwriters Lab finalist. She has a column “Runs in the Family” at Psychology Today and is a book critic for People and AARP.