Dear Grief Guide, All Of My Friends Have Vanished

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

My husband and I were elated when we discovered we were expecting a baby.

The dreams and hopes we built around their soon-to-be life on earth were boundless.

We fell asleep every night talking about the things we would teach our child,

And the places we longed to show them.

We combed our family trees for name ideas that would honor both sides of our ancestry.

We asked our friends who are parents for their best new baby tips.

I even found ways to be grateful for my morning sickness,

Holding my belly and talking to my baby between back-to-back rounds with the toilet.

Our joy turned to sorrow when I unexpectedly had a miscarriage at 11 weeks.

It was a sudden event,

And I won't relive the trauma of my hospitalization here.

All I'll say is that I entered the hospital pregnant,

And came out empty.

It feels as though a piece of my heart has been ripped out of my chest.

I will never be the same again.

In the midst of the overwhelming sadness I feel,

I find myself grappling not only with the grief,

But also with a deep sense of isolation.

My friends have all vanished.

It's not that they don't care,

It's just that they seem unsure of how to approach me or what to say.

In the early days,

I was overwhelmed by the amount of support my husband and I received.

Now the silence from those I thought I could lean on has become a deafening echo.

It's like everyone has forgotten all about us and moved on with their normal lives.

I ache to share the memories we had begun crafting for our child,

To speak the name we chose for them.

I want to talk about my baby.

Yet every time I try,

I'm met with discomfort and awkward,

Clichéd conversations about silver linings and God's plan.

How do I make my friends understand that I still need their support and their presence and a listening ear?

As a grief guide,

How can I bridge this gap between my yearning for connection and their apparent hesitation in dealing with my pain?

I feel like my grief is invisible to those around me just because a little bit of time has passed and it intensifies the pain of my loss.

It feels like a devastating emptiness on top of the emptiness I already carry inside me.

Open to your thoughts,

Babyless and friendless.

Oh my goodness,

Babyless and friendless.

My heart goes out to you.

This sense of not only have I experienced a deep and profound loss,

But I have also lost connections to people I thought would be there for me,

Or who I expected to respond differently,

Or who I expected to keep showing up week after week with some sort of consistency is devastating.

Having both of those things happening together feels like more loss,

I imagine,

Than you can bear right now.

This is a difficulty that many grieving people experience of not just experiencing a major loss which you think would be devastating enough,

But also experiencing the secondary loss of loss of friendship or renegotiation of friendship at a time when it feels like all relationships are extraordinarily tender and fragile.

This is one of the biggest conversations that I have with grieving people in my online course Life After Loss Academy is how do I navigate relationships now that I am a grieving person now that loss has happened now that I have been irreversibly shoved through a doorway that I can never go back through again,

That I have been made permanently different because of loss.

I think you're asking the right questions,

How do you bridge the gap between wanting to feel connection and coping with the hesitation of other people and I think there's a lot of different ways you can do this.

I'll give you three today that I'm hoping that you can take away with you.

They are things that I have used in my own life,

They are things I have advised other grieving people to do,

And I hope they're helpful.

The first thing is to say the weird thing out loud.

Grief is weird,

It's hard,

It's awkward.

People don't know what to say,

You're right on the money there.

You are correct in saying that it seems like your friends are unsure of how to approach you or what to say and in articulating in this next paragraph that you write,

You want to share the memories you've begun crafting for your child,

You want to speak the name you chose for them,

You want to talk about your baby,

You can say those things out loud to the people you're surrounded by.

When you check in with them,

Whether it's through text or phone conversations or in person conversations or email,

You can say,

Hey,

I know it's been a bit since I lost my baby.

It's still really important for me to talk about them.

It still matters to me,

It still feels helpful for me to share and to be allowed to share memories of them with you.

That's helpful.

You can also be more direct about it.

For instance,

If they say something like,

This was a part of God's plan,

You can try again.

So when you having another baby,

Haven't you moved on by now,

You can say things like,

That's not actually helpful to me,

What you just said,

It actually feels really hurtful.

And then,

Because oftentimes grievers are burdened with the task of teaching people around us how to support us in our pain,

You offer up what you would like them to say instead.

Instead,

I would prefer you listening as I told you a story about my baby,

Or giving me permission to continue to feel my feelings months and even years later,

Or reminding me that it's okay to continue to miss him,

And to not forget about him or be in a rush to move on.

You're allowed to ask these things of your friends,

How they respond is up to them,

And says a lot about them,

And what they're capable of,

And perhaps what they have learned about grief from family,

Society,

Media,

So on and so forth.

But you can ask.

The second thing that I'll offer is that you may need to gently shelve some of your friendships for now.

This is a sad reality of grief,

Sometimes is that we must,

How do I phrase this?

We must acknowledge what is costing us more energy than we have in the midst of our grief.

And sometimes it is these friendships that don't know what to say or do,

And we are too exhausted to teach or be a grief resource in addition to doing the hard and heavy heartwork and hard work of grieving.

Sometimes we simply do not have that capacity.

And in instances like that,

I know for myself,

And what a lot of other grieving students of mine find helpful,

Is finding these places where their grief can belong,

Because they are spaces designed for grief,

Whether that's an organization or a community where people talk about miscarriage and the very specific loss and circumstances that that entails,

Or it is something like Life After Loss Academy where everyone there is experiencing a different kind of loss,

But it is a community that is set up where grief is extraordinarily welcome.

That may feel like a less exhausting place for you to tell stories about your baby and express your grief for right now and know that no matter what you say,

No matter what you feel,

No matter what you need to process,

That you won't have to explain yourself or prove yourself or ask for permission or do the work of teaching other people how to respond to you and how to support you.

The last thing I'll say,

And this is the hardest,

So I saved it for last,

Is that of the circle of friends that you have right now,

There may be some who cannot come with you into this next season of your life.

The next iteration of you as a grieving person.

They may be perfectly lovely people with lovely personalities and lovely skills and lovely abilities and lovely stories and lovely connections to you and your past.

But they may not be capable,

For whatever reason,

Of holding who you are and what you need now and in the future going forward.

This is not because you are too much,

Because you are asking for too much.

This,

In a sense,

Is often their way of telling you,

I do not have enough resources,

Education,

Emotional intelligence,

Time,

Space,

To make room for your grief in the ways it deserves to have room made for it.

There may be friendships that end or fade away as a result of this loss,

And that is a grief worth grieving and releasing in and of itself.

And this is something we talk about too in Life After Loss Academy,

Friendships,

Relationships,

How to navigate those after loss is something we cover later on in the course.

But oftentimes,

My students find themselves going back again,

To some of the beginning lessons about releasing pain and releasing expectations,

Because now they are grieving friendships and relationships that they thought would come with them,

That they thought could stand the test of a very weighty,

Very heavy loss.

And it turns out they simply can't.

And there is a great sense of heartbreak and devastation in that.

And what I need to tell you is something that I have talked about on other podcasts and in other places on the internet.

It's something that I once told a client who was going through the breakup of a relationship,

And most of the people in her friend and family circle had for whatever reasons,

Many reasons,

Sided with or chosen the side of her ex,

The person that she was breaking up with.

And so in the midst of this great breakup,

This great loss,

This dissolution of a partnership,

She felt enormously alone.

And the story that she was telling herself was,

I do not have a friend in the world.

Every friend I had before this partnership,

Within this partnership,

Is gone.

My friend circle has vanished.

And what I invited her to consider,

And what I'll invite you to consider as well,

Babyless and friendless,

As you call yourself,

Is that maybe you are not friendless in this space.

You are doing the unconscious,

The subconscious work of exiting your former friend circle.

Yes,

That is true.

But you are not being rejected somewhere into this great outer space of nothingness.

You are entering what I often call the Venn diagram of friendship,

Where one circle overlaps with a newer,

Often larger circle.

There are friends from your life before that will stay,

Whether friends,

Family members,

Coworkers,

I'm using the term friends very broadly.

And there are new people who will enter your life as a result of this loss,

Who are enormously capable of holding space for your grief and actually know how to honor it,

Not just as a part of your relationship,

But as a part of you.

They will remember your grief dates.

They will if you want them to participate in rituals with you,

They will say your baby's name.

They will remember your baby,

Even as you complete or walk through or move through future milestones in your life,

Moving,

Getting a new job,

Potentially having another child,

Entering and exiting relationships,

Experiencing new losses,

They will remember the impact that this miscarriage has had on your life.

They will not forget it.

They will make so much room for it.

These are the friends that are coming your way.

Yes,

You can sometimes teach the people who are in your life right now,

How to support you and be there for you in your grief.

And yes,

Sometimes there are friends that need to be left behind or,

Or insist on being left behind because their behavior is not congruent or,

Or matching or easeful with what you need now,

As a grieving person,

It is not aligned.

And that does not mean you're being cast out into some godforsaken wilderness,

Because of your loss,

Because of something you could not control.

What it does mean is that you are moving now into this Venn diagram space,

This in between space of friendship,

Where even as I speak,

Even as I answer your letter,

There are people waiting and at the ready,

Whether they are people who have experienced the same loss or another kind of loss,

Or they don't know loss,

But they do know grief,

Who are waiting in the wings to support you to be there for you,

To surround you,

To honor you,

To take care of you and to love you in all the ways that you need to be loved.

May you know that you have the power to set boundaries in your friendships as they stand right now.

May you know that you are more than allowed to remember your baby and to remember your grief.

And may you know that there are grief-honoring friends on their way to you right now,

Sending you so much love.