Grief Changed What "Friend" Means
By Glen Lord, SADOD Director
Friends have been a source of both great pain and joy in my grief journey. My friends and my relationship with them have surprised me.
Before my son died, I thought I knew my friends. I thought I understood the strength of our bond. They existed in these basic categories.
- Friends of circumstance: We liked each other, but all we had in common is that we worked at the same place, our kids were on the same team, or we went to the same church. I did not expect much from these people.
- Casual friends: We hung out in the same circles. We went out as groups, but I did not rely on them for the important things in life.
- Close friends: I knew them well, they knew me, I believed I could count on them for anything.
- Lifelong friends – I may not see them frequently, many of them lived in different parts of the country. I knew they would be there for me no matter what.
- Best friends – They are closer than family – I knew they would be there no matter what.
Then my son died. Wow, was I surprised!
I first turned to my best and lifelong friends. One friend I had known for over 20 years told me that my child’s death was too much for him. Some of my best friends sent cards but did not call or reach out to me in any other way.
Some of my friends went out of their way to support me. They sat with me while at work. They listened to my pain. They asked me about Noah and how I was doing. This was all in the weeks following the funeral.
Casual friends were a mixed bag. Some surprised me by reaching out and offering support, others remained silent.
However, over the next few months, I found that the topic was off-limits to almost all my friends -- no matter what category I had placed them in. Sometimes this was very subtle, with a change of topic or a quickening of the pace.
I soon found that I needed different categories of friends:
- Those with a shared loss and grief experience
- Those lifelong friends who see value in my journey
- Those best friends I love and care about but need to have boundaries about how much I share regarding the pain of grief
- Those who turned away but turned back when their own lives were touched by grief
- Friends who I had to let go gently because my pain was too great for them
For the first few years, I shuffled my existing friends into new categories with some mistakes. For many, I thought that I had somehow misread our relationship before Noah’s death. Later, I realized that some people did fail me and were never who I thought they were. However, I also came to understand that I had stopped communicating with others. Sometimes it was just the enormity of the pain, sometimes the fear of further loss or rejection.
One friend who had sent a card after the funeral had failed me, I thought, by not reaching out. He felt he was giving me space to grieve. My inability to reach out to him only added to that belief. They took this to mean that I did not want him around, and he left it at that. Years later, we reconnected and spoke about that space and how it had angered me. He shared his hurt and feelings of abandonment. I realized if I had been able to reach out and let him know what I needed, our relationship would have grown. Similarly, if he had understood the grief process better, he would not have given me “space.”
I learned that for some of my friends I had to become their teacher, and I needed to have patience, love, and an understanding that their actions were not designed to hurt me but rather based on a lack of understanding.
Also surprising are the friends who have come into my life who have suffered similar losses. These friendships happened fast and became closer than most others. We were immediately sharing our greatest joys and greatest sorrows, and this created a new category that never existed for me.
Truthfully, I don’t categorize friends anymore. I recognize that some want to learn, grow and develop our friendship and somewhere, we connect for a moment and move on. All my friends have helped me grow and understand love, life, forgiveness. And some provided me with hope.