Essays

January 12, 2023

Can You Ever Prepare for Loss?

Image via @slouisepetersen

By Henriette Rizzo

Contrary to all logic, I assumed the people dearest to me would remain in my life forever. But as I inch into middle age, the fear of loss has been heightened by increasingly seeing friends lose parents to old age, not to mention spending the past three years in a standoff with an insidious, microscopic killer. 

At the height of Covid, my father and I battled the virus together during an intense ten-day isolation. Despite all our precautions, catching Covid somehow seemed like our lot in life. But cancer? Cancer was something that happened to other people. 

After my father received his diagnosis, I spent days in shock, welling up at the thought of the absence of someone I didn’t think I could stand to lose. Eventually the shock settled and helplessness was replaced by a game plan. Illness, after all, is something you battle. 

But having felt so unprepared for the mere possibility, I wondered if there was a way to shore up for this level of loss. Or was that just crazy talk?

“You’re not at all crazy. I think it’s one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and our families. It’s so important,” says Claire Bidwell Smith, psychotherapist and renowned grief expert. “As someone who not only has gone through a lot of my own loss, but has also been a grief therapist for over a decade, I have seen countless people struggle to cope with what it means to go through the end of life. More people are starting to think about this. It’s a gift to our loved ones, truly.”

The conflicting emotion I keep bumping up against is that, as of now, nothing has been lost except my feeling of comfort and safety. Bringing up the end of life to my dad feels hyperbolic at this point, insensitive and like I’ve already given up.

“That is a hard part of it. Nobody wants to get really practical because it feels like you’re not holding onto hope,” says Smith. “I think it was death doula Alua Arthur who said, ‘Talking about sex won’t make you pregnant and talking about death is not going to kill you.’ It’s true, but people have these superstitions around it. If I do my end-of-life affairs right now, does that mean I’m going to die next week? No. It means you’re being smart and practical and doing a nice thing for your family.”

Smith knows the difference between preparation and the lack of it, having lost both her parents young. “My mom died first. She had nothing in place and felt really unprepared to leave this world. Afterwards, there was so much to sort through and figure out, and none of us had faced her death because she hadn’t been willing to face it,” says Smith. “In contrast, my father, when he died seven years later, was very intentional about the kind of death he wanted. He wanted to be home, on hospice. He added me to his bank accounts. He had me make lists of all the things I would have to do after he was gone.”

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To Smith, these end-of-life preparations felt morbid and, at the time, not very pleasant. “I was only 25 years old and would say, ‘Dad, I don’t want to do this.’ And he was like, ‘This is important. You’re going to be on your own and you’re going to be glad we did this.’ And I was glad because, in opposition to what had happened with my mom, I felt like my dad and I did have time to say goodbye and really be present to the end of his life. It helped with my grief process.” 

Having one’s affairs in order can help eliminate the confusion that compounds with grief, and there are several online resources to get you started (Cake allows you to navigate mortality, Modern Loss offers how-to guides from finding support for yourself to supporting others, the End Well Project encourages conversation about a better end of life.)

Yet there was little that prepared Nicole, 40, for how she would find out about her father’s terminal pancreatic cancer. “My dad got sick, and my mom called and said that they were going to the hospital. He got a scan back and the doctor literally just walked in the room, said what it was, and then walked out,” she recalls. “It was the worst bedside manner ever.”

Smith is not surprised that the medical community failed Nicole’s family at the very moment they needed support the most. In fact, this seems almost typical. “Doctors have a long history of being the people who are supposed to save and fix. When they do invite conversations about death and about the end it feels more like a failure, so they seem to avoid it,” she says. “[There is] a movement to try to help medical providers be better equipped to have conversations that are hard with families and patients. It starts with them, because they’re the ones telling us how long someone has.”

Nicole felt equally unprepared for the discourse that followed her father’s passing. “You have friends texting when they know your parent’s sick, or passed, and they’re trying to make you feel better, but they don’t really know how to say the right thing unless they’ve been there. The things that you don’t really want to hear are, ‘He’s in a better place.’ That is probably the worst thing you can say,” she says. “The thing that helped me was talking to people who had been through it.” (Like The Dinner Party, an online platform where people can come together and discuss grief, a sort of mix-and-match grief group built for your own needs.) On the other hand, for lack of something good to say, many ignore the event entirely. “You don’t want to forget that he’s gone,” says Nicole. “It’s nice for people to acknowledge it, and it’s not going to make somebody more upset if you talk about the person that died.”

Part of the problem with modern-day grieving, according to Rehan Coudhry, the founder of online platform Chptr.com, is that it remains very difficult to find the right forum to express it. Even funerals, which more often than not are formal religious ceremonies that bear little connection to the person being memorialized. “We’re still carrying over all of the bad behaviors that were ingrained in society in the ’40s and ’50s, this idea that vulnerability is something we have an allergic reaction to,” says Choudhry. “People really don’t talk about it. It’s fear that you’re burdening the widow with having to talk about something that you feel like she might not want to talk about. And she’s feeling like she doesn’t want to bring it up because she doesn’t want to pour her grief onto you. You’re all not helping each other.”

This is why Choudhry started Chpter, a platform that allows people to share memories and get together virtually to remember a loved one. It was born out of a Covid gig producing televised video tributes. “I didn’t expect how much communities who were grieving these losses would rally around a short-form piece of content as a support tool,” he says. It drove him to create a place where people could share photos, videos, and anecdotes that remain available in perpetuity. “When somebody dies, it’s like the center of gravity that pulled all of those people together is gone. What we’re trying to do is recreate that center of gravity the best way that we can so that that energy is still there and you feel like you can continue to be inspired by that person.”

Shoring yourself for the inevitable and gathering resources can never adequately prepare you for the roller coaster that is grief, that much seems clear. “Grief and loss open up every aspect of our lives and ask us to examine it,” says Smith. “If there’s other stuff already lurking under the surface, you can bet that the grief’s going to trigger it.” But according to Smith, planning for the end, whether someone else’s or your own, has one hell of a silver lining. “When you really enter into that space, it actually just makes you value your life more,” she says. “It helps you live a more meaningful life. It really makes you want to embrace your life, be intentional about your relationships and your choices and really think about it. When we acknowledge that our time here is limited and uncertain, often the result is that it makes us want to live even more fully. It’s a great thing.”

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