Losing my son

Picture your life as a a big, clear ball. When the grief first happens, it's like a giant, dark ball suddenly fills up the entire ball. There's nothing else. Everything is pain. Everything is grief.

People think the dark ball is meant to shrink over time, but in my experience, that's not it at all. What happens instead is that, slowly but surely, the clear ball gets bigger.

Eventually, not every moment is grief. Not every moment is pain. It's still there. It's never smaller. It never actually even hurts less. But you grow around it.

Losing someone to death is like if a color suddenly disappeared from your whole world. Let's use yellow. You've encountered so much of your life with this yellow in it. The more closely things were associated with this person,the yellower they are--and the more wrong they look now that yellow is gone.

Over time, you get used to the way they look, but you never really forget how they looked back when they were yellow. They're not as beautiful now.

But then there are other things that you encounter that haven't ever been yellow, places that person never went or things they were never a part of. You can imagine how much more beautiful they would be if they did have yellow, but they don't look wrong to you without yellow. They just look how they look, and that's the way you expect them to be beautiful.

I don't know if these images are helpful to anyone else, but they've made a big difference to me on my own grief journey, and since today would have been my sister's birthday, I thought I'd share them.

Ring theory [0], developed by Susan Silk, was one of the most helpful guidelines someone gave me early in my grief journey.

Picture the traumatic event or loss at the center of a set of concentric circles. At the very center are the people going through it directly. Each step outward represents one step removed from the event itself.

Everyone has permission to dump any pain or need or anything onto anyone in a larger ring than they're in, but under no circumstance should any such things be dumped into a smaller circle.

For example, when my sister and my died, her husband/his father was in the innermost circle. My mother was in a very slightly larger one. My brother and I were a circle out from that, followed by her closest friend, his parents, his brother, their other friends, etc.

It makes a really big difference not to have to try to deal with what other people need to dump when you're dealing with enough to be broken yourself.

And when in doubt? The most effective thing you can do in many circumstances is show up, stay, and not say a word. Your physical presence and willingness to sit silently in the overwhelming awkwardness speaks volumes. It tells the person you love that they aren't alone, even when being with them is really hard.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology)