Hard Things Are Hard

March 2, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I came across this saying the other day: Hard things are hard. At first thought, the adage seemed redundant (as so many sayings do), but on second thought seemed right on the mark. This reminder about hard things being hard is particularly relevant when it comes to grief since many people who are in pain after the death of a loved one come to me searching for quick and easy ways to go through grief. I keep reminding people that grief is hard. And it is. There is no easy way to get through grief because hard things, like grief, are simply hard and there is no way around it.

There are some ways you can deal with intense grief to help get you through the first soul-searing minutes, hours, days — cry, scream, pound a pillow — but these things only relieve the stress of grief. (The death of a child or a spouse is the most stressful life experience, and the stress is one of the reasons that grievers have a 25% greater chance of dying from all causes than non-grievers.) They don’t relieve grief because no matter what you do, your loved one is still gone.

As grief continues, as it does, there are other things a person can do in addition to crying and screaming such as walking or attending a grief support group or saying “Yes.” Too often grievers refuse all invitations because it simply is too painful to be around people. For those who lost a spouse, it is especially painful to be around those who are still happily married. Yet if you get in the habit of saying no, the invitations stop. Chances are, some invitations would stop anyway, like those from other couples — not only do they not want to be reminded that what happened to you can happen to them, but they feel as if the situation will be too uncomfortable for everyone. It’s not a particularly nice reaction to someone else’s grief, but it is, unfortunately, a very human reaction.

Mostly, though, there’s nothing you can do but the hard thing — feel your grief. As painful as it is, grief is a process, a means of moving you from your shared life to a new life. When your life has been entwined with someone else’s, it takes time to unbraid that life and create something new. All that work is painful because although it is necessary, it is not something you want to do. It’s not something you think you can do. And yet, you do it without even knowing you are doing it.

If it were simply an emotional process, grief would be hard enough, but it’s also a physical process, a physical response to a perceived danger. You might lose your grip, your appetite, your health. Your body is flooded with adrenaline and other hormones in an effort to get you to fight or flee from the untenable situation. Brain chemistry goes haywire. You feel as if you are in a fog, numb, and totally overwhelmed because your brain simply doesn’t work. Your brain is on overload, trying to understand something that cannot be understood. So many things go wrong, making you wonder if you’re crazy, but you’re not crazy. You’re grieving. And it’s hard.

Hard things are hard. Sad to say, but really is that simple.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Grief and Medication

August 10, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I generally stay away from talking about medication when it comes to grief because it is a sensitive — and personal — topic. I have a firm belief that grief is not a medical condition that needs to or can be treated by drugs, and though this belief extends only to myself and not to others, I worry that my talking about the subject will make people think I am being judgmental of those who need medical help, and I am not. We all deal with grief the best we can, however we can.

Still, medication is a topic that needs to be addressed because many people don’t realize there is an alternative. Not an alternative to the pain, of course, because that comes with the territory of grief, but an alternative to drugs.

Learning the truth about grief — that we are not crazy; that no matter what we are feeling, it’s natural; that others have felt what we have felt; that grief, no matter how painful, is a process that will help us become a person who can survive the loss — goes a long way to weaning ourselves from a dependency on drugs.

Alice, an older woman I met in an online grief forum, took anti-depressants after the death of her husband because she thought her emotions, the physical reactions, the endless tears were abnormal, and no one told her otherwise. What she really wanted and needed was the reassurance that her grief was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. We expect to be able to slide comfortably into old age with that one person we love more than anything, and when that person dies, excruciating pain and angst are normal reactions.

There’s no way we can learn about the normality of such grief except from people like me who are willing to talk about their experiences because the medical establishment has decided that anything but a mild grief is an abnormal condition, and the things we see in movies (and don’t see) seem to agree with that opinion. How many movies have you seen where a woman (always a woman!) is told about the death of her husband, and when she starts crying and screaming, a doctor is there to jam a hypodermic into her arm? A lot. On the other hand, the complex and painful experience of grief for a spouse is not something we see on television shows, in movies, or read about in novels. Fictional folks (when they are not being drugged into oblivion) shed a fictional tear or two, perhaps go on a fictional spree of vengeance, then continue with their fictional lives unchanged.

It seems as if this current reliance on drugs to “treat” grief is more about hiding than helping. In today’s world, grief needs to be hidden almost from the beginning so that it doesn’t offend other people’s sensibilities, so that it doesn’t bring the specter of negativity into other people’s lives. Drugs also hide your grief from yourself so you don’t have to face the raw reality of death. Drugs are good for that. They can hide your grief to a certain extent, but that’s all they can do. They cannot bring the deceased loved one back.

Some people do need medical help, of course, and they should get it. As Leesa Healy (RN, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator) wrote: “There are absolutely times when a therapist is required to nudge a person from being stuck, but the fact of the matter is that psychiatry since 2000 has become completely dependent upon what I call the drug/work model . . . i.e. create a diagnosis . . . create a drug . . . back to work for you. At least this is true in Australia and yes I’m qualified to say so (in case anyone wonders). Western psychiatry is leading us down a road of becoming the living dead and the risk is many folk are walking this journey willingly, unaware of the consequences so focused are they on the short-term fix. And who can blame them. It is not only our habit to avoid pain, but also, the very structure of any capitalist society is allowing us less and less time to be ‘truly human’.”

There were times I wanted the pain of being “truly human” gone since my grief was almost more than I could handle, but I wanted even more to feel sorrow that Jeff was dead. Well, actually what I wanted was him here, alive and healthy, but since I couldn’t have what I really wanted, I owed him my sorrow. I owed “us” my sorrow. He deserved to have someone grieve for him, to have someone feel the imbalance of the world without him in it. For me to have gone seamlessly from a shared life to a solitary life without a backward glance or a tinge of pain would have dishonored him. To not feel at all would have been way more of a medical problem than feeling too much.

Although medicine and psychology are the branches of science that have taken charge of grief and how it is described and understood, an anthropological approach — listening and observing — better captures the truth of the situation. Anthropology is the science that deals with the origins, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind, all of which pertain to grief. Few people listen to us bereaved; instead, they try to tell us how we feel. That is why support groups work. If the medical and scientific establishment won’t listen to us, we need to listen to each other, to observe how others are dealing with their grief, to talk about our own situation.

That’s the approach I took — listening, talking, writing, explaining what I learned about grief. I also walked. I was too restless to do much else (except cry) and as it turns out, walking is a good way to deal with grief, not just because of the sedative nature of walking but because it quiets the brain and lets the brain do the work of grief. When we’ve lost a person intrinsic to our lives, our brain goes into overdrive. So much of daily life is habit, and when that habit is suddenly disrupted, the brain tries desperately to identify new patterns and to find alternatives. Adding to the overdrive (and to the brain fog that is normal the first year of grief) is our need, however futile, to try to think our way out of grief. Walking helps put the brain back in its default mode — stream of consciousness. By simply feeling and not trying to make sense of grief, by letting thoughts drift through without trying to catch hold of any one of them, we can rest our brain and perhaps even open ourselves to new insights.

Not everyone is able to deal with grief in its raw state; in fact, many people are so traumatized they need extra help. As always, my mission, to the extent I have a mission, is to help people understand the nature of grief so they can deal with that cold, lonely road as best as they can — with or without medication.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator

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Getting Over Grief

August 1, 2021 — Pat Bertram

People often ask me how to get over grief, but the truth is (despite the title of this piece), we never get over grief for the simple reason that the person being mourned is gone for the rest of our life on Earth. Still, over time, the focus does change from the past and from our lost love to the future and perhaps a new love.

At the beginning, our focus — when it’s not on what we have lost — is about breathing. Taking one breath after another. Generally, breathing is simple. It’s something we do without thinking. But after the death of a person intrinsic to our life, such as a spouse or soul mate, it’s as if they took our breath with them when they left us, and breathing becomes something we need to focus on. A breath in, a breath out. Such a painful thing, those breaths! Adding to the complication is that so often we don’t want to breathe. We’d just as soon it was all over for us, too, and yet, we are compelled to continue taking those breaths.

As the years pass and the pain begins to subside, we hold on even tighter to our pain because grief is all that connects us to our lost love. During all those months and years, grief does its job, changing us into a person who can survive without the person we most loved. And gradually, a new love creeps into our life. Actually, I should say, a new focus comes into our life. Whatever it is that we find to focus on, it’s compelling enough to take our mind off our pain and sorrow and loneliness for a short time. And over the next months and years, all those “short times” add up. New memories are made. The past lessens its demands. The future becomes more compelling. And life goes on.

This new love or focus doesn’t have to be a person. It can be almost anything. Visiting museums. Hiking. Planning epic adventures. Yoga. Dance classes. Traveling. A new home. Gardening. For me, it was all of those things.

I tried so many things at the beginning. I wrote about my grief. I walked for hours. I visited museums. I went on day trips with people from my grief group. I took yoga classes. Sometimes, I could forget myself and my pain for minutes at a time, but nothing held. When the moment passed, I was right back where I started, in full grief mode.

It wasn’t until I started learning to dance that the focus lasted more than the moment. I started thinking about dancing, started practicing at home. Although grief didn’t leave me alone for long, it did start to lose its intense hold on me, and I could finally focus on something other than my loss and my pain.

As grief further eased its grip on me and I could sometimes imagine a future, I dreamed of — and planned — epic adventures. I was going to visit independent bookstores all over the country to see if they would sell my books. I was going to walk up the coast to Seattle. I was going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. I was going to take a freighter to New Zealand. I was going to go on a year-long camping trip. I was going to drive cross-country in my vintage VW. I still have the research I did for all these adventures, but in the end, the only one I followed through with was my 12,500 cross-country road trip as well as a north/south trip along the western coast and several trips from California to Colorado.

A couple of years ago, I changed my focus yet again when I bought a house and found a place to call home.

And now, what I find compelling enough to propel me into the future is gardening.

I’m far enough away from my focus on grief that I seldom get snapped back to those early months, but for the first seven years, no matter how compelling my current focus was, I often found myself blindsided by grief.

I’m not sure how a person goes about finding a new focus. I tend to think that when a griever is ready, a new focus — a new love — appears, rather than needing to search for it, but however it happens, the readiness and the new focus are part of this process of change we call grief.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator

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Dealing With Death

April 14, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Death is such a strange thing. A person lives and then something happens, and they are gone. The survivors have to deal with all the terrible death tasks — arranging a funeral, taking care of finances, getting rid of the person’s effects. And then life closes around where the person used to be, and to the world at large, it’s as if the deceased has never been.

It’s only the loved ones left behind who feel the absence, who have to deal with the grief, the angst, the loss, the missing, the yearning. When grief is new, all of those chaotic feelings fill the void where the loved one used to be, and then years later, many years later, even those feelings dissipate, and what’s left behind is a photo that begins to seem like that of a stranger. Even the void left behind loses its name — it becomes just a feeling of something that should be there but isn’t.

Even with all my experience with grief, I’m just as tongue-tied as anyone when it comes to offering words of condolence. In my case, it’s not ignorance of what the person is feeling, but a recognition of the terrible angst they are going through and will continue to go through for a very long time.

Some people never get a chance to work through all those feelings. If an elderly woman loses a son, as did my mother, chances are she will die with those feelings. In my mother’s case, the death of her fifty-four-year-old son killed her. Oh, not immediately, but she never got over the shock of his death or the horror of seeing him in a casket. She got sick within a couple of months, and she died right before the one-year anniversary of his death.

A friend has recently lost her son, and I can’t help thinking of my mother and what the death of my brother did to her. In light of that, it’s almost impossible to find consoling words for something I know cannot be consoled. As I’ve often told people — it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what you do. It’s being there. It’s letting the bereaved find what comfort they can in your presence.

For a while, people do rally around the bereaved, and then gradually, they move on, getting back into the swing of their own lives, leaving the bereaved alone to deal with their grief the best way they can.

It’s not the best system, perhaps, but it is what it is. After all, as people often have said, life is for the living, and it’s the living who gradually fill in the void where the deceased used to be — someone will take over their job, someone will wear their clothes and use their things, someone will move into their house. Gradually, the remnants of the deceased’s presence will disappear and life will continue largely unchanged for most people. But for the people who lost their loved one? The void remains, and their life will never be the same.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator

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Uncoupled In a Coupled World

February 14, 2021 — Pat Bertram

Valentine’s Day is such a couple’s day that it is a particularly hard day for those were uncoupled by death. Too many people have been left with a broken heart that seems even more broken on February fourteenth.

All holidays are hard, of course, but this is an especially difficult one because romance, with its emphasis on love and couplehood, is the theme. Clichés about love abound: You’re nobody unless somebody loves you. Love fulfills you. Love makes the world go round. All you need is love. Love is all that matters. Two hearts beating as one. Soul mates. Everlasting love.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, we see images of happy couples. It seems as if the day is taunting us with our loss, reminding us that once we were part of a couple, and now we are not. Hence, today, more than any other holiday, we have to guard against bitterness.

I say “we,” but I truly don’t include myself. Well, the part about the songs and love clichés is a problem all year round, or at least, it was. I’m mostly okay with being uncoupled in a coupled world because the truth is, you are someone even if you are now alone, even if yours is the only heart that is still beating. But Valentine’s Day itself was never a special day for me and Jeff because we didn’t really celebrate holidays; neither of us saw the point of buying candy or a present just because someone designated a certain day for that purpose.

Still, I am aware that it is an especially difficult time for many who had to deal with the death of a life mate, soul mate, spouse, and my heart goes out to them. Mostly, though, I wanted to present a different side of the heart and flower theme, to let people know that Valentine’s Day is not a good day for everyone.

Today could have been a hard day for me for an entirely different reason: the high right now is zero, and it’s going to go down to minus fifteen tonight, with a wind chill of minus thirty-five. Yikes. That’s cold! I’ve dealt with such temperatures before, but not when I’ve been living alone, and not when I am nearing “elderly.” But so far, I’ve been fine. I even managed to go out a couple of times to clear a path on the sidewalk. I couldn’t do the whole width — as someone kindly reminded me, it’s dangerous doing physical labor in such frigid conditions.

I hope you’re doing okay, too, whatever adverse situation is you might be dealing with today. Some things change if we wait long enough, such as the weather. Even though it seems as if it’s been winter forever, chances are the days will get warmer. Other situations, such as the death of loved one, there’s nothing to do but get up each day and deal with it the best we can. Even then, sometimes things change if we wait long enough. At the very least, we get used to being uncoupled in a coupled world.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator

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Preparing for Grief

December 14, 2020 — Pat Bertram

An online friend who will soon be experiencing grief due the death of a loved one, asked me which of my books I would suggest she read to help her prepare.

To be honest, there is no way to prepare for such a physical, emotional, and spiritual upheaval. No matter how much we are prepared, the actuality of the experience is more than we could ever imagine because there is nothing that compare. Even people who have suffered comparable losses, such as an undesired divorce, are shocked when they have to contend with death as well as all the painful changes they were expecting.

We simply do not have the capacity for understanding death, what it means to the person dying, what their death means to us. When it happens, all we can do is stand at the abyss, and wonder if our grief will carry us over the edge.

The best way to prepare is to try to keep from falling into the pitfalls of regret and guilt, to try to act in a manner that won’t carry an additional burden into grief. I say “try” because there is no way to prevent such pitfalls. Even though a person might be dying, they are still alive, and life carries with it emotions and actions that that seem reasonable at the time and only in memory prove to be problematic. When one of a couple is struggling to live while the other is preparing to die, emotions run strong. The only time Jeff and I ever got into a verbal altercation was three weeks before he died. The problem is, although we know they are dying, we don’t know it. It seems as if forever after, they will be dying, and so we don’t truly fathom that one day they will be gone from our lives.

All we can do is love the person, do the best we can for them and for ourselves, and try to keep up our strength. A dying vigil is exhausting. Death tasks are exhausting. Grief is exhausting.

All that being said, both my books can help a person get through the lonely years that follow.

Grief: The Great Yearning is a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries I wrote while struggling to survive my first year of grief. As one reviewer said, “This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Many people use this book as well as my blog posts as a checkpoint to see if what they are feeling is normal, because the truth is, such grief feels anything but normal. They need to read my story partly as a validation of their own experience and to see that they are not alone in what they feel. Grief is horrendously isolating. Few of us know anyone who has experienced grief. Few of us know anyone who is willing to let us talk about how we feel without trying to “fix” us. Death is simply not fixable. It’s something that must be assimilated. And grief is how we assimilate such a profound loss.

Although the official consensus is that everyone’s grief is different, I have found the opposite to be true. We may actually grieve differently in that some people cry, some scream, some become ill, some refuse to acknowledge their feelings, but the pattern of grief after the loss of a spouse, life mate, soul mate is more or less the same for most of us. So this is not just my story, but the story of many grievers I have encountered during the years after the death of my life mate/soul mate.

Grief: The Great Yearning is a personal look at grief from the inside out. Grief: The Inside Story is look at grief from the outside in, written eight years after the onset of my grief. It’s more of a guide, an explanation of the various permutations of grief and how it changes us than simply one woman’s story. Although the book is obviously personal since my grief is the grief I am most familiar with, other people have allowed me to use their thoughts and experiences to create this guide, this explanation of grief and what the experience entails.

Coping with the death of a loved one can be the most traumatic and stressful situation most people ever deal with — and the practical and emotional help available to the bereaved is often very poor. As the bereaved struggle to make sense of their new situation they often find that the advice they receive is produced by medical professionals who have never personally experienced grief; and filled with platitudes and clichés, with very little practical help. How long does grief last? What can I do to help myself? Are there really five stages of grief? Why can’t other people understand how I feel? Will I ever be happy again? Grief: The Inside Story debunks many established beliefs about what grief is, how it affects those left behind, and how to adjust to a world that no longer contains your loved one.

Although I don’t often include it with my grief books because it is fiction, Unfinished is also an important about grief. It shows the emotional instability and practical concerns the woman character experiences while her husband is dying and shows the surreal thinking that she experienced after he was died. One reviewer found it unbelievable that a woman who so loved her husband that she experienced so much mental and physical devastation after he died, would act the way she did, carrying on with another man during that last year. But all that shows me is that she was never there. You truly do not know the skewed way one can think when forced into such an untenable situation.

Would anyone believe, considering all my talk of grief, considering our almost cosmic connection, considering all he had meant to me over the decades we were together, that there were times during that last year of our shared life when I hated him, when I just wished he’d die and get it over with? Many of us have been there, and it is a secret we hold close, seldom admitting it even to ourselves. (Thinking back, I’m sure he knew, and I’m sure he never held it against me, though I did.)

I guess, then, after reviewing all my books, a person who wants to prepare themselves for what is coming, should read Unfinished first, then Grief: The Great Yearning, and finally, Grief: The Inside Story.

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It’s All Small Stuff

November 19, 2019 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday’s post, “It All Matters” was not supposed to be so much an explanation of why I blog about the things I do but rather an explanation of why small things are important (and important enough to blog about).

There is a saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff.” Believe me, it’s not all small stuff. Dying. Death. Grief. Loss. Love. Birth. These are all huge. You can’t choose not to “sweat” them, because they sweat you. So much of the accompanying emotional, mental, chemical and hormonal changes occur without your volition. They all work to propel you into a new way of being so that you can eventually handle those immense and intense life events.

When you are dealing with changes, especially traumatic changes, it’s the small things that keep you going. A cup of tea. A flower blooming in the desert. A smile from a stranger. A shadow. (After Jeff died, I so often walked with my head down to keep people from seeing the bleakness in my eyes, that I was very aware of shadow play.)

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, there was something I once did that helped train me for grief. Jeff and I lived on a lane that was less than a third of a mile long. At one end was private property. At the other end a busy highway. To take a walk of any length, I had to walk up and down, up and down that lane. It was like a treadmill in that the scene never changed. It could have been horrendously boring, but I learned to look for the small things: a flower growing in the gravel, a reflection in the irrigation ditch water, a pretty weed. I also learned to look through the eye of a camera. Focusing on one of those small things (or even a big thing like the mountains in the distance) helped make that walk as interesting as a hike in the forest. (Well, maybe not that interesting, but it did keep me going.)

After Jeff died, what kept me going were the small things. What brought the world into focus was the eye of the camera. (I was too raw at the time to be able to see life as a whole. I had to break everything up into small, lens-size pieces.)

Conversely, it was also the small things that brought me low. One of the first upsurges of grief came when I broke a mug. The mug was unimportant but it was something gone from our shared life. One of the worst upsurges of grief came when I was blindsided by lilacs. Jeff had loved lilacs, and we had planted them all around the property where we lived. I’d never seen any lilacs in the desert I’d moved to after he died, but one day, shortly after the first anniversary of his death, the scent of a stray lilac bush in a vacant lot called to me, and I was once again awash in grief.

Mostly, though, focusing on the small things helped. I could not deal with the enormity of death, but I could focus on a dying leaf. I could not deal with the immenseness of learning to live without the one person who had made it all worthwhile, but I could focus on a budding flower. I could not embrace life quite yet, but I could focus on a hug or a smile; I could focus on a single bite of food or drink.

Grief is such a hard thing to deal with, but it does come with its lessons, and one such lesson is that in comparison to the immensity of loss, it’s all small stuff. And the small stuff really is important.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Handling Someone Else’s Grief

August 20, 2019 — Pat Bertram

In the book I am currently reading, a thirty-year-old woman lost her 5-month old baby to crib death, and now, nine months later, she is still grieving, still depressed. Because of a divorce, she and the baby had been living with her parents, and since they can no longer handle her grief — they feel as if they’d lost her as well as their grandchild — they ship her off to her godmother. The godmother is freaking out because she doesn’t know how to help the bereft woman, doesn’t know how to bring her out of her depression, and the godmother is emoting through many pages about her inability to cope.

This sort of story — this attitude — makes me so very frustrated!! It’s not enough that we (they) lost someone intrinsic to our lives, we have to deal with people’s need to help.

Here’s a clue, folks. For all of you who have asked me over the years how to help someone who is grieving: don’t help.

Let them grieve. So what if you can’t handle their pain. It is their pain. Sometimes love means letting your loved one hurt, letting them nurse their pain. Grief is how a person becomes someone who can handle the loss. You do not go from being an ecstatic mother to being a happy non-mother in a few months. It is not possible. Grief takes you where you need to go, takes you to a happy-but-sad (sad-but-happy?) place, though it takes way more — years more — than a mere nine months.

Nine months is nothing when it comes to the loss of a life. Sure, the baby had only lived a few months, but what the mother grieves along with the loss of those few months, are the young girl, the young woman, the happy wife, the radiant mother, the grateful grandmother the baby would have been. That is a whole lot of grief to deal with.

If you can’t handle a griever’s pain, realize that what they are feeling is a thousand times worse than what you are feeling. Have empathy. Swallow your pain and let them talk about their loss and sorrow. Prepare food for them if you must, but don’t guilt them into eating it.

Grief is in control. Not the griever. Not you.

It is their grief. Whether it takes nine months or nine years, it is none of your business. Sorry to sound harsh, but it isn’t. Grievers go through more than you can ever imagine, more than can ever be expressed in one silly story about helping someone overcoming the loss of their baby. So let them get on with their grieving.

You can and should be there (and still love them) when the grievers become someone you don’t know. Because they will become such a person. It is the nature of grief. And you cannot hurry grief.

It is this sort of simplistic view of grief that made me write about grief from the very beginning. It’s important for people to know the truth. It’s not the griever who has to change their attitude toward grief. It is the friends and families of grievers who must accommodate their loved one as grief takes the bereft where they need to go.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Grief: The Inside Story

August 15, 2019 — Pat Bertram

One common challenge facing all of us — grievers, friends of grievers, and health care professionals — is how to help those who are experiencing grief after bereavement.

Coping with the death of a loved one can be the most traumatic and stressful situation most people ever deal with — and the practical and emotional help available to the bereaved is often very poor. I found this to be true as I recovered from the loss of my life partner.

How long does grief last? What can I do to help myself? Are there really five stages of grief? Why can’t other people understand how I feel? Will I ever be happy again? Questions like these aren’t easily dealt with, and much of the literature aimed at the bereaved can read either like a medical textbook.

My new book Grief – The Inside Story: A Guide to Surviving the loss of a Loved One aims to answer these big questions in a straightforward way, and it may be of help to you or someone you know.  If you would like to know more a free easily-downloadable sample of the book, and a complete and detailed listing of its contents, is available here: https://www.docdroid.net/klBIjLB/grief-by-pat-bertram.pdf

The book trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtLwOpGpm_w

Grief – The Inside Story is now available from Amazon (www.amazon.com/dp/0368039668), and all good bookstores. If you have any questions I’d love to hear from you.

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Preparing for a Life Mate’s Death

January 8, 2019 — Pat Bertram

People often ask me how they can prepare themselves to cope with the eventual death of their spouse, but there is no way to ever prepare yourself for such an eventuality. You cannot imagine how you will feel when they die — it truly is unimaginable — so the best thing you can do is spend time with them now, enjoy what you have together, and let the end take care of itself. If you prepare now for what you imagine you will feel then, you will miss the very things that will get you through the pain and loneliness — creating memories, knowing you did the best for your loved one that you could, having no regrets as to your actions.

The truth is, grief at the loss of a spouse is so great and so all-consuming, that it changes you into the person who will be able to live without your mate. Not at first, of course. There is no way to prepare for the pain you will feel. But as time goes on, you will become the person you need to be and you will learn to embrace life again. Even the loneliness will become bearable.

It is not our choice who lives and who dies, but we can choose to live despite their death. I have met many widows and widowers since I lost my life mate, and every one of them eventually found a way not only to survive, but to thrive.

While dealing with the horrendous loss of their mates, while still grieving well into their second and third year, women have traveled the world alone to honor their husband’s dream. By themselves, they have closed up the house they lived in for twenty years and moved halfway across the country. They have put in irrigation systems, have finished building a house, have written books, have taken up painting, have gone back to school, have started businesses, have blogged about their grief. They have made new friends. They have worked to support themselves and their families, and to pay the medical bills their husbands left behind. They have welcomed grown children back into their homes, helped take care of newborns and elderly parents. All while dealing with active grief.

Just as you cannot imagine how you will feel, you cannot imagine who you will become. So, try not to imagine the unimaginable. Celebrate what you still have, and if the day comes when you are left alone, you will be able to do whatever you need to do.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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