Compound Grief
It’s not every day that I choose willingly to look into my grief and take inventory on how losses have impacted my life. The desire to avoid embodying the definition of insanity is what drove this deep dive. I just didn’t want to continue doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. When you can’t change the world, you must change yourself.
Between June of 2013 and December of 2014, I lost four people of significance in my life. I had also moved across the country the month before, by myself, and faced those losses alone. I was in a new state, new job, no friends yet, and 3,000 miles away from my friends and family and everything familiar to me. I love so much that Paul commented on my last post that loss can rewire our neural pathways and cause us to default to numbness at the slightest threat of loss. He reminded me of a colleague who sat patiently as I listed all the deaths that occurred in that short span of time, and he told me if I didn’t talk to someone about it, I’d become exactly what Paul said, numb. In hindsight, I think that ship had already sailed because intellectually I knew he was right, but internally I felt no impetus, or need, to get help. Numb.
Each one of those people had a very unique significance in my life from the other. There was the adopted brother, the adoptive mother, the birth father, and the birth aunt. It shouldn’t be left unacknowledged that ten years prior, I experienced the most significant loss on my life, my Dad. So special to me, there will never be the word adoptive preceding Dad.
This is compound grief, also known as cumulative grief. When I choose a bank account, I look for one that offers compound interest. When I lift weights, I’ll do compound exercises on some days for maximum benefit. But when it comes to the things I lose that matter to me, thank you but I can only handle maybe one per decade.
While these were people that I lost, every potential future, opportunity to resolve old wounds, or chance at reconciliation was lost with them. Every time I had to tell my new boss someone else died, I lost another piece of the innocence and enthusiasm belonging to my new beginning. Every day I spent alone in my grief I missed out on the healing power of the presence of another and felt alienated.
Compound grief isn’t exclusive to the loss of life. There are many circumstances that can spiral from one loss to another, such a losing a job, causing financial loss, then your wife leaves you because she has had enough, and then moves out with the kids. Each one of these things on their own is a lot to mourn, but collectively can overwhelm your ability to process any of it.
Compound grief is the accumulation of losses in a short period of time; when you do not have a chance to grieve one loss before another one shows up. It is a form of trauma that I think is not recognized enough. When events overwhelm our ability to cope, we can get stuck in flight, fight, freeze or fawn, hypervigilant or desensitized in ways we are not even aware of.
It’s a kindness we can give to ourselves and others, to stay sensitive to events might that evoke a sense of loss. I wish I had had that for myself. For me, it took facing what might have ultimately lead me feel so dispassionate and disconnected from others. The parts of me that ARE integral to my self-identify, empathy and compassion, had felt gone forever, and I needed to understand why they went away. This was affecting me in the same way over and over again, hence my insanity plea. This deep dive into my grief has not been as scary as it threatened to be, and honestly allowed me to find my empathy and compassion, which started with myself. It’s okay that I get emotional writing this because it means I feel human again, and assured of my ability to contribute to another’s healing journey.
I’m sorry for the things you have lost. I wish I could look you in the eye so you could see how present I am here with you in this space. Please start the conversation with yourself or another about whether you have experienced compound grief so you can begin to heal and honor all that you have been through too.
Love,
Elisha
p.s. I have added grief and loss resources on the resource page. Please let us know if you have any you recommend :)