By Dr. Alan Wolfelt

Though you should reach out to others as you do the work of mourning, you should not feel obligated to accept the unhelpful responses you may receive from some people. You are the one who is grieving, and as such, you have certain “rights” no one should try to take away from you.

The following list is intended both to empower you to heal and to decide how others can and cannot help. This is not to discourage you from reaching out to others for help, but rather to assist you in distinguishing useful responses from hurtful ones.

1. You have the right to experience your own unique grief.

No one else will grieve in exactly the same way you do. So, when you turn to others for help, don’t allow them to tell what you should or should not be feeling.

2. You have the right to talk about your grief.

Talking about your grief will help you heal. Seek out others who will allow you to talk as much as you want, as often as you want, about your grief. If at times you don’t feel like talking, you also have the right to be silent.

3. You have the right to feel a multitude of emotions.

Confusion, disorientation, fear, guilt and relief are just a few of the emotions you might feel as part of your grief journey. Others may try to tell you that feeling angry, for example, is wrong. Don’t take these judgmental responses to heart. Instead, find listeners who will accept your feelings without condition.

4. You have the right to be tolerant of your physical and emotional limits.

Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you feeling fatigued. Respect what your body and mind are telling you. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. And don’t allow others to push you into doing things you don’t feel ready to do.

5. You have the right to experience “griefbursts.”

Sometimes, out of nowhere, a powerful surge of grief may overcome you. This can be frightening, but is normal and natural. Find someone who understands and will let you talk it out.

6. You have the right to make use of ritual.

The funeral ritual does more than acknowledge the death of someone loved. It helps provide you with the support of caring people. More importantly, the funeral is a way for you to mourn. If others tell you the funeral or other healing rituals such as these are silly or unnecessary, don’t listen.

7. You have the right to embrace your spirituality.

If faith is a part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you feel angry at God, find someone to talk with who won’t be critical of your feelings of hurt and abandonment.

8. You have the right to search for meaning.

You may find yourself asking, “Why did he or she die? Why this way? Why now?” Some of your questions may have answers, but some may not. And watch out for the clichéd responses some people may give you. Comments like, “It was God’s will” or “Think of what you have to be thankful for” are not helpful and you do not have to accept them.

9. You have the right to treasure your memories.

Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after the death of someone loved. You will always remember. Instead of ignoring your memories, find others with whom you can share them.

10. You have the right to move toward your grief and heal.

Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be patient and tolerant with yourself and avoid people who are impatient and intolerant with you. Neither you nor those around you must forget that the death of someone loved changes your life forever.

(Some days I play the role of advice mallard.  So, hang with me as I dish.)

I want to give you permission to pursue your doubts about your faith.

In some faith communities and religious families, the doubters are ostracized.  Doubting isn’t just seen as questioning; it’s viewed as something that’s underpinned by rebellion, by sin.  The prevailing idea is that, “You’re doubting the faith, so you can leave the faith; and by leaving the faith, you are leaving our family.”

To stave off being ostracized by family and friends, many doubters keep their questions about God to themselves.  And, to a degree, it’s okay, except when that doubt is part of your grief.

Doubt and grief are directly correlated.  Kenneth Doka suggests that “one of the most significant tasks in grief is to reconstruct faith or philosophical systems, now challenged by the loss” (Loss of the Assumptive World; 49).  All forms of grief, normal, complicated and especially traumatic grief produce doubts about one’s faith.

Goodness is sucked away in grief; and many of us base our faith off the presumed goodness of God.  When that goodness is sucked into the darkness of grief, the foundation of God’s goodness begins to shake; our faith trembles and sometimes it shatters.

Faithquake.

The dilemma that results is this: we need our family and friends during grief … to share our grief with, to remember and to receive acceptance; yet, we’re afraid we will be ostracized by our family and friends if we express our doubt.  Do we: 1. Pursue our grief induced doubts at the expense of our community and at the expense of experiencing the grief within the community; or, 2. Do we pursue our community at the expense of our personal faith searching?

We do both.  You need both.  You need to accept your doubts and find acceptance in community.  And it might be nearly impossibility.

If you are experiencing doubt in a faith community during your grief, tell someone you trust something like this:

“I need to talk and I need you to just hear me and accept me right now.  I know your faith is strong and I respect you for your faith, but my faith has taken a hit since ____’s death.  Instead of forcing my faith, I’m processing my doubt.  _____’s death is changing me.”

If they can listen, you need to talk it through with them.  It’s healthy to express your grief within the community of grievers; and if your grief includes doubt, sharing will only help diminish your pain and clarify your outlook. 

On the other hand, I want to give you permission to pursue the faith you’ve never had.

Grief can also enliven a newfound belief in God.  All of a sudden your darkness sees a light and now – in your community of “unbelievers” – you’re the religious nut.

And you need to say the same thing to your community:

“I need to talk and I need you to just hear me and accept me.  I know we aren’t very religious and I respect you and how you live life.  But, I’m pursing faith since _____‘s death.  I don’t want to convert you, but I want you to know I’m changing.”

The grief that can produce doubt can also enliven faith.  And both are okay.  And both need to be done in our communities.

Accept your grief.  Accept your enlivened faith.  And, to the best you can, do so in your community.

denial,

anger,

bargaining,

depression,

and acceptance.

In this process of grief, Kubler-Ross assumed that throughout the whole grief process, the bereaved should be experiencing what Freud called “decathexis”, which is a removal of emotional energy from the deceased; a detachment. Freud then suggested that during and after “decathexis” we will take those emotional energies and reinvest them into another object or person in a process called “recathexis.” Essentially, we find other people to love … and use them to fill the “love hole” left by the deceased.

The assumption to both Freud and Kubler-Ross’ model is that the end of the grief process (healing, acceptance) is a form of detachment from the deceased.

But, I think they’re wrong.

Anna Lamott writes,

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

Instead of saying that the end of the grief process is detachment and healing, I think we should say that the healthy end of the grief process is adjustment. It’s adjusting to the fact that your loved one is no longer here to share life experiences with you. It’s adjusting to the loss of the future, but there’s never a detachment from the past.

We simply have on-going bonds with the deceased. They will forever be apart of us and instead of trying to “heal” and find “decathexis” (although I don’t think Freud’s idea is categorically wrong), we must learn to adjust and dance with our limp.

Over time, you will learn to adjust to the death of a loved one. A part of you has been lost and you will never find it again, so you must learn to live without it. But, don’t confuse your adjustment for healing. You may never heal.

This from Jandy Nelson over the loss of her sister, Bailey:

“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”

Maybe the reason we never heal is because our love never dies.

One of the parents mentions that she still sleeps with her son’s pajamas so that she can be soothed by “his smell.”  Certainly, considering the tragedy of Newtown, there is nothing abnormal about her practice.  In fact, it’s healthy and I can’t help but feel the heaviness of her grief as I think about it.

Here’s a question: A what point has her son’s smell disappeared and what she thinks is her son’s smell is actually her own smell.  At what point in sleeping with his pajamas have they stopped smelling like her son and started to smell like her?

At funerals, you’ll often hear people say, “Cathy lives on in all of our memories” or, “Cathy will never die as longs as we remember her.”

There’s a difficulty that comes with remembering our loved one.

I remember an old man, who was married to his late wife for over 50 years, stopped into funeral home to pay his bill and he said, “I both grieve the loss of my wife and the distortion of my memories of her.  Even now, when I remember her, I ask myself, “Is this memory real or is it my mind’s adaptation of her?  I only want to remember the good, but I miss the bad and messy nearly as much because it’s who she was.”

There’s a time when the smell on the pajamas becomes our own.  There’s a time when memories are distorted by our desires for comfort.  But, this is why we must grieve in community … so that community can help us piece together the real.

Grief must take place in community!  We have to share, we have to be vulnerable with our friends and family.

Share at your family dinners … over the holidays.

Be brave an ask your parents old friends about mom/dad.  Ask your child’s friends … your spouse’s co-workers.

Have people write down their memories.

Talk.  Talk. Talk.  Talk about your deceased loved one.  Don’t let the memories die.  Don’t let them become distorted.

I have some problems with the idea of heaven.  I know, you might hate me for saying that.

The Barna Group says 81% of Americans believe in the afterlife.

The Washington Post quotes 75%.

The Council of Secular Humanism states 55% definitely believe in life after.

Anyway you look at, the majority of us believe in life after death.  My problem has less to do with the idea of the afterlife and more to do with how we use it.  The afterlife is powerful; and like most powerful things, its easily abused.  The easiest abuse that arises is that we can pay more attention to the life after than the life here and now.  As the saying goes, we become so heavenly focused that we become no earthly good.

This plays out especially during death and dying.

The “Don’t grieve, deary, your husband is with Jesus” cliché, death-related responses hit right at the heart of what I’m trying to communicate.

To start with, religious believers have a very difficult time accepting their grief as legitimate because many worship a god who is impassible … who is without emotion.  We emulate what we worship and nothing is unhealthier than humanity trying to act like their unemotive deity during times of distress, pain and death.

Compound that with the belief that death isn’t really real … that death is the pathway to another life … that we shouldn’t grieve because “your husband is with Jesus” and we have a recipe for disastrous dishonesty about our pain in death.

Religious people tend to downplay tragedy with clichés like:

“It’s God’s will”

“God meant it for good.”

“We don’t always understand God’s mysterious plans.”

And in the same way, we use the powerful antidote of the afterlife to downplay our grief and pain during times of death:

“At least you know he’s in a better place.”

“You can be happy to know she’s in the arms of Jesus.”

All this speaks to repression, delusion and the tendency to skip the first four stages of Kubler-Ross’ grief model and go right to a faux form of “acceptance.”

And this is why I think it’s unhealthy.  It’s unhealthy because it can too easily take away your grief work.  It’s a “get out of pain for free” card that all too many play to the detriment of their personal growth.  In the same way that I disdain a person buying a fake online PhD, so do I distain this attempt to skip the labor of grief, the growth of grief and the personal evaluation that inevitably comes with death.

Heaven’s the trump card.

The “Easy Button”.

We become so heavenly minded that we’re no good at grief.  We can become so heavenly focused, that we forget the here and now.  We see death as unreal, as almost fake; and we become just like our view of it.

(Either this week or the next, I’ll post a follow-up called, “How Heaven Can Help Grief Work.”)

One of the main issues that psychiatrists are having with the DSM-5 is that it is lumping normal grief into Major Depressive Disorder.  Here’s a quote from Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of Duke’s School of Medicine:

(In the new DSM-5) Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.

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There are many shared characteristics between grief and depression, but there’s also some distinct differences.  Dr. Ginette G. Ferszt states this:

Although everyone grieves differently, grief and depression share several common characteristics. Both may include intense sadness, fatigue, sleep and appetite disturbances, low energy, loss of pleasure, and difficulty concentrating. The key difference is that a grieving person usually stays connected to others, periodically experiences pleasure, and continues functioning as he rebuilds his life. With depression, a connection with others and the ability to experience even brief periods of pleasure are generally missing. Sometimes people describe feeling as if they have fallen into a black hole and fear they may never climb out. Overwhelming emotions interfere with the ability to cope with everyday stressors.

Here is a chart that shows the similarities and differences between depression and grief.

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Should we medicate grief?

Mostly “no”, but in some cases “yes”.  Here is when grief may need some type of medication:

• If grief-related anxiety is so severe that it interferes with daily life, anti-anxiety medication may be helpful.
• If the person is experiencing sleep problems, short-term use of prescription sleep aids may be helpful.
• If symptoms last longer than two months after the loss and the diagnostic criteria are met, the person may be suffering from Major Depressive Disorder. In this case, antidepressants would be an appropriate therapy.

Here is are some criteria to determine if grief has transitioned to Major Depressive Disorder.

•   Feelings of guilt not related to the loved one’s death
•   Thoughts of death other than feelings he or she would be better off dead or should have died with the deceased person
•   Morbid preoccupation with worthlessness
•   Sluggishness or hesitant and confused speech
•   Prolonged and marked difficulty in carrying out the activities of day-to-day living
•   Hallucinations other than thinking he or she hears the voice of or sees the deceased person.  (From Nancy Schimelpfening’s “Grief and Depression”).

Ultimately, grief is the response to loss.  And no amount of medication is going to bring that loss back.  We must learn to live with the loss of someone integral to our very being.  If medication hurts that learning process, then it’s destructive.  If it can help us learn to live in the “new normal”, then it becomes an aid to understanding life after loss.

I think the following quote sums up the core of why medicating grief is usually not healthy:

For many, it’s a time when we come home.  Maybe our jobs have taken us away from our extended families, or our wanderlust has created a land distance between the place we grew up and the place we’ve planted ourselves.

Holidays allow us to touch … again.  Touch, hug, and kiss our parents.  Embrace our brothers, tightly hug our sisters.  It fills what Facebook and Skype can’t provide.

But the same thing that underscores life also underscores what’s missing.

Parents, who only a couple years past were welcoming you home for the holidays with their embrace, their holiday feast, are now gone.  Siblings, spouses, maybe even children — people who were mainstays in our lives — are no longer there to share in the life of Christmas morning, of New Year feasts, of presents.

And what is meant for rest … what is meant for life … becomes a time that creates unrest as it all accentuates what’s missing … or rather who’s missing … from the family table, from the celebrations.  The busyness of work, of kids, of our schedules comes to a screeching halt during the holidays and all of a sudden we have time to remember.

We remember the holidays past.  The joy.  The hugs.  The love.  The life that is now missing.  And all the grief that we thought was over all comes flooding back into our hearts and our minds.

*****

If you’re the person who will be met with the unrest of death during this holiday season, here’s some practical advice for dealing with the grief of the past, present and future:

The Grief of the Past and Present: Whether your loss was very recent or years gone, when you’re with your family and friends this season, take time to remember your loved one who has passed away.  Before the meal, or during the game, speak up and share something like this, “Hey guys, I just want to say that I love you all and I really miss ______ this year.”  That’s it.  Or, if you want to go on, share your favorite holiday memory of your loved one.

If you really want to be an angel this holiday, visit or call or send a card to someone you know who has recently lost.  A simple “I’m thinking about you this holiday” goes a very, very long way.

The Grief of the Future:  The best way to deal with the grief of the future is to live life now with absolutely no regrets.  This comes from the authority that a funeral director possesses – if you’re at odds with a family member or a friend, no matter how ugly the dispute or no matter how hurt your pride, life is simply too short to hold a grudge.  Give your family, your friends and yourself the greatest gift you could possibly give this Christmas – a gift that reflects the real reason of Christmas – and forgive.

And if you haven’t lost a loved one recently, I encourage you to love EXTRA HARD this holiday season.  Live!  Hug!  Speak your love over your family and friends!  And when the festivities are done and they’re leaving to go home, make sure you tell them that you love them.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!  I love you all.

On Friday, December 14th, Sandy Hook Elementary experienced a tragedy that is creating a new normal for the town of Newtown, Connecticut.

The very same day as the school shootings I worked a viewing at a small Mennonite church in Gap, PA.  As with most Mennonite churches, the pastor is bi-vocational.   This specific pastor works as a part-time pastor and full-time salesman for an agricultural feed company.  The area that he covers includes Bart Township, the same area that experienced the Amish school shootings in 2006.

We walked in to the church, set up the casket and flowers and I broke the news to the pastor about the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.  His countenance fell as he immediately connected the Sandy Hook shooting to the Amish School shooting.  “I’ve been the salesman there for years.  All the Amish families are my friends.  Just the other day one of the mothers who lost a daughter told me she’s reminded of her daughter every time she sees children coming home from school.”

This, like all tragedy, finds a life of its own.  Friday, December 14^th marks the first day of a new normal for Newtown, Connecticut.  In many ways, this new normal is a sad birth.  In this blog post, I want to look at the practical side of how the next couple days and weeks will look for Newtown.

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TRAUMA RESPONSE: Thankfully, there are professionals who are being tasked this very moment in setting up response teams.  The American Red Cross, various hospice programs and the American Psychological Association all have large scale trauma response teams who are trained to counsel children and parents in psychological and bereavement support, organize support groups and guide the community back to some type of semblance.  The response teams will evaluate, support, offer guidance and help as the children, parents and teachers begin this dark journey.

Children do grieve.  As long as there are relationships formed, there’s grief.  And while the general public is not very adept at understanding a child’s ability to grasp death, those from the APA, Red Cross and hospice programs are.  All the children will experience traumatic grief (CTG), many will experience post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the hope will be that these children, like the youth from Columbine, will bond together and find deep fellowship in their grief, sorrow and pain.

Pragmatic questions like, “When do we restart school?” and “When should I go back to work?” will be guided by these wonderful angels from the response teams.

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BODY IDENTIFICATION AND FAMILY NOTIFICATION:  By deduction, the families know whether or not their son or daughter, husband or wife is dead by the simple fact that they didn’t come home.  But, their son or daughter, husband or wife may be so … that the bodies have yet to be identified.

Some families may be called into the hospital to visually identify their loved ones, other bodies may be too distorted and will need to be identified through other, more technical means.  All the bodies will be studied, some autopsied, some given for organ donation and one – the shooters – will be looked upon with contempt by all who view him.

Once identified, the families will start the funeral arrangements.

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These police were apparently some of the first on the scene of the Newtown shootings.

FUNERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS:  There’s only one funeral home in Newtown, Connecticut. And while I doubt the Honan Funeral Home will bury all the victims and the shooter, they will probably bury many of them.  From what I can tell by the obituary section on their website, the Honan Funeral Home is not a very large funeral home.  In fact, they’ve only advertised 12 obituaries in the past year.  They will need help as they could very well have twice their yearly volume in one week.  And thankfully, per this article, other surrounding funeral directors are offering their help to Honan.

Any funeral home and funeral director who works with these families will need their own type of support over the months to come.  Most of us don’t enter this business because we’re cold hearted; rather, we enter it because we’re generally big hearted.  These tragedies hurt us as well.  Embalming the body of an elementary school student that has been autopsied and shot is enough to permanently disturb anyone, including a seasoned funeral director.

Questions of “how will this family pay for this funeral?” are likely taken off the table, either by the funeral director’s generosity or by nonprofits like Bury a Child (run by my friend Nancy Burban, who lives in a neighboring town) who are already donating caskets and raising funds for funeral expenses of the children (UPDATE: Per Nancy, all the funds have been raised to cover the funeral expenses of the victims).

Police and other first responders will carry a burden that no man or woman should ever carry.  They have seen images no one should ever see.

Pastors, too, will experience many sleepless nights as they prepare words for an unspeakable event.

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THE NEAR FUTURE: The funerals will be large, sad and no doubt full of horrible theology explaining how we can’t question God, how God will turn this into good, etc.  Yet, despite the horrible theology, many churches will find themselves full.  Churches will comfort some families.  The community will become more closely knit.  Memorials and monuments will be built to honor the memory of the children and the teachers.  School will eventually reconvene.  On December 14^th, 2013 CNN will hold a special marking the one year anniversary of the shootings.  And in five years the world will forget.

But the pain will linger.  The grief will remain in the hearts of the parents and their families.  Time will not heal these wounds.  This is the new normal for Newtown, Connecticut.

I don’t know Deepak Chopra, except that he has simultaneous fame and infamy.   I’m sure the man is a decent human being.

And I’m sure he was caught off guard with the question posed in this video here.

I hope he really didn’t mean it when he answered said question with this piece of crap:

“You must go through the grieving process … if you remember all the joy you got out of (the relationship you had with your deceased spouse) and you grieve and you heal your body at the same time, then within six months (grief) will start to dissipate, and within one year you will be back to your baseline status.  We know this from psychological studies.”

When he talks about “the grieving process”, I’m not sure what he means; furthermore, I’m not sure HE knows what he means. Either way, when he starts talking about a time frame for grief “dissipating” and regaining your “baseline status”, I STRONGLY disagree with Mr. Chopra.

There is no time frame.  And there is no exact “grief process.”  There are not scientific stages that the psychological community agrees upon (there’s a number of different models of grief work, each entirely or slightly different than the next).  Even though the psychological community is greatly indebted to Kübler-Ross, there’s a tendency in pop psychology to think that grief follows in linear lock-step with the five stages of grief.  Some even attach a timeline to this process.  And they’re wrong.

Here a poem that communicates the more “circular staircase” of grief.

The night I lost you

Someone pointed me towards

The Five Stages of Grief.

Go that way, they said,

It’s easy, like learning to climb

Stairs after the amputation.

And so I climbed.

Denial was first.

I sat down at breakfast

Carefully setting the table

For two.  I passed you the toast –

You sat there.  I passed

you the paper – you hid

behind it.

Anger seemed more familiar.

I burned the toast, snatched

The paper and read the headlines myself.

But they mentioned your departure,

And so I moved on to

Bargaining.  What could I exchange

For you?  The silence

After storms?  My typing fingers?

Before I could decide, Depression

Came puffing up, a poor relation

Its suitcase tied together

With string.  In the suitcase

Were bandages for the eyes

And bottles of sleep.  I slid

All the way down the stairs

Feeling nothing.

And all the time Hope

Flashed on and off

In defective neon.

Hope was a signpost pointing

Straight in the air.

Hope was my uncle’s middle name,

He died of it.

After a year I am still climbing,

Though my feet slip

On your stone face.

The treeline has long since disappeared;

Green is a color

I have forgotten.

But now I see what I am climbing

Towards: Acceptance

Written in capital letters,

A special headline:

Acceptance,

Its name is in lights.

I struggle on,

Waving and shouting.

Below, my whole life spreads its surf,

All the landscapes I’ve ever known

Or dreamed of.  Below

A fish jumps: the pulse

In your neck.

Acceptance.  I finally reach it.

But something is wrong.

Grief is a circular staircase.

I have lost you.

Jerry Brown

Another week in the NFL.  Another tragic death.  Another reaffirmation of a culture of “play on.”

Last week it was the Kansas City Chief’s Javon Belcher who shot himself in front of his coach.   This week it’s the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Brown.  Brown was the passenger in teammate Josh Brent’s car, when Brent lost control, wrecked his car, killing Brown –  who just announced a couple days ago that he’s a father-to-be.

Brent, who survived the crash with a couple cuts and bruises, is being charged with “intoxication manslaughter.”  The crash happened Saturday, effectively destroying the lives of two young men.

On Sunday (the day after the crash), the Cowboys, like the Kansas City Chiefs a week before, decided to play their game against the Cincinnati Bengals.  And like the Chiefs, the Cowboys won.

This from the head coach of the Cowboys after they beat the Bengals:

I’m very proud of our football team. Somehow, someway they did find a way to channel the emotion that we had. I think there was a feeling of numbness out on the field today but somehow they focused it and we figured out a way to win this ballgame. I thought we honored him as well as he could be honored. This is a day I’m never going to forget. Its’ a tragic day for all of us. I’m never going to forget how this football team came together and honored Jerry Brown and his family. We’ll continue to mourn his loss. We’ll continue to miss him, and we’ll never forget about him.

It’s obvious that – like the Chief’s players and coaches – the Cowboys are mourning the loss of Brown.  And it seems obvious that – like the Chiefs – the Cowboys saw that they honored Brown by playing and by winning.

This style of grieving is important to note, as it is distinctly what psychologists have termed an “instrumental grieving style.”  This “instrumental grieving style” is generally attributed to the style that men choose to use.  Most (not all) men tend to

One. suppress their emotional responses,

Two.  hide their vulnerability,

Three.  focus on thinking (as opposed to feeling) about the loss,

Four.  seek to solve practice problem via engaging in physical activity

Five.  immerse themselves in work. (Martin and Doka)

The other type of grieving style (intuitive) is where the person learns to express their emotions and reach out for help.  The intuitive style has traditionally been seen as the conventional norm for grieving, where the “instrumental style” has been downplayed as improper and incorrect.

The fact is that different people have different styles of grieving and both styles can come with their own forms of complication.  A person using an intuitive style can just as easily bury themselves in their emotional life as a person using the instrumental style can bury themselves in their work life.

Traditionally, the instrumental style of grief (usually practiced by men) has been belittled.  But, it’s not wrong per se.  In fact, it’s the way many grieve.  And it’s okay.

What’s wrong is the culture of the NFL that is so predominately male that there’s little to no pause from work.  There is no pause.  There’s just an attitude of “play on.”  An attitude that sees “winning” and “playing” as nearly synonymous with “honoring.”  A culture that would rather play the game than allow for a pause and send a message that “drinking and driving is dead wrong” … that “even the athletes of the NFL aren’t impervious to bad choices.”

It’s okay that the players and coaches what to honor their deceased friend with their work.  What’s not okay is that the NFL let the game go on the very next day.  The NFL might be a case study in “masculine grief”, but it’s also a case study in money and sport over life and death.