Personal Reflections on Grief and Loss

Anna H
9/15/09

In considering how I have personally come in contact with death and loss, or experienced grief, I must first acknowledge that I do not feel as though I have had much first-hand knowledge of what it is like to lose someone. I have been blessed to have not lost anyone immediately close to me, neither friend nor nuclear family member. That being said, however, it occurs to me that there are a number of different categories of loss which I tend not to consider to be “as important” somehow when applied to myself (though they are significant in the lives of others). When I allow myself to broaden my approach to loss- as I would with a client, though perhaps reticently for myself- I come to realize that there may be much for me to say on the topic which I can speak to personally.
My experiences with personal grief stem more from an awareness of people and opportunities I have not had. Some of my greatest losses are more concerned with the sense of lacking and wanting, rather than the traditional experiences of severed attachments due to death. I am the daughter of divorced parents, who separated when I was 4 years old; therefore, I have not had the experience of growing up in an intact family system, with the support and ready attention of both biological parents. While the divorce in and of itself might qualify as a major loss, in my mind the grief comes not so much from their separation as such, but from the losses that occur as a result of not having them together. I do not remember what it was to have my parents love one another, to model for me how a good working relationship functions, or for us to work as a happy family. These losses of what I could- perhaps feel I should- have had in my growing up are much more what I feel, as I was not old enough to know what things might have been like before my parents became unhappy with each other. Loneliness, and the awareness of missing good family relationships, has therefore been the most pervasive cause of grief in my life.
Beyond my parents, I have grown up with very few family ties: my parents each were isolated themselves from their extended and nuclear families, and, though for different reasons, the end result was that as their daughter, I know very little in the way of familial support or interaction. My mom’s mother died of breast cancer when I was two and my mother still grieves for her, but I do not know what it is like to feel that pain immediately, because I didn’t get the chance to know her; it is for that that I grieve. My father’s parents both lived in Florida and were very much out of regular contact with my Dad due to his strained relationship with them after they kicked him out of the house at age 18 for getting his first wife pregnant; they both died by the time I entered high school. My mother’s father, who died only this past April, was my last grandparent, but due to the falling out she as the result of much hurt and anger over my grandparent’s divorce and my grandfather’s marriage to the woman with whom he had an affair before that, I too lost the chance to develop a meaningful relationship with him. As much as family means to me in theory, my personal experiences with the ways in which families interact has been extremely curtailed by the actions of my parents, beginning long before I was even born. While I don’t often think of these things as losses per say- they are so far removed from my experiences that I again don’t know to miss them most of the time- when I allow myself to realize the extent of my family connections, I am aware that my ties with family beyond my mother, father and stepmother are only tenuous at best, and due to the nature of relationships damaged before I had a chance to experience them, I inherited the disconnection and isolation of my parents’ choices.
I can remember growing up in some ways very much alone, as both an only child, and the daughter of a single, working mother who out of necessity had to leave me at home, or with care-givers for extended periods of time from the age of 6 until I moved to college. That isolation seemed to follow me into my middle and high school experiences, and in reflecting back on my experiences as an adolescent, I am cognizant of a significant amount of time spent on my own, at home by myself. Because I had very little in the way of extended family connection, I have long been aware that my friends are in many ways my family of my own choosing, and as such the separation and drifting apart that occurs when life stages and physical closeness wane have been acutely and painfully felt on my part. This is my greatest source of fear for future loss, which in and of itself may play a part in my understanding of what it means to experience grief: after the initial pain of a loss has begun to subside, there still remains the fear that another, equally hurtful loss will follow the next time I engage in a close relationship or friendship, and either through loosing again and again, or else by never having the ability to find someone else, I will remain alone.