Mourning With Bumps and Band-Aids

 I was in a hurry. Bending to pick up a shoe, I banged my head on the sharp corner of a shelf. A huge bump — my nurse friend called it a ”hematoma” — immediately rose on my forehead bringing pain to me and horror to my children. No serious injury occurred but the wound remained visible for days. I covered it with a band-aid - more to spare others its unsightliness than to protect my head. I soon discovered that the band-aid and the bump served a purpose I had not anticipated. They signaled to the world that I was hurting and vulnerable.

My mother died a week earlier after a long and painful disability. Her death left a deep psychic wound. There was a rawness about my pain. Sometimes I needed to talk about it. Sometimes I couldn’t. Meanwhile, the business of my life continued relentlessly. Healing had to be squeezed in between the carpool and the church meeting.

However, this band-aid stopped people. “What happened to you?” they asked. Sometimes I responded, “I bumped my head.” Sometimes I said, “My mother died.”

I wanted the world to know of my loss but I didn’t always want to talk about it. The bump and bandaid were my psyche’s way of declaring my need for special consideration.

Grieving is neither well understood nor accepted in our culture. We seek to tame its wildness by describing a predictable “process” with inevitable “stages”. We are told to “work through” our grief as we “let go” of our loved ones. There is, it seems, a “right way” to grieve.

I long for the days when grieving was more mysterious and we who grieve were given time and space to allow the inevitable transformations to happen within us. To burn a candle, to gather after a month or forty days, to ritually observe the loosening of the bonds — these make sense to me. They are public ways of honoring private grief without dictating the form or content one’s healing should take.

Black armbands or head coverings, crepe hanging over doors — these were the bumps and band-aids of past generations. They discreetly informed the public that here were individuals in a special condition of vulnerability. Here were people adjusting to a world that had been made unacceptable by their loss. Here were individuals, they signaled, who bore within them a need for special care.

Alas! Crepe no longer hangs over our doors. Armbands and head coverings no longer protect us. We are left to heal as best we can in the spaces we create. Bumps and band-aids will have to do.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, Faith in A Minor Key.