“Maybe now you will pay attention to me,” read the suicide note.
Grief never goes away. Significant losses come to mind throughout a lifetime.
I have often said we all grieve in different ways. Some may cry a lot after the death of their person, others very little. Some can’t part with the clothes of the departed, others clean out the house within weeks of the death. Grief expresses itself in a wide range of actions, thoughts, and feelings that would be considered “normal grieving.”
I had a brother who died a week after being born when I was six years old. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I asked my mother about Randy’s death. When I did, she burst into tears and said, “My father wouldn’t let me go to his graveside burial service.” I never knew she kept such grief just below the surface. I told this story in more detail in a previous blog.
Although my mother carried that grief all those years, she functioned fully engaged in our family’s life. She had found a new normal as a mother who lost a child. She was in this range of “normal grieving.”
But there are ways of grieving that could be considered abnormal – check out the podcast titled, “Prolonged Grief Disorder.” You can listen to it or read the transcript at Geripal.org. In the podcast Holly Prigerson, Ph.D., describes prolonged grief disorder:
Photo by Meruyert Gonullu:
“So those symptoms were symptoms of yearning after 12 months post-loss and or preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased, but it’s really yearning.… You feel like you don’t know who you are anymore, where you fit in to the world. You feel disbelief. You feel a sense of meaninglessness. You feel extreme loneliness. You feel bitter and pangs of sorrow, emotional pain is how they they’ve phrased it.… It’s mostly meaninglessness, purposelessness, disbelief, yearning, loneliness. These symptoms in and of themselves are very distressing. They feel detached from others. The only person they felt they really could connect with is the dead.… So, they have to have these distressing symptoms and they have to be significantly impaired by those symptoms. So, by definition, their dysfunctional symptoms, this isn’t normal level grief.”
I’ve witnessed this type of grief firsthand. I was a nursing home chaplain; a co-worker lost a teenage son to a hit-and-run accident. She believed it was murder, but the driver was acquitted at trial. She, understandably, became obsessed with this loss. She even bought a house next to the cemetery so she could always look out on her son’s grave.
Tragically, after some time passed, her younger teenage son died by suicide. He left a note, “Maybe now you will pay attention to me.”
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Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.
For a situation in which you have no control: “No problem, there is nothing you can do about it.” For a situation in which you CAN do something about it: “No problem, take steps to figure it out.”
Rosemary Bowen, at 94, was living independently. She said she had had a wonderful life and did not look forward to a long, slow decline toward death. For years, she had been telling her children, “That her life would not be worth living if she had to depend on caretakers to feed her, dress her, and take her to the toilet.” Then, it happened. She fractured her back and went to rehab but was unable to live independently. That was enough for her.
Do not try this without medical support. Rosemary was able to get a hospice to care for her in her last days. Palliative care is also available to ease burdensome symptoms like pain and thirst. See 
I have just discovered two great videos with Dr. Michael Greger discussing this very topic. Each video is less than seven minutes and worth every minute of your time. One is called 
In his second video he referred to a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “In fact, the most expensive drug they looked at, the one costing $169,836 a year, did not improve overall survival at all, and actually worsened quality of life. That’s $169,000 just to make you feel worse with no benefit. Why pay a penny for a treatment that doesn’t actually help?”
I was leaving on one of my daily bike rides recently and needed to pick a new book to listen to. I selected a reread — 
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”
“It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.” 
I was such a scaredy-cat at 8 years old. All I can remember of two particular movies in 1956 was that I kept my eyes closed during the entirety of each film. I have just discovered, through Wikipedia, that 
I just placed the latest “deep field” photo from the new James Webb Space Telescope to my home screen on my iPhone. This is a time exposure photo of a portion of the night sky the size of a grain of sand held at arms-length. Thousands of galaxies appear as we look back billions of years. Each galaxy has billions of stars — each star is not unlike our sun.
My wife and I tend to be news junkies. Each evening we record the ABC World News Tonight and the PBS NewsHour. And, each evening, we watch both, mercifully skipping the commercials. Katie did not share our news addiction and turned us on to a “new drug” — Grey’s Anatomy.
Last week, out of the blue, Katie texted us, “During covid when we watched every season of Grey’s Anatomy and you both didn’t fall asleep and paid attention I think that was my favorite time in life.” (I will not comment on the falling asleep or paying attention part, but I really did enjoy the series.)
I lived a few doors down from Scott and his family for four years. His sisters babysat my kids. I was Scott’s den leader in Cub Scouts. As disease ravaged his young body, Scott graduated from college in a wheelchair. I was so privileged to be a part of his care.
This is how David Brooks starts a recent 
Gradually, for some people, a new core narrative emerges answering the question, “What am I to do with this unexpected life?” It’s not that the facts are different, but a person can step back and see them differently. New frameworks are imposed, which reorganize the relationship between the events of a life. Spatial metaphors are helpful here: I was in a dark wood. This train is not turning around. I’m climbing a second mountain.