A couple of years ago, we lost my father-in-law to cancer. It was fast, but it wasn’t gentle. The kind of fast that still leaves room for a lot of pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the son-in-law, I wasn’t sure where I fit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He wasn’t my father, but he was family, and I was grieving too. I just don’t think that I knew what my grief was allowed to look like. So I did what made sense to me and what I thought my father-in-law would respect: I held the line. I kept things running at home and tried to make sure that my wife knew that she had the space she needed to grieve the loss of her father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 52, I’m lucky that both of my parents are still alive. But I’ll admit I dread the day that changes, partly because I’ve already lost a father-in-law, and I know a little of what’s eventually coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing I didn’t expect is how many unknowns show up when a parent dies, or how deep in a family that grief can travel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Questions nobody ever thought to ask. Conversations nobody ever thought to have. Decisions that suddenly land on people who are already exhausted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there’s something else I certainly didn’t see coming. In the early days, grief is strangely balanced. Everyone is miserable together, and there’s a kind of unspoken understanding in that. Nobody has to explain why they’re struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But grief doesn’t stay in lockstep. Eventually, people begin to heal, but not at the same time. They laugh a little more, make plans, start to feel like themselves again. Others are still in the depths of grief, and that’s when the balance shifts, and the apple cart gets upset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the people who are healing, it can be hard to understand why others are still hurting so much. For the people still grieving, watching someone move forward can feel like walking away from the past, or worse, like abandoning the person everyone lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Neither side is wrong. That’s the hard part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’m learning is that the only way through this is to talk about it. Openly. Probably more than feels comfortable. The person who is healing isn’t forgetting. The person still grieving isn’t stuck. They’re just on different parts of the same road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It truly isn’t fair for either side to dictate how the other should feel. Grief doesn’t follow a schedule or a rulebook. The best we can do is be honest about where we are at, and be patient with where everyone else is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re in the middle of this right now, on either side, I hope you’ll give yourself and your family a little grace on both sides. Have the conversations that nobody wants to start. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It might be the thing that holds the family together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A couple of years ago, we lost my father-in-law to cancer. It was fast, but it wasn’t gentle. The kind of fast that still leaves room for a lot of pain. As the son-in-law, I wasn’t sure where I fit. He wasn’t my father, but he was family, and I was grieving too. I just … Continue reading When grief stops moving together \ufffc<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deepthoughts","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8DcKP-tz","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1834,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}