Frances spoke directly to me now. “This is only the third time the group is meeting, so you aren’t far behind in our work. Each session, we concentrate on a prompt.” She indicated the chalkboard behind her. “The goal of the group is to tackle every prompt on the list, one for each week of the year, fifty-two in total. I say that you aren’t far behind in our work, because processing grief is some of the hardest work you’ll ever do. Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it’s a messy one, at that.”
I read the crossed-out prompts with renewed interest. I had been upset to miss the first two weeks, but I had to admit I was relieved that I didn’t need to discuss my answer to the second one with the group. My father, whom I loved more than anything in this world, had made me very angry right before he died.
Then Frances said, “Ruth, I’d like you to answer the first two prompts in a journal entry, and we can discuss them privately over the next few weeks.”
Homework. Great.
The prompt for that evening read: My support system includes… Frances asked the woman to her left to start it off. She had big white teeth and a small, pointy nose, mere slits for nostrils. I found myself feeling concerned for her. How did she breathe through nostrils that narrow? She was already clutching a tissue in her hand as she started to talk about her sister, who had lost a baby in her sixth month of pregnancy and admitted to her recently that she was relieved because it meant she could continue with nursing school unencumbered.
At seventeen weeks, a baby is the size of a turnip. My sister-in-law told me this; personally, I couldn’t care less about pregnancy. The woman with the whittled nostrils had lost a turnip and I had lost my dad, who took me to see the debut of women’s speed skating at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley when I was nine. Helga Haase of Germany had won, and she was signing programs after the competition in the parking lot at the same time as the men’s alpine ski racing event, and even though my brother whined and begged and called me a Nazi for wanting to meet her, my father waited with me in the parking lot to get her autograph. This is important to your sister, he had said in that way of his that was authoritative but also persuasive at your most empathetic level. All right, my brother had said, sighing, and then he’d waited without complaint.
I thought I was going to meet women who had lost wonderful, terrible people, not turnips. But then the woman with the claw marks returned to the room with two Band-Aids on her chest and declared, “Your sister is a real piece of work, Margaret.” She plopped back down in the beanbag and continued with effusive familiarity, “You’ve got to stop minimizing your pain in service of her! She lost a fetus, and you lost a three-year-old with special needs who required your undivided attention at all hours. You should not have to deny the magnitude of your loss to make her feel seen.”
I realized my misunderstanding with a sharp intake of breath. The woman with the big teeth and narrow nostrils—Margaret—wasn’t there because her sister had miscarried a turnip. Margaret had lost a three-year-old and not died herself. I took her in again, this time with awe and extreme hope, remembering she had been laughing just before we started.
“Tina brings up a good point,” Frances said, giving the injured woman a name and such a smile that it was instantly clear Tina was her favorite. “Which is that members of our support team don’t need to understand every dark corner of our grief in order to provide us support.”
Tina caught me looking at her and smirked, as if to say, I was right. I looked away quickly, the tips of my ears hot.
Frances talked more about doing the work of building a support system. We talked about work so much in that room. Healing was work, a job, something to dread and grouse about but necessary in order to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Frances said that a good support system included people who were willing to listen to you and who would not judge you for anything you were feeling, even if your feelings were provocative. I couldn’t be sure, because I was too afraid to get caught looking again, but I sensed Tina staring at me when Frances said that part.
“I had complicated feelings about my husband’s passing,” Tina piped in. “Unlike Frances’s husband, mine was not a good man. But he was beloved by the community, and so there weren’t a whole lot of people who wanted to hear me talk about what he was really like behind closed doors. I had to do the work of going out and finding the people who wouldn’t try and convince me that I was to blame.”