4 Things I Did Wrong While Grieving – 1 Thing I Did Right

Lessons from a Year Without My Father

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This week marks one year since my father died, and sure enough, I approached this milestone by making a mistake.

As longtime readers of The Nonlinear Life know, I’ve written a lot during the past year about what it felt like to go through grief. I shared the eulogy I gave for my father, what not to say to someone mourning, what surprised me most about an experience I thought I was prepared for, and the worrying science of how losing a loved one affects adult siblings.

But what I haven’t written about is all the blunders I keep making – or at least all the blunders others keep telling me I’m making. So here, to mark this occasion, are four things I did wrong while grieving—and one thing I did right.

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1. I Didn’t Follow the Rules / I Did Follow the Rules

In the first days alone, I made multiple affronts at convention. I asked one rabbi if my siblings and I could speak after him at the funeral; I demurred when another rabbi recommended that I pray every day for a month. I encouraged my mother to drop sand from my father’s beloved Tybee Island in his grave instead of dirt and supported her wish to place roses on his coffin instead of stones. I even left my mirrors uncovered and my face un-unshaven.

Even the conventions I did follow left some people uneasy—I wrote an obituary for my father’s local newspaper that some thought was too long; I hosted an in-person shiva even though we were in the midst of COVID.

The point is: Everything I did left some people upset.

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2. I Wrote Too Many Thank-You Notes / I Didn’t Write Enough Thank-You Notes

One of the most powerful things about losing someone in the age of social media is the outpouring of responses you get almost immediately – texts, DMs, emails, likes, emojis, comments. Then the handwritten notes arrive, along with the flowers, the gifts, the visits. I was deeply touched by all the people who genuinely, fondly, and in some cases unexpectedly shared expressions of love and sympathy.

And I was completely confused about how best to respond. Was I supposed to handwrite thank you notes in response to texts? How about in response to telephone calls, or flowers, or visits? Finally, a friend set me straight, “People are trying to comfort you; they’re not sitting around wondering why you have written them back.” That made me feel better so that when, after writing dozens of handwritten notes, I finally stopped writing I was able to accept my decision.

At which point, I started receiving complaints: “Why didn’t you acknowledge my card? Why didn't you send me a thank you note in response to DM? Am I not important enough to you?”

Again, my reaction to being squeezed in this wasy was the same: Boy, there are a lot of unwritten rules around grief--but who even knows what those rules are anymore?

Photo credit Floral Deco via Canva

3. I Wrote the Wrong Thing on His Tombstone / I Wrote the Right Thing

This summer, my mother began circulating among the family potential language for my father’s gravestone. Soon enough, questions arose: Should we say rest in peace? (Turns out, the phrase is Christian in origin.) Should we give military titles? Should we list his parents? Should we list his cause of death? Should we include a joke or a saying—my dad was a man of jokes and sayings?

Once again, my instincts went against convention – my dad earned impressive accolades, but it was his warmth, humility, and generosity that people remember – so we decided to nix most resume facts and used the one phrase he liked best about himself, A Professional Savannahian. I have no doubt some people will complain.

Photo credit Floral Deco

4. I Bought the Wrong Yahrzeit Candle / I Bought the Right Yahrzeit Candle

That brings me to my latest and somehow more representative mistake. I asked my wife, Linda, to order a yahrzeit candle for the anniversary of my dad’s death. I have vivid memories of my mother burning 24-hour candles on the anniversaries of the passing of her parents—the grandparents I never knew.

As it happens, Linda ordered a week-long candle, which is customarily the type you light immediately after someone’s death, not on their anniversary. “You can’t use that one,” one family member insisted, “it’s the wrong one.” Even if you don’t know me very well, you might guess how this comment landed with me. Says who? Some rabbi from a thousand years ago? The Ten Commandments say, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ not ‘Honor your father and mother until the paraffin expires.’

(Linda, for the record, had a different reaction: "Your dad's worth seven days!")

Just to double-check the type of candle we had, I went to Amazon to read the description. It insisted that the candle lasts seven days; however all the reviews of the produce insisted that it lasts only five days. Ha! Even my wrong candle was wrong! How fitting.

What I've taken from this long chainess of wrongness is that being right, in this instance, is not exactly a place I aspire to. Many times in the last year, I’ve said that there’s no single way to grieve. Everyone gets to mourn in their own way.

Especially as a defender of organized religion, I feel strongly that if religious institutions expect to have a role in people’s lives in the future, they need to spend less time forcing the rest of us to bend to their rules and more time meeting people where they are.

And where are people on the topic of mourning? The answer to that question is the one thing I did right.

They want to talk. They want to be heard. They want to share their story. The articles I wrote in the last year prompted outpourings of anecdotes—some emotional, some sad, some celebratory, some bereft. If there’s been a universal pattern in these responses it's that people are desperate to tell their experience of grief. There is an epidemic of unshared pain.

So here’s my brief rule about going forward: Stop worrying about the rules. You don’t need to count days, or thank you notes, or Robert’s Rules of Order; you need to be vulnerable, you need to share, and you need to be grateful for those who listen and lift you up.

Then, when you're feeling less overwhelmed yourself, go find others who are going through their own grief and do the same in return. And let them know: No need to write you a thank you note; pay me back by paying it forward to someone else.

I still miss you, Dad. Thank you for all the things you’ve taught me in my first year without your voice.

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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, watch my latest TED Talk, or scroll through my other posts. And if you'd like to do a storytelling project with a loved one similar to the one I did with my father, click here to learn more.

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