Dear Grief Guide, My Support System Is Fading

Six months after their grandmother's death, a listener's friends seem to be pulling away. They want to know if they should be more clear with their needs or find new friends to share their grief with. I read their anonymous letter and then offered them practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through their grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

I'm reaching out to you because I'm disappointed in the support system I thought I had.

About eight months ago,

I lost my beloved grandma,

And I turned to my two closest friends for comfort.

Initially,

They offered condolences and seemed understanding of my pain.

However,

As time has passed,

Their support has dwindled,

Leaving me feeling abandoned and alone in my grief.

I live in a studio by myself with no family nearby,

Making my friends' presence even more important to me.

Yet,

It seems like right at the six-month mark,

They stopped caring about me at all.

I've received nothing but silence from them.

No texts,

No calls,

No gestures of support.

This weekend,

As I tried my best to ride the waves of overwhelming grief emotions which are still very present for me,

I couldn't shake the feelings of anger and betrayal at their sudden absence.

Even though I still very much need it,

My support system is fading.

I decided to talk to my friends about their lack of support,

Hoping for understanding and empathy.

While one friend acknowledged her oversight,

Expressed remorse,

And promised to check on me more often,

The others seemed to deflect responsibility entirely,

Placing the burden on me to reach out if I needed anything.

I was left feeling invalidated and misunderstood.

Now I'm questioning the depth of our entire friendship.

I read some articles online about how to support someone after a loss,

Just to reassure myself that my expectations aren't crazy or unreasonable.

Everything I found emphasized the importance of consistent check-ins and specific offers of support,

Which my two friends can't seem to do.

In times of grief,

They say you find out who your real friends are.

Perhaps there's some truth to that,

Though it's a painful realization to confront.

I understand that people struggle to know what to say when someone dies,

But I had hoped for more from those closest to me.

Grief Guide,

Is there a better way to ask for what I need?

Or should I let go of my expectations for how my support system was supposed to look and try to get help elsewhere?

Sincerely,

Abandoned and Alone.

Hi there,

Abandoned and Alone.

I hear you.

I see you.

In this place of,

I thought this is how they would be there for me,

And how long they would be there for me,

And they're simply not.

And that's disappointing.

And I don't want to wave this off as trite.

I think that a lot of people think that disappointment is a small or a petty emotion.

Like,

Oh,

I dropped my ice cream on the sidewalk,

That's disappointing.

But the author Brene Brown writes that our disappointment is equal to the weight of our expectation.

And if you expected your friends to support you through the entire rest of your life,

Which is very reasonable,

After the death of your grandmother,

As your grief shifts and changes and looks differently through those years,

It's not intense,

Intense support for unending periods of time.

And then for them not to do that is,

Is disappointing,

Is disheartening,

Is an expectation in your brain,

However reasonable or unreasonable,

That has gone unmet.

So yes,

In response to your question,

I think,

I think you can do both in this situation and see what happens.

That's the invitation I'll offer you today is to do both and see what happens.

So is there a better way to ask for what I need?

Perhaps I can give you some.

In Life After Loss Academy,

I devote an entire section of the course to negotiating relationships with people who are close to you.

Because once you've kind of figured out how you do grief,

How you express grief,

How you want to be in partnership with grief,

Then we take grief outside of yourself.

We start talking about how do you do grief in relationships.

And part of that is identifying what's hurting you in a relationship and naming it and speaking it out loud and then offering substitute behaviors.

So you can say something like,

It's hurt me that it seems like at the six month mark,

You just kind of dropped off the map.

I'm not mad necessarily,

But I do want to understand.

And I've noticed that with friends,

Family members,

Online grief support,

It's been really helpful to me.

If you'd ask me more about my grandmother,

I love telling stories about her and I feel like I don't get to talk about her much anymore because she's not alive.

So you are saying this is the behavior of yours that has hurt me or I feel hurt by this.

And then you're offering a substitute behavior based on what you've learned feels supportive in your grief.

So you could say,

I really hate when you compare your losses to mine.

That's really hurtful to me and makes me feel like my losses don't matter and will never matter in your eyes.

Instead,

I wonder if you could just acknowledge the fact that I'm in a lot of pain right now.

And then maybe we could do an activity together,

Like go for a walk or bake cookies or whatever it happens to be.

So offer it's kind of sandwiching it in.

This is what's hurtful and why this is a substitute behavior.

I hope we can repair because ultimately from the sound of your letter,

You want to stay friends with these people.

These are people who have supported you in other seasons and other moments of your life.

And at least one of them is curious about or interested in being better in checking on you.

The next thing I'll offer you in the do both the second half of do both is to release expectations of how you thought your support system was supposed to look and to try and get help elsewhere.

So in another section of Life After Loss Academy,

I teach grieving people how to release the expectations not just of the life they were supposed to live,

But how things were supposed to go after their grief,

Including who was supposed to be there for them and how and why and for how long,

Because these expectations we have of our friends,

Sometimes we don't even know that we have them until until they're not met until it seems like people abandon us or they fail us or they hurt us or they pepper us with cliches and we're like,

Whoa,

I didn't expect that.

I didn't see that one coming.

And then we must grieve how our reality is different than our expectations.

So in some way,

However,

It's impactful to you.

And if you're not sure how to do this,

I would encourage you to come join us and Life After Loss Academy and I'll walk you through it step by step to create some sort of ritual for naming and releasing here's my expectation.

And here's the reality.

And they're different from each other.

And that is worthy of grieving.

And I want to reiterate again that your disappointment is not it's not insignificant,

It matters that you thought these people would be different,

They would behave differently,

They would support you differently.

And it's also okay to be a person with needs.

Grief makes us inherently needy of others.

We need their comfort,

We need their presence,

We need their validation,

We need their support.

It is okay to have needs and to be leaning on people for help and support.

And we don't talk about how our friendships change in the aftermath of loss enough,

Which is why I have spent so much time and energy answering questions like yours here,

Under your grief guide,

But also building these tools for renegotiating friendships after a loss into the work that I teach.

I will say this in terms of finding support elsewhere,

Because it sounds like these two friends have been your biggest scaffolds since the loss of your grandmother.

They may be they may be a little tired.

For as much as it is exhausting to be a grieving person,

It is also exhausting to support a grieving person.

And that I know less of in my life,

To tell you the God's honest truth,

I know a lot more about what it is to grieve than what it is to support someone who is grieving.

And I can imagine,

Based on what my friends have told me,

Based on what my partner has told me,

Based on what my sister has told me,

How exhausting it is to maintain a connection with somebody who is grieving.

And that's not to say it's all exhausting all the time,

But the intensity of their grief,

The unfixableness of their pain.

It's not going taking a trip to the mall and buying a pair of pants together and they don't have your size in stock.

It's someone significant has died and neither of you can fix it.

And now you're sitting in this place of,

Well,

Now what?

We are together in a place of great pain.

There's nothing to solve or fix or do,

But to simply be and to hold space for that energy as a friend.

There is a tax to that.

I often call it,

I joke and call it the grief tax.

So maybe if that resonates with you,

You're free to bring that language into your friendship with these two people.

But that being said,

That's a very roundabout way of me saying that it's okay to look for support outside these two people.

I'll give you a whole bunch of options right here.

First and of course,

Shameless plug.

If you'd like to join Life After Loss Academy,

It's not just courses and lessons.

It is also an online community of people who are grieving,

People who listen to this podcast,

Just like you,

People who are looking for support and validation and a knowing that they're not crazy for grieving and that they're not alone and that it's okay for grief to continue past that six month mark.

So many people who joined the course are months,

If not multiple years into their losses.

And just now really learning what it means to carry grief with them for the rest of their lives.

I'll also say this too,

Because often the best supporters of grievers are grieving people themselves.

Are there grief groups in your area or online that you'd be interested in attending?

Even if you're just expressing your grief to someone during a Zoom workshop or during a virtual call where you don't necessarily need to be in conversation with somebody all the time,

But can just participate in a way that honors your grief.

They have been massively helpful to me and my grief is to find these spaces where my grief is welcomed because the space is inherently designed to honor grief.

It is grief welcoming by its design.

And then the last thing I'll offer you,

Especially for your friend who's willing to be coached is a service.

And I'm not sure where in the world you live,

But a service called Help Texts.

And this is a text messaging company that will text you twice a week with tips for moving through your grief as you grieve the death of your grandmother.

And you can put in your relationship to her,

She was your grandmother,

You were a grandchild,

What she died from,

How long ago,

Significant dates,

Birthdays,

Anniversaries,

All that jazz and twice a week,

It will send you text messages with ideas and tools and practical suggestions for coping with her loss.

And then on top of that,

You can add your two friends to your text message subscription and once a week,

They'll get tips for supporting you.

This is one of my all time favorite tools for grief and loss because it's so easy.

There's not,

After you sign up,

There's nothing more you need to do to get these text messages and get the support to your phone.

You don't have to show up to a grief support group and sit in a circle of folding chairs with a box of tissues and tell your whole life story.

You don't have to take time out of your week to travel to any sort of group or even devote to studying something like an online course.

It is really a simple and easy and wonderful way to get grief support in a way that is low touch but high impact.

So if you're interested in help texts,

I do have a promo code for this one.

So I am an affiliate of their service.

I actually was employed by help texts for more than a year and a half and wrote many of the text messages that you'll receive.

So you'll be getting wisdom in my voice.

If that's something you would like and that your friends would be receptive to also,

And you can go to helptexts.

Com slash Shelby for Cythia to sign up and you will get a discount on a full year of text messages from help texts.

I will say abandoned and alone.

I don't know that you are as abandoned and alone as you think,

Even by this one friend who's like,

Yeah,

I'm willing to check in more often.

It's a shame.

And I've said this before on the podcast.

It's a shame that as grieving people,

We must be the teachers of our grief that we must take time out of our,

Our lives and our days and our,

And our mourning processes to educate the people around us or to ask more from them.

It's a shame that we aren't taught societally inherently how to do that.

And,

And that that needs to be done for long after the first month or six months.

And also I wonder if there's a way to reprioritize your grief in your friendships with these people,

Simply to make that as a request,

I feel like I haven't gotten to talk about my grandmother very much,

Or I feel like,

You know,

It's,

It's been hard to stay in touch or,

Or that you've been a little distant,

Maybe even asking,

Is everything okay in your world?

I know my loss happened,

But what are you going through right now?

Oftentimes holding space for a friend's pain can help you both make space for each other's pain without it feeling icky or competitive or,

Or one uppy or gross.

I think,

I think there's a lot of ways to invite in mending and repair here,

Abandoned and alone.

And I also think there's a lot of ways to seek out support outside of these two friends,

As you continue to grieve the death of your beloved grandma.

I am thinking of you.

I am thinking of those you are currently surrounded by,

And those friends you've not met that are waiting in the wings to surround you whenever you are ready to seek us out,

Because we are out here.

And I'm holding space for your heart and hoping it will not feel so abandoned and alone here in the very near future.

My heart is with you.