This Grief Public Series Announcement (9/10 in our nearly completed series) is directed at people around us, but also toward ourselves. It focuses on relinquishing regret, second guessing, and piling on the “should haves” when reflecting back on how we navigated losing our loved one.
In September of 1997, our Daughter Alexis died at 13 months and 5 days old. After planning a funeral with an open casket I drove to the local mall to find something to put on her body. It was swollen from the embalming and we wanted something beautiful that wasn’t too snug.
As I held up a tiny forest green velvet dress, a young and loud voice asked me: “Is that for your baby?” It was a school aged child making conversation while being curious, and I answered “Yes.” I paid for the dress and ran to my car where I could sob privately before trying to safely operate my vehicle to get back to the safety of my bed.
As the years passed I would kick myself again and again for choosing an open casket, embalming, and a dressing up of the body that went lifeless in my arms on that September 15th dark Monday night. I held tightly to the regret that we “should” have cremated her body, or at least closed the casket. After all, the body in that green dress had zero resemblance to the infant girl who once breathed life into it.
The skin of this body was taught and bigger than Alexis was. The prednisone and immunosuppressive therapy that was treating her for Aplastic Anemia had caused her body to swell, and combined with the embalming process left the appearance of this body nearly unrecognizable. The white lace around the collar of that green dress was slightly soiled, with make up, the foundation kind that covers the skin. It was all wrong.
But right or wrong, we got through it. The open casket wake, the burial and the eventual letting go of her body was upon us. It’s all still foggy but I know that we got through it because I have a clear memory of sobbing in my stand up shower for what seemed like hours, the day after her funeral.
Although difficult to re-live, I am sharing this intimate, gut wrenching account of Alexis’ burial as an example of the regret we can feel after our loved one dies. Instead of allowing the profound, hollow, dark breaths of grief to settle into our bones, we may choose to mask that experience by focusing on logistics, specifically, what we “should” or “should not” have done.
Playing Monday morning quarterback is not fair to our grieving hearts. We have so much more information now, than we did at the time when unthinkable decisions were demanded from us. It is an exercise in self-torture to re-live the millions of decisions, from authorizing treatment, to meeting with ethics committees, to bringing Alexis home in surrender, to buying a green velvet dress. There is no merit in participating in such a self-critical process.
If you’ve lost a loved one, and have done this, or if you are supporting someone who is grieving, this message is for you: Stop.
Stop superimposing a past situation with the overlay of new knowledge that you, or they didn’t have at the time that end of life decisions were being made. Stop imagining there was any “right” way to bury your Daughter or loved one that would be bringing you comfort right now. Let go of the tendency to tread water in the swirl of a strong current that is your memory of making decisions and learn to respect and honor doing the best you could in the moments that counted, and encourage a loved one who is grieving to do the same.
Anything else is just self-torture. Not only can it become harmful over the long haul, it is a major hindrance to foraging a healing path in the after math of loss. And when we have lost, building that path to healing is truly the only thing worthy of our time and attention.
Our loved ones are gone. We did the best by them, that we knew to do. We cannot change the past. We must forgive ourselves as we scrutinize our decisions in the face of the unthinkable. We must be compassionate, accepting, and even tender with ourselves, when judging our choices. I thoroughly believe we can take comfort in the knowledge that “We did the best we could with the information, options and reality of that time.” We are human, not perfect.
I share this intimate account of regret, as an illustration that it is easy to project frustrations or negative self talk onto a past decision, and difficult, to let those decisions stand. But whether or not we agree with our “then” choices, we can today, choose to be loving toward ourselves and acknowledge that unless we can see the future, we mustn’t criticize our decisions from the past.
I’m not saying it is easy, or even comforting, but I am saying it is a necessary component of building a path to healing. We must step forward into what is here, now, and release ourselves from the non-productive hazing of “should-ing” all over ourselves. Haven’t we already suffered enough?