Grief Poker

Some people see the reality of another’s pain as a threat to the validity of their own

I wrote this article a while ago, but couldn’t get it published. Yesterday would have been my son’s 40th birthday, if he’d lived. It’s hitting me hard, so publishing this now, here.

One Christmas, years ago, I was lying in bed with my boyfriend. We were both sad. Neither of us liked the holiday season. He told me, again, how difficult his parent’s divorce was, those first Christmases apart when he was a young child.

He was in his fifties when we had this conversation. As he continued talking, I saw he was competing with me. He was playing grief poker. Laying out his hand, here’s my pair of sevens, and waiting for me to play mine.

I was sad because my son was dead. The last Christmas I had with RJ, after his brain injury, he sat at the dinner table in his wheelchair. He couldn’t talk or walk anymore. We’d taken him out of the nursing home for a couple of days to visit my aunt. Since there wasn’t a hospital bed at my aunt’s house we made a kind of nest on the living room floor and slept there together. I told him it would be like camping.

He was eighteen. The car accident happened when he was sixteen. I lost my job because of the demands of caring for him. Then I had to put him in a nursing home. I was a single parent. He was restless when he slept, his arm moving over his head. I laid on my back on my aunt’s carpet, looking at the old familiar furniture, the richly colored rug, making sure RJ stayed on the waterproof pad.

RJ died the following summer. His funeral happened to fall on my birthday, because it was the Saturday after he died, and his father needed time to get there from Europe.

Royal flush.

RJ died twenty years ago; the old boyfriend is a decade in the past. But people seem to be playing more grief poker, the cultural climate has changed. My damage is worse than yours, my loss beats yours.

I am surprised by how often people want to throw down their cards and challenge me. “Say mine is worse. Say it. Say it.”

We all want our damage acknowledged, our challenges and experiences seen and honored. But some wounded people see the reality of another’s pain as a threat to the validity of their own. We’re so deeply socialized to compete and win that for some, honoring another’s loss can be seen as a threat to the importance of their loss and by extension to their very identity.

Some people, like the old boyfriend, just erase that part of my life’s experience. I tell them the date of my son’s birthday or the day he died, let them know these are tough days, and they disappear, or pick a fight, or demand attention. It is mystifying to me. Is acknowledging a another’s pain which they can’t fix too much for them? Are they just so deeply avoidant they can’t face grief? This isn’t a gendered reaction; I’ve had men and women do this to me. Just as I have had men and women not only make space for my grief but grieve with me.

If we need to fight to defend our right to grieve by tearing down another’s right to grieve we are in a futile cage match of ego where no one can heal. It’s a lucrative battle. Outrage is the engine that makes social media run, it’s the lever for political donations and votes. Grief poker monetizes well.

Each loss is different. As a bereaved mother, I realize that parents who lose their children to suicide or overdoses, so called deaths of despair, have a different burden to carry than I do, with a son who died because of a medical error.

I got nineteen years with RJ. Parents who lose children during pregnancy or infancy don’t get that. I was with my son when he died. Plenty of parents lost their children in combat or gun violence, and they weren’t with them at the end.

But when I talk to these parents, and I do, we connect on a deep level of our shared experience of loss, and we support one another. As another mother told me, it’s a terrible club, but we’re in it together.

What if we stopped playing grief poker and tried to use our shared suffering to foster compassion for one another? The loss of my son, and the circumstances around his disability and death broke me. Now I recognize brokenness. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, I try to build commonality and connection with other broken people.

Community can be built on compassion and care. I try not to argue or judge, because I don’t know the contours of another person’s grief. Griefs are stacked like metal folding chairs in a closet. One grief can open the door and cause the rest to come tumbling out. We don’t know what’s in another person’s grief closet.

I used to carry a secret judgement about adults who were devasted by the loss of a pet. But then I had to put down our dog, a few years after RJ died. The death of the dog was the first chair out of the closet. Then the other chairs tumbled out.

RJ would never have children, the closest I got to his child was the badly behaved black lab he raised from a puppy. Losses echo. Our bodies carry loss, and one small loss can send us back to the place of the larger loss. Songs, smells, even a particular weather pattern can remind of us a time of devastation. RJ died on a hot day. Hot days still make me anxious and sad, decades later.

Anger can be energizing. Righteous indignation is a strong stimulant. Compassion and empathy are difficult, softer, tender, vulnerable, feeling with another instead of against them.

I remember what I felt like, leaning against the stainless-steel table in the vet’s office as she injected our old black lab with a fatal shot. The vet was very pregnant. She’d know our family for years, she knew this was my dead son’s dog, and we both leaned against the table and cried. In my best moments, I can soften and remember what I felt like then, and know that others have felt what I felt, and worse. What if, instead of judging them, or comparing the terrible hands we’ve been dealt, we simply leaned against the table and wept together?