Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
There’s no simple, easy-to-understand manual to help a man understand grief, so I thought I’d create one. This guide won’t fix anything, and it won’t tell you how you should feel. It lays out what you’re likely to run into, so that when it happens, you’ll know what it is. If you understand it, you’ll have a better chance of getting through it without destroying yourself and whatever life you have left.
The lessons in here are hard-earned after the loss of my first wife and daughter. I’ve made every mistake possible along the way and my hope is that this might help you avoid some of them while you’re getting on with the task of rebuilding a life worth living.
What Is Grief, Anyway?
Grief is the long, hard work of learning to live with a loss that changed your life.
That loss might be your spouse, your kid, your parent, or a buddy who didn’t make it home. It might also be a marriage that ended, a business that imploded, a job you got fired from, or a body that won’t do what it used to. If it changed your life, it counts.
Grief isn’t like a hangover where you gut it out for a day or two and then you get back to normal. Month eight might feel worse than month two, and month fifty might feel worse than month eight. It can be frustrating and infuriating to the point where you feel like you’re losing your damn mind.
Grief asks you to work harder than you ever have in your life. Doing the things you used to do can feel impossible. The idea of facing another crushing wave of pain will make you want to do anything to escape, especially because you know when you get through this one, another one is around the corner. Getting up off your knees again to face the next one takes everything you’ve got.
Grief Isn’t Only Sadness
Most men picture grief as crying, and they think crying makes them weak. If you’re not crying, you figure you must be handling it fine. But grief shows up in plenty of forms that look nothing like sadness, and if you don’t recognize them, you’ll never understand what’s happening to you.
Guilt is one of the biggest. Your head replays the last conversation, the call you didn’t make, the sign you missed, and everything you should have done differently. Those “what if” loops can go on for hours, days, and weeks, and no amount of logic shuts them off.
You can tell yourself that you did everything you could. You can remind yourself there’s no point in endlessly going over things you can’t change. And the doom loops will continue anyway.
Anger is another. You can be furious at the doctors, at God, at whoever caused it, and at everyone who still gets to have what you lost. You can even be angry at the person who died for leaving you with this mess, and then hate yourself for feeling it.
Some men feel relief, especially after a long illness, a brutal divorce, or a job that was killing them. You might even feel relief after a suicide. Relief can feel like betrayal, so you stuff it down and pile shame on top of it. Feeling relieved that the suffering is over doesn’t mean you didn’t love them or that the loss didn’t matter.
And sometimes you feel nothing at all. You stand at the funeral or sign the papers and feel dead inside. Some days you’ll cry at their grave, and other days you’ll stare at their headstone like it’s just a rock and wonder what the hell is wrong with you. Numbness is your mind’s way of protecting you from dealing with more than you can handle.
Grief can also show up in what you build. You might finish a project you started together, spend hours alone in the garage, or put in long miles walking down a back road. That can be grief too, and only you can tell whether it’s avoiding your pain or helping you move forward.
Every one of these is grief. You’ll probably experience them all. None of them makes you a bad man, and none of them means you’re doing this wrong.
Grief Is a Rip Current
You’ve probably heard about the five stages of grief. People think you’re supposed to move through them in a neat and tidy order that ends at acceptance. They were never meant to be a checklist you work through until you’re done.
Grief comes in unpredictable waves. You’ll have a decent week and tell yourself you’ve turned a corner, and then, out of the blue, something knocks you flat on your ass. A good day doesn’t mean grief is over, and a bad day doesn’t mean you’re back to square one, even though that’s exactly what it can feel like.
Some of the hardest days show up on the calendar, like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. Others come out of nowhere, years later, when you thought you were past the worst of it. When it happens, it’s demoralizing to realize that once again you need to deal with shit you told yourself was behind you.
A rip current drags you away from shore, and every instinct tells you to fight it and swim straight back in. That’s how even strong swimmers drown. They wear themselves out against something stronger than they are. The way out is to stop fighting, swim sideways until the current lets go of you, and then head for shore.
Grief works the same way. The back and forth is part of it. Some days you’ll face the loss head-on, and other days you’ll need to push it aside so you can live your life. You need both kinds of days. Over time, the waves usually come less often and hit with less force, even though they might never stop for good.
There Is No Box
You’ll want to stuff it into a box so you can function. You’ll tell yourself that you’ve moved on and put it behind you. That’s what strong people do, while weak people lie on the couch and cry about something they can’t change.
It might seem like it’s working for a while. You go back to work, answer emails, and coach your kid’s game. The world doesn’t stop turning because you lost someone or something important to you.
Listen to me now. There is no box. Grief will show up everywhere in your life, and because you think you’ve locked it down, you won’t recognize it. Your fuse will get shorter, you’ll drink more, you’ll lie awake at 3 AM with racing thoughts you can’t turn off.
You haven’t put it behind you. You’ve lied to yourself, and like mold, grief is seeping into every nook and cranny of whatever life you have left.
Your Invisible Operating System
You probably have no idea why you do the things you do when grief or pain overwhelms you. You live in your head because that’s where you can maintain some sense of control over the train wreck your life has become since the loss.
Grief doesn’t exist only in your head. It shows up in your body, often before you have any idea what’s going on. You’re exhausted no matter how much you sleep, you forget why you walked into a room, and you read the same page three times without taking in a single word. You catch every cold that goes around, and some days your chest feels like it might explode.
None of that means you’re losing your mind. It’s what grief does to your body, and it’s one more reason gritting your teeth and pushing through never works. Grief kicks off the same chain of events, over and over, usually so fast you don’t notice it happening.
It starts with something that sets you off. It might be a song, a smell, a date on the calendar, or an empty chair at the dinner table. You don’t get to choose it, and you often don’t see it coming.
Your body reacts before your head has time to realize what’s happening. Your heart beats faster, your head starts pounding, and your stomach drops. The oldest part of your brain treats it like a threat, and it responds faster than any thought. It’s designed to keep you alive, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.
Before you know it, you’re telling yourself a story about what these awful feelings mean. “If I feel this, I’ll fall apart.” “If anyone sees me this way, they’ll never respect me again.” “I can’t fucking handle this.” These stories feel so true that they don’t feel like stories at all. They feel like facts.
So you do whatever it takes to make the feeling stop. You snap at someone, find something to fix, tell everyone you’re fine, or check out. That’s where the four patterns come in.
The trigger and your body’s reaction aren’t choices. The story is different. It’s the one part of the chain you can learn to catch, and once you can see it, you have a shot at doing something different with what comes next. Learning to do this is a hell of a lot of work, but it’s work you have to do if you ever want to stop your reactions from making your decisions for you.
How Men Manage
Most men fall back on one of four patterns to avoid the pain they aren’t ready to face. You’ll probably recognize yourself in more than one, but there tends to be one that’s calling the shots.
The Fuse
Your temper is on a hair trigger, and your explosions get bigger than the moment deserves. A dropped glass or a slow driver makes you lose your shit, and afterward you feel worse than you did before. You know you’re out of control, but you can’t stop it. At least anger feels like strength. That can seem a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
The Fixer
You drive yourself into the ground taking on every problem at work and every project around the house. You become the go-to guy everyone calls when something breaks. You can’t fix the loss, so you fix everything else. If you’re busy, you’ll never have to face the pain that’s waiting for you when you stop.
The Rock
You hold it together for everyone else. You believe your job as a man is to be the strong one when everyone else is weak. You handle the arrangements, answer everyone’s questions, and tell anyone who asks that you’re fine. Everyone leans on you because you can’t tell them how close you are to falling apart. You can’t let that happen because it would mean letting them down, and that violates your idea of what it means to be a man.
The Ghost
You might be physically in the room, but you’re not really there. You give one-word answers, let calls go unreturned, and stay up with the TV or your phone until you can’t keep your eyes open. Checking out feels safer than feeling any of it, because if you let yourself feel it, you’ll implode and do even more damage than you already have.
None of these patterns means you’re broken. Each one is protecting you from something that feels too big to face. If you can’t see them, you can’t stop them. Over time, they’ll cost you much more than the loss you’ve already experienced. You’ll screw up your marriage, your relationship with your kids, your friendships, and any shred of self-worth you have left.
If you want to understand what patterns have you, or someone you love, by the throat, I’ve created a simple tool to help you see what’s going on. It’ll give you some ideas about what you can to do to break free from them. It’s completely free, no strings attached.
Numb Is Not Better
Whichever pattern you fall into, there’s a good chance you’ll reach for something to take the edge off. For some men it’s booze. For others it’s weed, pills, porn, gambling, or doom scrolling for hours on end.
They all do the same job. They turn the volume down on the pain long enough for you to fall asleep, get through the night, or forget for an hour that anything happened. When you’re hurting this badly, you’ll do anything for even a moment of relief.
The pain doesn’t go anywhere. It never does. When the numbness wears off, it’s still there, along with a hangover, an empty bank account, or damaged relationships. Add on the inevitable guilt and shame and you’ve made a horrible situation even worse.
And the only way you know how to deal with it is to do it all over again until you’re in a death spiral you can’t escape.
Wanting relief from this much pain makes sense. The trouble is that the longer you lean on something to get it, the more it costs you and the harder it gets to stop on your own.
People Will Let You Down
In the first few weeks, people show up. They bring food, send texts, and tell you to call if you need anything. Then they go back to their lives, and just as the pain is getting worse, they stop checking in.
Some of the people you thought you could count on will disappear completely. They’ll stop calling, steer clear of you at parties, or act like nothing happened the next time you see them. Others will say things that make you want to put your fist through a wall (or their face): “Everything happens for a reason.” “They’re in a better place now.” “You’ll find someone else.”
Almost nobody will bring up the person you lost. You might be desperate to talk about them, and people clam up the moment you do. You learn quickly not to do that again. If your loss was a marriage, a career, or your health, some people won’t even treat it as a loss worth talking about.
They aren’t trying to hurt you. They’re trying to protect you, and themselves. They’re scared of saying the wrong thing, scared of making you sad, and scared of being reminded that it could happen to them. That doesn’t make it hurt any less, and you’re allowed to be pissed about it.
Understand that you’re also contributing to the situation. You won’t want to mention your loss again because you don’t want to make people feel awkward or be a burden to them. You don’t want them to think you’re the guy who’s stuck and obsessed with what he lost.
If you want to talk about your loss, you’ll probably have to go first. Bring them up by name, or explain what the experience has been like for you. Most people are waiting for permission, and once you give it, some will show up for you in the way you need.
And don’t hate the ones who don’t. They’re doing their best, just like you are. Sometimes the best human beings can do kind of sucks.
Moving Forward Isn’t Betrayal
At some point you’ll laugh at a joke, enjoy a meal, or get through a whole afternoon without thinking about what you lost. Then you feel guilty. How could you be having a good time when they’re gone?
That guilt can plague you with every step you try to take. Clearing out their closet, taking off your ring, or going on a first date can feel like you’re erasing them from your life. If your loss was a marriage, building something new can seem like your old life didn’t matter as much as you thought it did.
Underneath the guilt is a belief that your pain is the last thing connecting you to them, and if it disappears, then they’ll disappear with it. So you hold on to the pain with a death grip, because letting it ease feels like letting them go. You might cry and hope they’re looking down at you and seeing how much you’re hurting so they know you still love them. Misplaced love is still love, even when it keeps you stuck.
The bond doesn’t end because you start living again. It changes. You keep them with you when you tell their stories, use their tools, and live by what they taught you, and none of that requires you to stay miserable.
Rebuilding a life worth living is one of the best ways you have left to honour them.
The People Who Didn’t Die Still Need You
Your loss didn’t happen to you alone. Your partner, your kids, your parents, and your friends are living with it too, and some of them lost the same person you did. They’re also watching you.
While you’re trying to survive, the people closest to you are paying for the patterns you can’t see. They’re on the receiving end of your rage, they’re alone while you work another late night, and they wonder what they’ve done when you shut down. They’re losing you on top of the loss they’re already dealing with.
If you have kids, they’re learning what a man does when life knocks him flat. If you shut down, drink it away, or pretend nothing happened, you’re showing them how to deal with hard things. They’ll learn it whether you mean to teach it or not.
Nobody’s asking you to be fine, and pretending you are only makes things worse. Your obligation is to let the people you love see more of what you’re going through, and to keep fighting your way back so they don’t lose you too.
Asking for Help Absolutely Sucks
Everything you know about being a man tells you that you should be able to handle this on your own. You’ve handled everything else. Asking for help feels pathetic, like you’ve failed.
You tell yourself that seeing a therapist or a counsellor so you can barf out your feelings isn’t going to bring anyone back. It’s not going to take care of all the things that need to be done. The idea of crying to a stranger, or your spouse, or a friend is repulsive.
You’re sure that if anyone finds out how bad it is, they’ll look at you differently. They’ll mollycoddle you like you’re a helpless child. They’ll look at you with pity as they ask, “How are you doing?” They’ll tiptoe around you because you’re too fragile to be treated like a normal person.
Asking for help doesn’t mean pouring your heart out to everyone you know. It can start with being a little more honest the next time someone you trust asks how you’re doing. It can be a call to your doctor, a counsellor who works with grief, or a group of men who know what you’re going through.
No matter how strong you think you are, no one is at their best on their own. You can’t sort out the intense thoughts and feelings in the mess inside your head. You need the perspectives of other people. You need to be challenged. And you need to get it out, even if the words don’t make any sense.
It’ll probably feel terrible every time you do it. Do it anyway.
Nothing in this guide will bring back what you lost. What it can do is help you recognize what’s happening the next time grief crushes you, instead of wondering what the hell is wrong with you.
If the pain ever gets so heavy that you start thinking everyone would be better off without you, or you start thinking about ending your life, don’t wait. Call or text 988 in Canada or the US, or go to findahelpline.com if you’re anywhere else.
The loss changed your life. You have the power to choose what you do with the rest of it.