Many elderly people experience grief if they experience losses such as moving from their own home or the ability to drive. (Photo by Piksel)
When the word grief comes to mind, many people think of the pain of losing a loved one and the rituals of honoring them.
Yet grief also reaches men and women suffering other kinds of losses that are common as they grow older.
Those who provide pastoral care to people in grief say we need to embrace, understand and process those moments as well.
“They feel grief when they cannot drive. They feel grief when they have to downsize. That’s a huge thing,” said Tom Brefka, the pastoral care manager at Clement Manor Senior Living Community in Greenfield.
“Some of our residents move from independent living to assisted living, then to our memory care or into our healthcare center. Each time, there’s a different grieving process, as just a little more independence is taken away from them.”
Jacque Kelnhofer, a chaplain at St. Camillus Life Plan Community in Wauwatosa, says that sometimes that grief involves giving up your home because you can’t manage it, or saying goodbye to an animal that you can’t take care of any longer.
“While grief is different for everybody, there are a lot of commonalities,” she says.
“How we feel on the inside is often very similar. There’s a sense of sadness. There’s a sense of loss. Often there’s a sense of regret or wondering of how things could have been different, of whether the best choices were made.”
She explains that people often feel anger or resentment in their grief, and discover that there often is no particular “target” upon which we can place that grief.
“It’s often not having anywhere to go with that anger that can make it difficult,” she explained.
Sometimes after a spouse passes, the tasks of managing a home become too much and lead to someone discovering they have to sell their home, which leads to compounded grief.
“You’re still carrying the problems of being single for the first time as a widow,” said Marie Joers, a leader at the GriefShare Grief Support Group at Holy Angels Parish, West Bend.
“Now you’re on your own. Unless you have support during that, someone who can walk you through it, it is a problem.”
Support often seems like something unreachable after the initial stages of grief, because the funeral Mass has passed for someone who has lost a beloved person, or those you love have finished their initial communication with you after your pet passes, you downsize or you lose an object that matters.
“There’s nobody who comes to me to ask how I’m doing. There’s nobody who calls me,” said Joers.
That’s where the support, empathy, accompaniment and offering moments where we weep and mourn beside the griever, as Jesus did for Lazarus and his family, need to happen.
“I believe to call them or write a letter, or stop over and be willing to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ And then, listen. It can’t be about you at that point in time. It has to be about the person who you’re trying to help. You have to listen,” Joers says.
“Then it’s saying, ‘I’m here. What can I do to help?’ They may shrug. ‘I’d be happy to drive you to Mass. What about doctor’s appointments? Do you have any coming up?’ It’s not substituting because you can’t. But it’s being there to pair with them as they walk this journey.”
“As humans, we long for that. We long to be seen,” Brefka adds.
“We long to be noticed. One of the biggest roles is just to be a presence and to allow the person to grieve in their own way.”
Brefka adds that someone who’s going through any kind of grief, whether it’s losing a person, an ability, an object or a way of life, needs to allow God to work in a time window that we may not always agree with — and it’s absolutely OK to feel that way, even as we trust in God anyway.
“God works in his time,” said Brefka.
“We would want everything to happen immediately because that’s what kind of culture we’re in right now. We have no way of making it happen any faster, right?”
Kelnhofer also adds that the process of grief means closure doesn’t necessarily happen, but God works in the consistent connection and consolation that happens over the days, months and years beyond the first grieving moment.
“There will always be those moments that catch us unaware, but rather than rocking us to our knees, we have in some ways befriended the loss,” she says.
“In Psalm 63, it says, ‘because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings. I cling to you.’ There’s something very visual about that imagery that reminds me of grief, about what it might be to be in the shadow of the wings of a great comforter, and that we’re invited to just cling. We don’t have to be able to stand. We don’t have to know the next right step. We can trust.”
