Our four years at Hillsdale teach us transcendental truths, but something’s missing if we graduate without having learned to love our friends in their suffering.
Clare Ansberry wrote that, as a nation, “we aren’t very good at dealing with grief. In fact, we might be getting worse at it.”
In the Feb. 16 article for the Wall Street Journal, “Why We are Getting Worse at Grieving,” Ansberry identified our national failures to grieve well with aversion to death, loss of religious ritual, and our desire to “move on” and get over a loss.
Even at Hillsdale, we don’t know what to do with grief. Surrounded by other bright, young high achievers from comfortable backgrounds, we can start to see real suffering as an alien concept, jumping into icy lakes or taking hard classes just to feel something approximating pain.
Yet no environment can, or should, insulate us from a broken world. Every year, Hillsdale students bury parents, siblings, or best friends. Every year, Hillsdale students suffer devastating mental or physical health crises. Every year, Hillsdale students endure divorce or serious family discord.
And if they’re bold enough to share the struggles, they most often receive pity or polite silence: two poor substitutes for real empathy.
We can do better. In a largely Christian environment, we have the tools and tradition at our disposal to better accompany those teammates, classmates, and friends who are grieving. First, though, we must open our hearts.
Some of our shyness around grief comes from the assumption that the sufferer must not want to talk about it. Usually, that’s wrong. Loneliness in a loss compounds the suffering exponentially — I know, because to this day most people are surprised to learn I lost my mom at 18. Talking about her is something I love, not avoid.
There are situations in which you ought not to bring up sensitive subjects: don’t ask someone you’ve met twice to open up about their best friend’s overdose. But if a good friend’s sibling is diagnosed with an eating disorder, ask that friend how she’s taking the news. If a teammate’s father dies, ask him what his dad was like. If a housemate is going through a breakup, sit down and help her process the loss.
Scared of making your friend cry? Confining him to suffer alone is far worse. In times of loss, give your friend the gift of suffering together: don’t look down on him with pity, but choose to bear his burdens with him.
Opening your heart enough to look someone’s tragedy in the face will never be easy. Resist the temptation to hurry the process along to ease your discomfort, and instead accept that grief takes decades to process and never completely goes away. Check the impulse to compare one loss to another — no, your friend losing her brother was not like you losing your dog. Instead, listen, for as long as it takes.
Take risks for love. The first response to someone’s loss should always, for believers, be one of prayer. But we all need to get better at accompanying our peers and loved ones in the thorny throes of suffering. Whatever you give will be returned to you a hundredfold.
We aren’t very good at dealing with grief. Now’s the time to learn.
Caroline Kurt is a junior studying English.
