Profound grief of divorce, death play out differently

My friends and I appreciate your counsel and have a question that dogs us. Is the grief of divorce comparable to that experienced by widows? Which is more or less bearable? I and my recently widowed friends know the pain of loss of spouse to death. I call it the thief that keeps on robbing, for its pangs continue well after the initial agony of loss. My divorced friend, 60 years old and dumped for a younger woman, feels her loss is more, noting her ego and self-esteem were affected and the loss is just as permanent. We know this is a pointless exercise, but do you have an opinion?

-- S.T., Las Vegas

First, let's clarify terms: People who choose divorce often grieve the occasion of their divorce and certainly its social, economic and familial consequences, but their grief is a quite a different animal compared to the grief of the mates who are still in love with them and not wanting the divorce. That is, the rejected mates.

I'm saying that what we're comparing here is death and rejection, not death and divorce.

Some 25 years ago, I shared a table at a church luncheon with a 62-year-old widower in Winnsboro, Texas. Ironically, I was in Winnsboro to bury my cousin.

Over a Methodist potluck, I learned the man was widowed six months previously. His high school sweetheart and wife of 41 years had been killed instantly in a car accident on one of those rural, farm-to-market highways that zigzag across east Texas. Just like that, she was gone.

"How have you gone on?" I asked, moved by his story.

"At first, it's horrible," he said, thoughtfully. "And then it gets worse."

That might have been the moment I came to truly respect and understand profound loss and acute grief. Oh, sure, life is filled with goodbyes and losses. But some of those losses are profound. Archetypal. The death of a child. The death of a beloved. And, in some cases, getting dumped by your beloved when it turns out that you are no longer your beloved's beloved.

The chief thing I have learned about profound loss is that the myth of getting over it is just that -- a myth. We don't get over it -- ever. We surrender to it. We let it dismantle us. We learn to sit quietly with our sadness. To breathe it in and breathe it out. We let it change us, because we know that acute grief must change us.

Bit by bit, we are reconstructed into our new life. Our new life can be filled with meaning, hope and creativity. Indeed, some of the creativity actually flows from the empty places grief leaves behind. But we're never over it. That's ridiculous. When grief is healthy, it's more that we learn to move on with it. It's a part of us now. Forever.

So, death and rejection certainly have the basics of profound loss in common.

The chief way these two losses differ is in moral and social context.

The death of your beloved tears a hole in your soul ... but, however painful, we tend eventually to write the grief narrative in terms of heroism, nobility and largely positive meaning. In most cases, a richness emerges from the suffering. A sense of human victory. We said "till death do us part," and we did!

Somewhere inside ourselves, we know that, for mortals, grief is the only possible outcome for love, devotion and a lifetime of commitment.

Being rejected by your beloved tears a hole in your soul ... and then we tend to write the grief narrative in terms of humiliation, worthlessness, shame, a sense of moral and personal failure -- largely negative meaning. Which is why, I think, rejected spouses tend to reach for the glaring anti-analogy: "It would be easier had she/he died."

So, I'm not sure I'd say that either grief is easier or harder to bear. Both are profound losses. But I would say that being rejected by your beloved is most often a more complicated journey.

For me, it's like the difference between the grief of World War II veterans and Vietnam veterans. War is hideous and awful in any case, riddled with profound losses. But World War II veterans returned home to tickertape parades and a nation that had a shared sense of heroism, nobility and meaning. Vietnam War vets came home to a nation divided in moral ambiguity and deep ambivalence -- no shared sense of meaning.

The grief of a rejected spouse is more like a Vietnam veteran.

Originally published in View News on July 14, 2009.