Help with Grief and Depression
When You're the Strong One at the Funeral
By default, you’re in charge of affairs, the organiser. You make the calls nobody else can face making. You speak to the funeral director with a steadiness that surprises even you. You’re ushered to sit in the front row and asked to give the eulogy and don't let yourself go because if you do, something will come apart that you won't be able to put back together in public.
People tell you how incredibly strong you’ve been for everybody. You accept this because there isn't another option. Then everyone goes home and you're still standing and not quite sure what you're supposed to do now.
Being the strong one at a funeral is a role that most families assign without discussion, usually to the person who has historically been most able to hold things together or most willing to, which aren't always the same thing. It tends to fall to the eldest or the most organised or the one who lives closest and maybe the one whose own grief is deemed most manageable for reasons nobody has examined.
What it means in practice is that your grief gets deferred, not cancelled, deferred. You've been too busy to actually feel what's happened and by the time the space allows, the world has moved on enough that it seems strange to be still in it. The condolences have stopped coming and the immediate family have returned to their own lives and are slowly getting to the acceptance stage of grief and loss. However, you're expected, somewhere in the background of everyone's assumptions, to be fine.
This is one of the more common things that goes unaddressed in bereavement. Not the grief itself but the delay and the loneliness of the delay. The person who kept everyone together after the death of an elderly father or mother and found themselves, six months later, in a supermarket car park unable to explain the uncontrollable floods of tears or physical reactions to what was happening.
If truth be told, there’s no planned schedule to the grieving process. Sometimes it waits and then again it doesn't. When it arrives, most unexpectedly in a supermarket car park, in the shower or on an ordinary Tuesday, six months after the funeral, it can feel disproportionate, belated, almost embarrassing.
It isn't. It's just your timing. The loss is the same as everyone else's, just that yours was delayed taking care of others, being the strong one holding it together.
If this resonates. I offer short, no pressure chats to see what might help.