What are you afraid feeling better would mean?

What are you afraid feeling better would mean?

It is a strange question to ask someone who is grieving. Most people assume you want to feel better, and that the only problem is how. But a lot of us carry a quieter fear underneath: that getting better would cost us something we are not willing to lose.

This is mine.

What I was afraid it would mean

Early on, I was scared getting better meant that I'm not a good daughter, I don't love him enough, or that he's not as important to me as I would tell myself he is. Getting better sounded like letting go of him or forgetting him. I think there's a part of me that believed staying close to the intense grief means staying close to him in the way I still can.

What changed, five years on

5 years on, I realised that grief is not defined just by pain. Yes pain is part of it, but it is also the choice to live life in a way that honors everything he has done and hoped for me as my father, plus taking care of the people who he would have taken care of like my mom and my siblings.

So the definition of getting better was no longer moving on, or not feeling pain. It is simply for the pain to not be completely debilitating, and to become more able to live my life.

Getting better in this sense actually brought me closer to him, because now I can take care of family on his behalf. I can grow my life the way he would have wanted me to.

He was never pain

He was never pain, before he died, and he isn't pain after he died. His absence is the pain.

I can be close to him without holding onto the pain. Because he isn't pain itself.

The fear that is still here

My fears of getting better have eased, but I do still fear I will forget him.

If that fear lives in you too, the fear of forgetting their voice has its own page here, and so does the day you forgot to be sad, the lighter day that can feel like the start of forgetting, and isn't.

If you are afraid of feeling better too

You do not have to answer the question tonight. But it can help to look at it, gently, instead of letting it run the show from underneath. A few things to sit with, only if they are useful:

• What would feeling better say about your love? Notice whether some part of you has made pain the proof. Joy is not a betrayal is a longer piece on that equation, and why it doesn't hold.
• What would "better" look like if it didn't mean less? Not over it. Not moved on. Maybe just a morning that doesn't flatten you, or the energy to do one thing they would have been proud of.
• Where are they, if they aren't in the pain? In the people they looked after. In the way you do things. In the life they hoped for you. Many people find that is where the closeness was all along, which is part of why you don't get over it, you grow around it.

There is no right pace for any of this. Holding on to the grief for a while longer is allowed too. Some of us need the pain close until we trust that they won't go with it.

Questions people also ask

Why am I scared to feel better after someone died?

Because, early on, intense grief can feel like the closest thing left to the person. When the pain eases, it can seem as if they are slipping further away, or as if feeling better would mean you loved them less. It is one of the most common fears in grief, and it comes from love, not from wanting to suffer.

Does feeling better mean I am forgetting them?

No. The pain easing and the memory fading are different things, even though they can feel tied together. Many grievers find the person stays just as present, and often more so, once the pain is no longer taking up all the room.

What does getting better actually mean in grief?

It rarely means not feeling pain, or moving on. For many people it comes to mean the pain no longer being completely debilitating, and being able to live their life again, often in ways that honour the person they lost.

More in Grief over the years, or browse the whole library.

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