Grief Is Not a Journey: John Onwuchekwa on Why Grief Is a Language We Learn

One of my favorite quotes comes from Natasha Trethaway and she says, to survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it. Can I tell you all the story? Alright. Can I make a confession whether or not you said yes, I was gonna tell my story anyway. Um, I’m not a crier. Not because I don’t think that men shouldn’t cry.

I’m a. Sensitive soul. I was singing candy rain to my fifth grade girlfriend. All right. Um, I’m not a crier. Not because I don’t think that men shouldn’t cry. I’m not a crier because I’m not a good one, right? I’m a very ugly crier. I do not have the Denzel single tear dripping down chisel cheek when I cry.

It’s more like Viola Davis in fences, right? That’s the kind of crying that I had. So I try not to cry, but all that changed for me. Um. Eight years ago, April, 2017, after grieving 10 years of unexplained infertility, me and my wife are driving south down I 85 to meet our newborn daughter. And so I do what you do right as we’re in the silver, uh, accord with the gray cloth.

In interior, we are driving and I do what you do when those trees just pass by you zone out to your last most vivid memory for me that took place two years prior, April 14th, 2015. Still the worst day of my life. It’s funny, the things you remember on the worst day of your life. You remember all the unimportant things, right?

I remember it was a. Tuesday, I can still close my eyes and retrace the floor plan of the Longhorn Steakhouse in Orlando. I remember the unevenness of the pavement outside, but most importantly, I remember the way that the people’s faces twisted between shock and horror and despair as they looked and tried not to look at me screaming the words into my iPhone.

He’s dead. He’s dead before you had a chance to pray or barter with God or any of the other things that you do on the worst day of your life. I found out that my 3-year-old brother was dead and I was left holding nothing but the anxiety that came from knowing I would have to put my mom and my dad, my three remaining siblings and every other unsuspecting restaurant bystander.

And there’s fear through the same trauma. I do not remember much of the next two years, except for I would just promptly and very quickly excuse myself outta every room that my tears would invite themselves into. I remember at the lowest point in my life, I was lonely. Fast forward April 14th, 2017, I get a chance to meet my daughter.

It’s funny the things you remember on the anniversary of the worst day of your life. One of the sneaking thoughts that comes in is you secretly hope that the worst day of your life stays the worst day of your life. ’cause you never want any other day to take first place, right? I remember it was a Friday, good Friday.

My daughter was born premature, so I still remember capturing her first smile through the smudged incubator glass. I remember the precise tones and beeps and pitches. That reminded me that she was still breathing and her breathing machine worked. I remember how uncomfortable it was. To hold her ’cause the breathing tube was in her nose and wrapped around her neck, and I didn’t want to crinkle it, but most of all, I remember the way that my heart forgot to beat when all the makings of another April 14th tragedy began.

Before I knew it, the doctor snatched her outta my hands. And before you have a chance to pray or barter with God or any of the other things that you do on the worst day of your life, I remember the deafening silence of all of those beeps that told me that the breathing machine was still working. Go deafeningly silent.

I’ll never forget the way that I felt when the doctor placed her back in my arms and he whispered the words into my ears. Um, today’s the day your daughter’s gonna breathe on her own. I wasn’t gonna kill her in this story. It’s sad enough in here. Okay. Two years to the day that my brother took his last breath.

My daughter takes her first unassisted breath. And let me tell y’all I was crying as ugly as one could cry, right? So the nurses there, they come over. Tanya Babcock. Yeah. Uh, please clap. But they got my timer on here, so thank you. Hold your applause to the end. We’ll treat it like a graduation, right? My nurses.

Come through and Tanya Babcock and Vanessa Moore, they start crying. And here I’m like, yo, y’all are crying, but y’all only know half of the story. This is a day of grief and joy. Both of those tears came out at the same time and they taste the same. And Tanya and Vanessa say, no, no, John, we know that grief and hope are not parallel streets.

It’s a winding road that. Intersect and they’re like, we have our own stories of grief and loss. And we sat and we shared it, and for the first time in two years, something clicked for me. Y’all, the loss remained, but the loneliness didn’t. 10 years later, I think here’s one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned about this thing called grief, and it’s this y’all metaphors matter.

They are important metaphors do not just help us grasp concepts. They help you and I navigate reality. So a bad one on something as important as grief is not just unhelpful, it is harmful the most. The, the predominant metaphor that folks are gonna use for grief is that this, that grief is some kind of journey.

The problem with that is journey starts and they have ends. Grief starts, but it doesn’t have an earthly end, and it’s a cruel thing to send somebody in search of light at the end of a closed tunnel. When we give them that, we give them the only thing in the world that’s worse than real pain, and that’s false hope.

Right. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of the five stages of grief and somebody presented that as some path that we get through, right? This is a room that knows this. Raise your hand if you know that. Um, it was the five stages of dying. She came to it by studying terminally o that were on their way to death, not the people that they left behind.

So if you do not fit into that suit, I want you to know that those stages as a pathway of completion are a custom suit made for breathless bodies. If your chest still goes in and out when you breathe, you were not made to complete it that way. And so what we find is that if that is the wrong metaphor for us to use, then maybe it’s more helpful for us not to think of grief as a journey, but to think of grief as a language and the goal of a language is not to.

Finish it is to become fluent. All right. If humanity were a country, grief would be the official language, and even though it is the official language, it’s nobody’s native tongue. My parents are from Nigeria, a country of 200 million people, hundreds of dialects and tribes. Do you know what the official language of Nigeria is?

English. It is a learned tongue that if you are going to navigate across that landscape, you have to learn it. And it’s the same thing when it comes to grief. And here’s the thing that starts to trip folks up or unlocks things, right? Language is not just about vocabulary. Language is about dialects. And when it comes to grief, there’s at least two.

Tangible grief. I have a loved one. Their body is dropped into the ground. Tears sprint down from my cheeks chasing their body into the ground. When people see that they can connect my fallen tears to a fallen body. And you’re surrounded with hugs and handshakes and casseroles, if that’s your sort of thing, right?

We all speak that. The other kind of grief that we don’t speak is ambiguous grief. This is the death of a dream, the death of a friendship. The death of a marriage, the the diagnosis of a parent with dementia, where they are still here, but you talk about them with past tense verbs. These are deaths with no funerals, funerals with no caskets.

And when your body and brain physiologically respond in the same way, and those same tears are chasing your fallen dreams into the ground, people look around. They cannot. Connect the two and you get questions at best contempt at worst. And when we realize the way that all of our grief work has failed.

We find out that a problem well-defined is a problem have solved. When we embrace grief as a language, we realize it’s meant to solve a different problem, which is this. The biggest problem of grief is not the initial loss. It is the eventual loneliness. It’s been 318 days since the Palisade Fire started, and one of the things that you find, if you ever had a friend whose house burned down and the fire department is out there and yeah, water’s splashing and they’re putting out the fire, you walk up to them and say, man, it’s great that the fire got put out.

And they’ll tell you as I walk through the smoldering remains of my house, what the fire didn’t destroy the water did. What we find with grief and loss, and we know this, what the loss doesn’t destroy the loneliness does. When we share that deep grief and people think the way to put out the blazing fire of grief is to splash us with a bunch of, sorry for your losses.

It’s a cul-de-sac where our loved ones are reduced to lost ones. But maybe there’s a better way. Can I tell you all another story? No, I’m gonna tell it anyways. You know that, right? Uh, two of my dear friends in the world, Jordan and Jessica Rice, they’re 44 years old. Uh, they’ve been married 12 years. It’s both of their second.

Marriages. Why? Because both of them were tragically widowed in their twenties. When Jessica was 26, 2 and a half months into marriage, her spouse died in a tragic motorcycle wreck when Jordan was 28 years old, 10 months in. The doctor pulls him from his room and says, your wife has a form of brain cancer.

So rare. I had to Google its pronunciation before I came to talk to you. 10 months later, his wife passed. Jordan and Jess bury their spouses before the birth of their first gray hairs, and they start to date. And as they start to date people say, I’m sorry for your loss. I know your spouse died. And then that goes into.

Is there any room for me? And you sure do talk about them a lot and, but I’m here. And sooner or later all those relationships fizzle and Jordan and Jessica are alone until Jordan and Jessica gets set up on a date. They meet at a bar and for the first time they meet somebody else who is fluent in widow.

And they do the one thing. This is the cheat code y’all. I learned it from my dear friend Barry Liner. Um. The punctuation of their condolences changes. When we think about the language of grief and condolences, we think about words, but one of the things that I lo loved about my failed attempt to learn Spanish is the punctuation matters.

That when it’s on the page, if it’s a question mark or if it is a question, the question mark is there, and you already know that. That’s the first thing. So when Jordan and Jesse. S. S spouses die. They sit and they meet and they talk, and do you know the first thing when Jordan says, I lost my spouse, Jessica does what Barry Liner taught me to do and says, what was her name?

Because 99% of the time when people have a loved one that they’ve lost, they’re content for them to be a lost pronoun. My spouse died, my brother died, and Jordan said her name. It wasn’t just a spouse, it was Danielle. Then Jess started to talk about Jaron. And do you know the next thing they said? They didn’t say sorry for your loss.

They said, um, would you tell me a story about your love? That if I know about them, then for a moment, for a moment, my loved one is not just a lost one. They are a loved one. They are resurrected. They are here. They, you see more of me as I tell you more of them. And do you know what took place with Jordan and Jess?

The loss remained, but the loneliness didn’t. The loss is the tragedy. It’s the loneliness. That’s the trauma. Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald is gonna say, trauma is when your emotional pain cannot find a relational home. When we treat grief as a language, we’re saying we’re trying to deal with the loneliness, not just the loss, and we do that through stories.

Tell me a story about your love. That story is this act of narrative love, where the person that’s grieving doesn’t get the answer to their grief, but in hearing story, they are reminded that their story, however terrible, is yet an incomplete one. Can I tell y’all one last story? Yes. Oh, of course. Thank you.

Um, my daughter, uh, is eight years old and I used to say that my daughter was scared of the dark. ’cause she would have these terrible nightmares and she would bust outta her room, sprint down the dark hallway, come into our room, she’d go past my wife. ’cause my wife is a little more stern than I am. And she’d come over to my side of the bed and she’d say, daddy, can I snuggle with you?

And I look at her in those big, like Pixar eyes and I say, yeah sweetheart, of course you can. You can get in the bed. And it’s fine for all of about three minutes. But then, but then after 90 minutes of getting kicked in the back, in the throat, we say, Ava fam, you’ve gotta go to your bed. She gets up and she walks, and as she’s on her way to her bed, she says Two things, a statement and a request.

The statement is unsurprising. The request gets me every time statement, but daddy, I’m scared of the dark. The request is what gets me. Do you know what she never asked me to do? She never asked me to turn the lights on. She says, daddy, will you hold my hand and walk me back to my room? I used to say that my daughter was scared of the dark.

Now I say. I think my daughter is scared of being alone in the dark. She does not need silver linings. She just needs to know that she is not alone in the dark hallway of grief. And let me tell y’all, y’all, grief is an everyday problem that every day people face every day. And when we treat everyday problems as if they only have expert solutions, society, hope.

Halts if the transmission breaks in your car expert problem. If your car runs outta gas everyday problem. If everybody took a gas less car to a mechanic, society would halt. And the LA traffic that y’all are about to be in would be worse than it is right now. But no, we know that a car running out of gas is something that everybody.

Has the ability to do something about, and it’s spaces like these that give me hope. We can get to a place where anybody who sees somebody with a broken heart can find the right words when there are none. Thank y’all.