The Glasses Effect: Cope With Grief Using A Simple New Perspective

November 5, 2019 Rachel Nusbaum

Reframe your relationship with the loved one you lost to positively navigate the pain and grief.

Recently I heard that if we can be joyful for a friend who is celebrating something that we yearn for, it is a sign that we have done the work on ourselves to be in a place of acceptance. If we feel jealous or angry (or some other negative emotion) as the initial response, it’s a sign that we have inner work to do.

How does that land with you? For me, I know it’s been true at certain times. I want to take time this week to acknowledge you if you see yourself in the second camp, feeling despair with what seems to come easily to other people. I hope to give you a small bit of hope if you are in a season of life where you feel pain simply by being in the world, from day to day existence. I know that pain.

After my unborn son was diagnosed with congenital heart disease when I was 18 weeks pregnant, it felt like I was given a new pair of glasses in which to see and experience the world. There was nothing good about those glasses. They took the joy and beauty out of life. Simple, everyday experiences, like going to a restaurant, became almost impossible to endure. I’ve written about that time, which was now almost a decade ago.

Slowly, over the years I’ve been able to take the glasses off. I’ve done a lot of work on myself to get to this place. I believe that each of us will experience the glasses at some point in life. We want so badly to crawl into bed and sleep until it’s over. To hide from the assault that walking out the front door brings. Keep opening the door and stepping out. Go through the motions if you have to. You will start to see windows of opportunity to make the lens of the glasses a different shade, a little lighter. It takes hard, deep work to commit to seeing joy again. Maybe you aren’t ready yet to approach that work. It’s ok. Trust that the day will come when you are ready to take a baby step.

I experienced the glasses again after my dad died and my mom’s illness progressed to the point that we needed to take care of her, rather than she helping to take care of my family. This has been challenging and painful in it’s own way. While I felt heavy sadness and grief working through my son’s diagnosis and treatments, I felt angry and cheated when I thought about my parents. There were reminders everywhere of what felt like a gaping hole in my own family. It seemed every family we knew had grandparents who could pick up kids from school, have the grandkids spend the night, come stay at the house during a work trip, and on and on. This is still the reality in which I live, but I’ve moved away from the anger towards something new.

Again, I want to tell you that I see you if you are in glasses-wearing season. I don’t think we can skirt around that part of the experience. We have to wade through and allow those emotions to come. But I do want to give you a handful of hope because without hope things feel quite meaningless.

At first, I tried to look to my mom’s network friends to help me handle these feelings. Many of them were supportive of us and wanting to help. They also were actively involved in their own lives, which of meant taking care of their own grandkids. They could only see our situation through the eyes of their own experience (of course, as all of us do). The problem was that their experience was with their own parents, which was akin to my grandparents, and that was not at all helpful. My mom’s friends were able to help take care of their parents and their grandchildren and the same time, while I was taking care of my parent and my children at the same time. Realizing that I would not find comfort there was a huge relief for me - I could let those relationships continue to nurture my mom while understanding I needed to look elsewhere.

I have a couple of close friends and family in-law whose parents I see a couple of times of year. I started noticing that it was nice to be around those folks because they cared about their own kids and grandkids but they also genuinely cared about me and my kids. They were interested in my life - my business, how my kids were doing. It felt good to be in their presence. I allowed myself to get curious about it. What did being with other people’s parents give to me? It gave me a window back into the parent/child relationship. Instead of being consumed by illness, grief and caregiving, these were more typical relationships. Parents cooking in the kitchen, parents driving their adult kids crazy, parents taking the grandkids out for a walk or playing Memory. It was a reminder. A reminder of the good times, the normal times that I had experienced with my own parents.

I think there are some lessons here for me and maybe you could apply these too. First, we need support. Sometimes we go looking for that support and we do not find it. That’s ok. We don’t need to point fingers at ourselves or anyone else. But keep looking. I never expected I would enjoy being around my friend’s parents. Find beautiful reminders of past relationships. It’s so easy to see only the negative. The trick for me was finding people who were honestly interested in my family and letting them in. My best friend’s parents, for example, helped take care of my daughter while my husband and I were in Boston for Griffin’s surgery last year. What a gift. But we have to intentionally see it that way rather than dwelling in feelings of martyrdom.

I wrote this poem to honor the different sets of (not-my-own) parents who have blessed my life over the past couple of years. I send them my gratitude and love.

A Poem Of Gratitude For Helping Me Process My Grief

The time we sat in your driveway on Independence day,

me and your dad in beach chairs side by side.

Watching the bottle rockets explode in the cul de sac and the kids shriek and laugh,

I felt the joy it brought him, just to be present.

It reminded me that my dad had felt that with his grandkids too.