A shared universe › Blog › Everyone grieves in their own way · Español
In the same house, on the same afternoon, one person cries and needs to talk about the person who has died, and another sets about fixing the tap that has been dripping for months. The first looks at the second and wonders whether they really care. Almost always they do, and deeply: they simply carry it differently.
The grief specialist Kenneth Doka and the psychologist Terry Martin, who have devoted much of their lives to studying loss and training those who accompany people through it, described two styles of grieving. They are not talking about better or worse griefs, but about different ways of feeling a loss and expressing it.
Hardly anyone is at one extreme. Most people have something of both, with one weighing more, and the same person can grieve differently over two different losses. Doka insists that someone who does instead of crying does not feel less: they feel it in a more contained way.
Their first book on this idea, published in English around the year 2000, had a title that repeated a cliché in order to dismantle it: “Men Don’t Cry… Women Do”. The subtitle made the intention clear: transcending gender stereotypes in grief. In 2010 they revised it and gave it another title, “Grieving Beyond Gender”.
According to Doka, in Western cultures more men are probably inclined towards the instrumental style, but sex influences and does not decide. Temperament, the family each person grew up in, culture and what was learned as a child about tears all weigh as well. There are women who carry their sorrow by working the land and men who need to cry and talk about it. None of them is doing anything strange.
Doka often tells the story of a teacher who had sculpture as a hobby. His long-awaited son was stillborn. Every afternoon his wife came home from work, went up to the bedroom and wept. He, meanwhile, worked a block of granite to make the perfect headstone for his son. Carving that stone was his way of weeping for him, even if at first he did not see it like that himself.
Instrumental grief can be recognised in gestures like these:
For a long time it was taken for granted that someone who did not cry was bottling up the pain and that sooner or later it would burst out. In 1989, the psychologists Camille Wortman and Roxane Cohen Silver reviewed several widespread ideas: that depression is inevitable after a loss, that someone who shows no distress has a problem and that pain is only overcome if you work through it thoroughly. The studies available at the time did not support them, and some said the opposite. For those who need it, crying brings relief; for those who do not, there is no need to force it.
That does not mean it makes no difference. Doka and Martin also describe people who feel sorrow in one way and make themselves express it in another: the man who needs to cry and forbids himself because he believes it is his job to be the strong one, or the woman who feels cold because she does not weep as others expect. They call this mismatch dissonant grief, and it is usually the one that weighs most, because it is carried in secret, even from yourself.
Doka tells of a man who was easily moved by other losses, but who after the death of his little daughter put away all her photos so as not to fall apart, and this brought him into conflict with his wife. Little by little he found a way through: on the drive home from work, in the car, he would put on a song that reminded him of her and cry. In time he was able to talk about his daughter at home too.
The differences show most within the family. A couple who lose a child, siblings who lose their mother: each expects the other to experience it as they do, and what is different is read as coldness or as exaggeration. Some ideas that help you understand each other:
If doing is your way, it may help to choose tasks with meaning, the kind that let you think about that person as you do them, and also to set aside some time to stop: the tiredness of grief builds up even when it is not seen. If feeling and telling is your way, it will do you good to find someone who can listen without hurrying, and tears need no apology. And if you are somewhere in the middle, which is the most common, you can follow whatever each day asks of you.
Neither style is better, and both can get stuck. Doing without rest can become a way of never stopping to think about what has happened; crying at all hours for a long time can be a sign that the sorrow has become stuck. If, as the months go by, you feel no relief, if you stop eating or sleeping, or if you find it hard to see the point of going on, talk to your GP or a professional. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
If the words won’t come, you can tell a gesture. A star for a loved one who is gone can hold that too: “Today I watered their geraniums”. Whoever reads it will keep it company with a line of remembrance, without asking anything more of you.