When you need support - what your loved one wishes you knew

I’m in the middle of writing an article for work about how to support a loved one through a clinical trial. It’s a humid June morning, I’m sitting on my balcony, and I’m trying to come up with some kind of guide to give people that would let them know how to support someone through one of the hardest times in their lives.

Easy, right?

It brings me back to the fact that we are terrible at supporting loved ones. When life gets hard, I’ve found the most typical response is one of distance. Sure, maybe in the first few weeks people bring casseroles to stock the freezer. But after the initial “acceptable adjustment period” has ended, all the individual is left with is empty baking dishes and radio silence.

Ask me how I know.

After Paris died, we had lasagnas on our doorstep, cards in the mail and everybody and their dog was texting to check in. He was born in March, and by that summer the checking in, gifts and support had all but stopped. Our arms were still empty, our baby was still dead, but our acceptable mourning period had passed and people had resumed their lives. Everything had changed, but only for us.

When I had my transplant, people gathered around to support us (which was and is still very appreciated). My family was provided meals when I was in the hospital, our bills were paid, people watched our dog and for the months when we were relocated to be close to the transplant centre things were taken care of. My health journey was anything but static, and I remember thinking each time another event happened the support would lessen. There would be less and less people around to support us. People liked to know what was going on, and they were quick to offer thoughts and prayers. But no casseroles arrived on our doorstep.

And this isn’t a judgement on anyone in particular. This is a comment on our culture that we don’t know how to grieve well, or to support those in the midst of trials. We expect life to move on, without much thought about what happens after everything happens.

We are in the middle of a hard season. In fact most of the time I feel like we’ve never really left the hard season. We just periodically find rivers to drink from and places to rest, but the entire journey never seems to venture that far from hard places.

I’m currently in the middle of reading a book that talks about what happens when your dreams come true for everybody except you. In this book, the author talks about this Christian idea of mourning with those who mourn and rejoicing with those who rejoice. I’ll come right out and say I think we suck at both. And I think it stems from two areas. One is that we have a false idea of what support actually looks like and the other is that we are all so self centered.

I’m sitting here this morning writing this article and I realize how to support your loved one through a clinical trial has turned into how to support your loved one for the rest of their lives? How do we really be there for one another?

Because for the people experiencing these major events and losses and life changes, it will be a random Sunday sitting in the back pew when everything rises up again out of the blue and it feels like the most devestating loss of their entire life was just yesterday. There is no over it, no point where support stops being needed. Life goes on, people adapt, but there is no conclusion point.

Like I mentioned, I’m really good at navigating hard things. Not by choice, it’s just something I’ve learned how to do. I’ve had lots of practice. I’ve been supported well, and not so well. I’ve experienced support in moments when I was clearly not fine, and in moments when I was pretending to be fine.

Here’s what I wish people knew: there is never going to be a time when my need for support runs out. Our culture has tricked us into believing independence was the goal, that self care is all we need, and they are lying. We need communtiy care. We need grief intermingled with joy, and for both to be accepted. The moments of support that meant the most to me were never the casseroles on the doorstep. In fact in the middle of a casserole season, my husband and I ditched the house full of frozen food and got Pizza Hut pizza just because we needed something more normal. The best medicine I recieved waiting on the transplant list wasn’t the physical medicine, nor was it someone driving me to appointments or cutting our grass (though both those things were very appreciated.) It’s the friend who showed up with glow sticks and disco balls and insisted we’re having a dance party. It’s the friend who booked me a massage, the celebrity gossip magazines delivered to my doorstep, the pizza.

We need to get better at supporting one another not just in acute moments of hardness but throughout life. To become more comfortable with being uncomfortable, and not having designated binaries. Instead of how to support your loved one I think the question needs to be how do we create a culture of support so that when bad things do happen we know what to do. We know how to support one another well, in mourning and in joy. And these are not two seperate things.