April 2023 Special Needs Living Akron/Canton

Navigating the Grief Journey

WRITTEN BY AMANDA ANSCHUTZ, CO-FOUNDER OF COMPASSION DELIVERED

Hello. I am Amanda Anschutz, cofounder of Compassion Delivered, and I am here to write about a subject that no one enjoys discussing but is something we should all be discussing. We should make it as normal as talking about the weather. What topic would that be? Grief. (Oh goody, right) I am not an expert, nor will I ever claim to have the professional knowledge of navigating this part of life, but I have personal and professional experience.

Six years ago, my husband, Daniel, and I formed a non-profit called Compassion Delivered. We exist to provide free healthy meals to people diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness in our community. When we started, we never thought the people we would serve wouldn’t typically overcome their diagnoses. Honestly, we were naive in that area. It took a year and two months to experience the loss of one of our meal recipients; we had to come face to face with grief. It was a different type of grief experience that neither of us would have been prepared for. I have experienced grief in my personal life, family and friends passing away, losing friends to suicide, and going through a divorce. All things that thrust you right into grief, and you find yourself trying to navigate each one differently, but at the core of it, it is the same, deep sorrow.

Every person will want to weigh in on what worked for them or what didn’t work for them as they went through grief. I want to clarify that grief never leaves; we learn to adjust our lives to it. Anyone who tells you that you will get over it hasn’t experienced it, and it’s not their fault they don’t understand; one day, they will. So here we are, talking about grief and how to navigate it. I wish I could hand you the road map and say follow each step, and it will be easy, but that’s not possible. I can share what I’ve done or what I am doing. I hope you will feel you can relate to what I am sharing with you today. Since we started Compassion Delivered, we have lost over 120 people in under six years, and it doesn’t get any easier; if anything, it gets more challenging because you know what’s coming. Each meal recipient begins as a stranger, but in the end, they are family. We have had the privilege of welcoming over 260 new family members into our organization. The food gets us in the door to have a set at their table. We have the opportunity to laugh with them and share stories and memories of their lives, but we are also there to be quiet when they get hard news or to hug them when there isn’t anything left to do. We believe in walking this journey with them no matter how hard it will be; we want them to know they are not alone.

So what do I do to navigate the grief journey? Laugh, I laugh. Laughter is not only a good release but also good for your state of mind. This reaction typically throws people off because it’s not a typical response when you are sad. Usually, when you expect to fill utter sadness sometimes, you will find yourself making jokes or nervously laughing, and that’s OK. It is also a defense mechanism, and the reaction is completely normal, don’t forget that.

Laughter is truly the best medicine in life. Incorporate it into your life, even when it’s hard. We like to tell ourselves two lies: Lie number one is that you must have it all together. And when someone asks you, you tell them that you are fine. Lie number two is everyone’s life is perfect but yours. And we try to compare ourselves to other people’s broken lives. So how do you fix it? Stop both of those because it’s OK that you are broken, and it’s OK that you are not OK; we all are. There is no fault in not having it together, and it’s time that we tell the truth about how we feel and what’s going on, it’s the only way to fix it – be honest with people, and if they cannot walk this journey of grief with you, that’s OK.

Recently we experienced a lot of loss, and it became heavy to carry it on my own, which I typically do because I don’t want people to be overwhelmed by my sadness. But this particular week, I couldn’t hold it back anymore, and I asked my husband if we could take a day to get out of town, and we did; we drove to Buffalo, NY (day trip, crazy – I know) BUT it was precisely what I needed, it’s what my heart needed. We laughed a lot, made new memories, and talked about the hard stuff, but most importantly, we didn’t hide how we felt. You have to let these feelings out when they happen; holding them in won’t solve anything, but it will create more problems. *I’ll touch on that at another time.