I’m your host, Dr. Jennifer Levin. I am a grief therapist and the founder of From Grief to Growth, the host of the podcast, Untethered: Healing the Pain from a Sudden Death, and I am the creator and author of the Growing After Traumatic Loss course. I provide support, guidance, and teachings to help you with the aftermath of chaos, trauma, and grief.
Hi everyone and welcome to Untethered: Healing the pain from a sudden death. I am Dr. Jennifer Levin, and I specialize in traumatic death and helping individuals through the struggles, pain, trauma, and chaos of an unexpected death.
The title of today’s show is But I Didn’t Get a Chance to Say Goodbye.
So many of you are living with this reality after the experience of a sudden death and it can be haunting. In the overwhelming majority of circumstances, when your loved one dies in an unexpected manner, you do not get the opportunity to say goodbye. There is usually not a final “I love you”, a final kiss, a way to hold hands or give one last hug while you are both living. And it is heart breaking. Many of you have probably spent hours thinking about final words you would have spoken if only you would have had the opportunity.
Today I want to talk about why it is so painful when you do not get an opportunity to say goodbye to someone you love before they suddenly die. I want to validate all the emotions you may have or may be experiencing about the goodbye you did not get to verbalize. I want to take a look at what saying goodbye represents, but more importantly, I want to stress that one goodbye cannot summate the feelings of an entire relationship. Finally, I want you to know that it is not too late to say goodbye, and I am going to give you some ideas that you can still use to say goodbye to someone you love who died suddenly.
Validate feelings
When you don’t get to say goodbye to someone who died suddenly, it is common to blame yourself for everything that went wrong - even if you know deep down there was no way you could have had any control over the situation.
I am curious if you found yourself thinking….
I should have been there
I should have known
I am such a bad person
This is all my fault
I failed
My loved one died all alone, and I wonder if they think I didn’t love them?
You may also find yourself regretting certain decisions you made, judging yourself for specific actions, and feeling guilty for things you did or did not do. The mind plays tricks on us when we are in pain. It goes down a deep rabbit hole to keep us in more pain, and spins in directions that are not helpful.
All these things are distractions and noise that try and take you away from the harsh reality that your loved one has suddenly died, and you are devastated because you did not get to say goodbye.
The key is to recognize what is happening and to gently tell you yourself, just because I did not get to say goodbye does not mean I failed my loved one. It does not mean I did not love him or her. If I could have been there, I would have, and one goodbye could not have expressed all of my love. And that is what we will be addressing next.
What do goodbyes represent?
But first, let’s take a small detour and look at what a goodbye represents. According to the dictionary, goodbyes are something we say at the end of an interaction, when we are parting ways or leaving. The first known use of the word goodbye appeared in a letter by English writer and scholar Gabriel Harvey in 1573 and was actually shortened from the phrase “God be with you”. This was the way that we used to part ways back in the early days because we truly did not know if and when we would see one another again. That’s not the case anymore. These days we throw goodbyes around causally at the end of most our interactions.
In the most general form, goodbyes are a form of closure.
My most favorite definition of a goodbye is from Eleanor Haley, and she says “saying goodbye allows us to put words to feelings, shape how we remember someone, codify our choices, and frame distinct periods of time.” In short, goodbyes give us a sense of closure as we move onto the next phase of our lives.
I am wondering, however, if saying goodbye to your loved one before they died suddenly would have given you a sense of closure. Is that the same in grief? Does goodbye give us any closure?
Relationships are not based on final goodbyes
It is my belief that relationships cannot be summed up in a final goodbye. How could they? Yes, there is always an opportunity for one last I love you. But you don’t just tell someone how much you care about them and how much they mean to you in a few sentences at the end. You have to show them, and that takes time.
I have worked with so many clients who report feeling relieved and so good because they know and they can feel it in their bones, that their loved one died knowing that they were loved, cherished, and honored even without a final goodbye. They spent years building a meaningful relationship and despite the tragic circumstances that ended their loved one’s life they are able to find solace in the strength of the relationship that remains. Are they struggling with their inability to say goodbye at the end? You bet they are. But they are able to find peace in the knowledge that their partner was loved. So when you are struggling with this, I invite you to step back and evaluate the strengths of your relationship. Look at it as a whole. This is what matters, not what happened in the last few hours or few minutes of your loved one’s life, but instead of all the time and all the years that you spent together.
As an aside, I do want to share, that I have the opportunity to work with many individuals who were with their loved ones in their final moments of life. These are individuals who had a chance to say final goodbyes because the end was planned.
When I asked them what they said to their loved one at the very end, most of them reported to me something like – there was nothing left to say - just an “I love you”. We knew how we felt about one another. You can’t sum that up in a few sentences at the end. Please note, I understand there is a huge difference between these circumstances and your circumstances.
What if the final words were not good?
It is important to mention that there are some of you who will have had final interactions with your loved one prior to their sudden death that were less than ideal. Either you were engaged in an argument, a mundane text, or some other form of communication that was not how you wanted your final moments to be.
I encourage you to have compassion for yourself and your partner for what was going on in your life at that moment. Obviously, if you knew that your time together was limited, things would have been so different. Give yourself permission to let this go and focus on the larger picture such as the quality of your relationship as a whole. If your relationship as a whole was struggling, this can complicate your grieving process and so you may benefit from professional support.
Things you can still do
Unfortunately, it is all too common these days to grieve a loved one without an opportunity to say goodbye. When this happens, you have to get creative. There are still ways for you to say goodbye. Remember, this is about you. It is about what you need to say and express in a manner that feels authentic and meaningful to your loved one. I want to give you some examples of things that you can do to say goodbye.
First, write a goodbye letter. I like this option because you can take your time and craft what you want to say. Pretend your loved one was sitting in front of you. How would you say goodbye? What would you want to include in a final conversation? What feelings would you want to convey?
Second, find a place where you would feel most connected to your loved one. This could be the cemetery, your favorite place in nature, a vacation place, or even the couch at home. It could even be some place with a particular smell or when you are curled up wearing a favorite piece of their clothing. How would you say goodbye at this place? Would you go to this place once and for all? Or would you keep going back? Perhaps you could read your goodbye letter at this place. How would that feel?
Third, talking to a picture of your loved one could be very helpful. This could be a great way to say goodbye. Perhaps you want to have a candid conversation or use this as an opportunity to read your goodbye letter.
Fourth – you can create a memorial to remember your loved one. These days there are so many ways to create memorials. You can plant trees or flowers in your garden, draw something or build something, the possibilities are truly limitless…
Funerals and memorial services are often used as rituals to say goodbye to loved ones. However, if you did not get a chance to say goodbye you might want to engage in a private ceremony, ritual or closing activity to say goodbye. I have had clients turn off or disconnect cell phones as a way to say goodbye, take memorial hikes, spread ashes at meaningful locations or take family trips, all as a way of saying goodbye or bringing some sort of closure to their loved one’s time on earth.
Grief counseling is another way to work on the process of saying goodbye. For some people saying goodbye is not a single event, but instead a long process that takes place over time as you work through different pieces of your loss.
Many people choose not to say goodbye at all and embrace the concept of continuing bonds. The continuing bonds theory supports the notion that our relationship with our loved one never ends and it continues through death. For more information about this you go to website and look at my workshop on Grieving a Sudden Death which teaches you how to develop and maintain continuing bonds with your loved one.
Review of podcast
The goal of today’s podcast was to show you that is completely normal to have judgmental feelings towards yourself if you did not have an opportunity to say goodbye to your loved one before he or she died. I want you to realize that these feelings are not moving you closer to healing. They are distractions from the pain that you have experienced a sudden death of someone you love dearly. Next, we looked at the meaning of goodbyes and questioned whether or not they actually bring about closure when a loved one suddenly dies. Third, I argued that a final goodbye cannot sum up all of the feelings and emotions that exist in a relationship, and finally, I provided you with some ideas so that you can still say goodbye to your loved one in a meaningful way.
In our next podcast will be on Wednesday, August 3rd and will be titled: How do I live with the Unanswered Questions and Uncertainty?
Thank you so much for joining today’s episode of Untethered Healing the Pain After a Sudden Death. If you know someone who is living with a sudden or unexpected loss, please invite them to subscribe to our podcast. You can also find me on Instagram @fromgrieftogrowth and on my Facebook page From Grief to Growth. Don’t miss my Facebook lives every other Wednesday morning at 9:00am PDT. Be sure to like my Facebook page and sign up to be notified when I go live so you don’t miss announcements and opportunities to interact with me. Bye for now. Thanks for tuning in today!
Thank you for listening today. Be sure to subscribe to my podcast so that you never miss an episode. For help with a sudden and unexpected loss, sign up for my free mini course, where I will teach you about the 3 Truths About Living With A Sudden and Unexpected Loss. Please visit www.fromgrieftogrowth.com to sign up.
