Hello my lovely,
I’m writing this on a Saturday morning instead of my usual Friday afternoon as yesterday I was at a funeral.
I should’ve planned, I should’ve had my newsletter already written out and scheduled to send to you, but I didn’t.
Mainly because this is the second funeral I’ve been to lately (really not looking for a hat-trick here) and because when life gets tricky, I tend to only do the crucial things and leave everything else whilst I lick my wounds a bit.
The funerals were both dreadfully sad, as funerals are, and also healing in a way that only collective grieving and saying farewell as a group can provide.
I saw people I haven’t seen for over twenty years.
People I knew as kids now grown into adults and parents. Faces that were familiar but also unrecognisable until I really looked at them, and if I’d seen any of these people under different circumstances, say for instance, if I passed them in a supermarket, I might say hello, stop for a chat, and it’d probably be a bit awkward.
But yesterday, we didn’t even say hello.
We threw our arms around each other, hugged, cried, marvelled at the changes in both our appearances and said little else. We didn’t fall straight into the ‘catch up conversations.’
I didn’t tell them about my kids, or my work, or the other usual topics that we tend to offer up first.
I didn’t ask them about how their job was, how the husband was, or anything else that I might usually do to create conversation.
We just asked, ‘are you OK?’
We offered tissues.
We rubbed backs and bowed heads.
We laughed and shared memories.
We remembered and then, after the important stuff, the chit-chat came. That was when the ‘catch-up’ happened and it wasn’t awkward, or with a slight sense of self-consciousness, because we’d fallen straight back into the kids we were last time we were in the presence of the person we were grieving.
It was a weird and emotional day and as I drove home, I thought how we often fall into the polite ‘catch up’ with people all the time.
Is it as a way to preserve our identity? To make sure they know who we are? Or is it because we’ve nothing else to say?
And, thinking about it, it would be strange to ask someone you hadn’t seen in years if they were OK in a sincere and earnest way. To offer to listen to how hard they were finding things and really hear them.
And then I thought how rubbish that was.
You should be able to ask people these things without doing the polite conversational dance first, but like I said, that would be weird. That would be odd. I would find it odd if someone asked me that straight up in-person when I didn’t really know them.
But you know where I wouldn’t find it odd?
Social media.
How crazy is that?
You often see these posts inviting people to really tell you what’s going on in their lives, and behind a screen and via a keyboard, people do. It’s like the screen is the safe barrier that can cut out the conversational crap.
So why not try it this week in one of your posts?
Talk to your community and ask how they are. Before yesterday, I realised I hadn’t answered honestly to ‘how are you?’ in a long time. My usual response ‘fine!’ wasn’t acceptable yesterday because I wasn’t fine.
Giving someone the opportunity to do that is a beautiful thing, and we all can via our platforms.
And I am fine today.
This isn’t intended as a self-pity type letter to you, it’s just a ramble about how in-person conversations differ to online ones, and how we can use them for the better.
I hope you’re having a fabulous weekend, and also sending you a warm hug, as well as an invite to tell me how you really are.
Zoe x
Hi Zoe .. thank you for this real human post. We do often gloss over the hard stuff. I know it will take you some time to process these two sad events and as an empath I’m with you in heart.
I’ve had the opposite emotional experience this week and been on top of the world after a totally unexpected but wonderful thing happened to me.. see my post from today 😮
I get a come down reaction from such peaks of emotion that I always forget about until they hit me. So today I’m a little emosh .. tissues go hand to mop the rebalancing tears and blow the slightly coldy nose.