Doing Hard Shoe Time

Now that the holiday season has passed, we can put our hard shoes back in the closet.

For those of you who know either of us personally, you know that we tend to be fellows who wear jeans and sneakers. We are definitely not suit and tie types, and no one would ever confuse us with fashion plates.

But the holiday season is that time of year when, like it or not, we find ourselves at a lot of social gatherings. For guys like us, this is bad news. It means our respective [and highly respected] spouses will command us to wear hard shoes. Hard shoes, obviously, stand in direct opposition to sneakers, which we would call soft shoes. It also implies that we will have to wear something more like slacks than jeans, maybe even a sport coat and tie. Life is hard when hard shoes are compulsory.

As John and I compared notes, our first comments to each other were, "Too many Hard Shoe events this year." If you have any sensibility, you can see Jess and Alice [the afore-mentioned spouses] glaring in the background of this article.

Enough about shoes. Frequently, we start these columns with something obscure just to see if you can detect how it will relate to our topic of grief and recovery. Have you figured out the connection between "Hard Shoes" and grief yet? Give? Okay, we'll tell you.

When we go to parties - wearing the dreaded hard shoes - there is that normal give and take where people exchange names then ask each other what they do for a living. No different for us, except that our answer evokes an interesting array of replies. Twenty-five percent of the people we meet say, "Is that like when my mother died ten years ago and nobody would talk to me about how I felt?" When we say, "Yes," they say, "Where were you when I needed you?" Sadly, we realize that most could still benefit from our knowledge, since time has only buried the pain, not completed it.

Another 25% react with a comment about someone they know, family or friend, who they think would need us, "Oh, my sister's husband just died - she could really use your help." Often, in that group, the person telling us about their relative or friend, fails to recognize that he or she is also a griever.

And the remaining 50% treat us as lepers, to be gotten as far away from as soon as possible. We've seen people trip over flat carpeting in their haste to retreat from us and our topic. It's as if they think that somehow just talking to us would rub off some major grief on them.

All of the responses make some kind of sense in the world we live in, where the idea of talking openly about sad, painful or negative feelings is frowned upon. Too bad, since telling the truth creates more connection than distance.

Our organization has been around for more than 25 years. During that time we've endeavored to spread the word about our existence and the need for wider awareness and acceptance of the principles of Grief Recovery. We have written books; sat for literally thousands of radio and print interviews; conducted workshops, trainings and lectures; and put on more than a million travel miles in an attempt to ensure that less and less people would ever have to say, "Where were you when I needed you?" With all that, and today's news that the United States population has just crested 300 million, we've barely made a dent. And what about the rest of the world? Yep, we've got billions more people to talk to.

Maybe some day soon, grief and recovery will no longer be the most hidden topic in our world, and people will be able to find us when they need us.