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Understanding loss and grief: Different paths, different feelings

By Emily Block

As a plant grows from a seedling to a fully blossomed flower, there are many factors that play a role in its development: the amount of water it gets, the amount of sunlight, the type of soil and what types of bees travel to and pollinate the flower. All of these factors care for the flower and change how it grows. Just like a plant is shaped by outside elements, our lives are shaped by the people around us. These people affect not only who we are, but how we view the world. Sometimes, that impact will outlive their physical presence in our lives, just like a flower can outlive the bee that pollinated it.

When I lost my dad to cancer last fall, I did not understand grief. I had heard about the so-called five stages of grief. Was I supposed to feel denial for the first week, then anger, next depression and finally after a couple of months was I just supposed to accept that I lost someone so important to me? None of that sat right with me. How could my way of grieving have to follow the same timeline as someone experiencing something entirely different?

It seemed to me that the five steps of grief were society’s attempt to organize something that is impossible to sort out. Grief is messy; it is different for everyone and it is a lasting feeling. Just as we all love others in our own ways, we mourn losses in our own ways.

Minnie Carroll, a mother of two students at Marin Catholic and Branson, shared her experience with grief after losing her husband to kidney cancer. She reaffirmed the point that grief does not follow a specific timeline.

“A lot of people think there’s a metric that should be placed on grief. [If a] grandparent dies, give them six months. A parent dies, give them a year and a half. A spouse dies, give them two years. A child dies, they need three. It is a nonlinear experience, so [this expected timeline] is unfair because it creates the impression [of], ‘Why isn't she over it?’ or ‘Why is she still ruminating on this?’” Carroll said.

For many people dealing with grief, it can feel as if they are experiencing it wrong because they are not following society’s set steps or timeline for grieving. Junior Erin Stolte lost her dad two years ago and felt she had not grieved in the “right” way.

“I felt like if I wasn’t thinking about him enough [and] I wasn’t doing the right thing. Or if I wasn’t living my life, then he would be disappointed in me,” Stolte said. “In the best way, I just wanted to find the right balance between living my life and also being sad and depressed. I realized there’s no right way to go through the first few months and you have to let your mind and your body run their course.

Just trust that everything will be okay.”

The specific traits that shape an individual play a role in the grieving process. Whether it’s a familiar smell, the way they smiled at you or an activity you loved to do together, these specific memories make for a deeply personal grieving process. In some sense, it is not only the person you are grieving for, but the relationship you two had. Carroll spoke to this when reflecting on her grieving

Stolte is not alone in her feelings. Luke

Trusheim, a Redwood graduate who lost his father just over a year ago, also reflected on how his emotions have changed over the past year through his process of grieving.

“I've felt certain emotions repeat themselves. At first, [the feelings I was experiencing and the things I would think about] were new, and I sort of know now that it’s normal. [My feelings] definitely weaken over time and grief does go away with time, but it’s always there, and you learn to live with it. I'll still have very strong waves of emotion, and they hit [me] randomly,”

Trusheim said.

In a fastpaced trying to be supportive. Some days you’re good, and then some days you’re not,” Carroll said. “We live in a society that tends not to talk about difficult things, and there's a lot of stigmas [and] discomfort around grief because you never want to say the wrong All experiences of grief are different, yet equally significant. These feelings of grief will continue to be present in society, so even if it is a hard subject to bring up, sometimes with the right person and situation, it can be necessary. Even taking time out of your day to support a friend dealing with grief or being conscious of why someone may be feeling a particular way makes a big difference. Handling these complex feelings amongst other societal stressors is far from easy, but it truly speaks to the impact that person had on your life and the power of your love and memories.

“It’s painful to think about what could have been and the future, and what it would be like if this didn’t happen,” Trusheim said. “But the other side of that is, I got time, and as much as I wished and hoped it would have been longer, I get to look back and say to myself, ‘I have memories.’”

Marin City: seven courts, six drives, four streets, two circles and one avenue. A single road, Donahue Street, leads off Highway 101 and into the city, curving behind the shopping center that holds Target and Panda Express.

Turn left at Phillips Drive, where Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy and the Recreational Center greet you, and loop along Drake Avenue. Golden Gate Village, one of Marin’s largest affordable housing developments, sits nestled in the hills, and, if you continue past it on Drake, it’s only a minute until the highway stares back at you again.

Created 80 years ago during World War II, Marin City has remained resilient through struggles over segregation, housing and gentrification. But more than that, Marin City is a tight-knit and intergenerational community with an incredible history and promising future. Stemming from its wartime origins, continuous development and ongoing activism, Marin City’s evolving legacy is just its beginning.

Marinship

Lifelong Marin City resident Bettie Hodges has lived through the history of Marin City first hand. Hodges’ parents, like many of Marin City’s first residents, moved to Marin from Mississippi during World War II to work in Marinship, a shipyard built in Sausalito that supported the U.S. war effort.

“When I grew up, Marin City was still the temporary wartime housing project that was built during Marinship to house 5,000 shipyard workers. It was the first integrated housing project in the whole country,” Hodges said.

Between 1940 and 1960, 3,348,000 Black Americans left the South in the Great Migration. A handful joined Marinship and turned to the Federal Housing Authority, who took control of the land north of Sausalito and built temporary homes, thus founding Marin City.

“It was the kind of neighborhood where we never locked our doors when we were kids,” Hodges said. “Marin City was our playground. We used to go up to what’s now the Marin Headlands and play in the orchards. The hill, [overlooking the city], was our slide and go-kart hill. We would climb up and spend the day sliding down on cardboard. It was a fun community to grow up in — a very freespirited kind of community.”

Marin City, known at the time as the bestintegrated shipyard in the West, still faced challenges in preserving its unique multicultural makeup.

According to Felecia Gaston, the founder of Marin City’s Historical and Preservation Society, Marinship’s internal racial tensions drove a pro-integration labor movement.

“Marinship had what they called a Boilermakers Union, and [it] wanted all the Blacks to be in a separate auxiliary,”