After everyone goes home

Original Medium Post HERE

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Three ways to help build community after loss

My wife Vanessa with her Aunt Maureen, who passed away last year

“Leading up to the funeral, you’re so busy. Then there are all these people around at the wake and the funeral. You’re planning everything, talking with everyone, your head is spinning.’

‘The toughest part is after everyone goes home, when you’re at home and everything is quiet.”

My father shares this from deep personal experience. Several years before I entered their lives as a foster child, my parents lost their son and my sister lost her brother. He was just four-years-old.

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Resilience in community

The community joy approach recognizes life brings high highs and low lows. Increasing joy: sustained emotional wellbeing, means a happier, more resilient baseline, not the end of pain.

A joyful community comes together in challenging times.

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My immediate family is part of big extended Italian families, descended from 8 kids on one side, 11 on the other. We make extended family holidays out of days that aren’t normally family holidays: Halloween, Labor Day, New Year’s Day, St. Mary’s Day, and when I was a child: every Sunday.

My father owned a pharmacy that was a community gathering place.

Family and community surrounded my family after their son’s death. After everyone went home, my family wasn’t as alone as many are, but there was still deep loneliness in the loss.

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Three ways to help build communities of support

In an often fast-paced and fractured world, how can we build those communities of support around those who need it?

Here are three ways:

1) Understanding where people are — without being invasive

2) Reaching out personally, and

3) Remembering to follow up

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1) Understanding where people are — without being invasive

My wife Vanessa recently lost her Aunt Maureen.

When Vanessa was growing up in New Jersey, Aunt Maureen (her mom’s best friend) lived in New York City. Every time Vanessa went to New York, no matter the reason, she saw her.

From age 6, Vanessa looked forward to her two annual reserved long weekends in New York. Aunt Maureen introduced her to new theater, music, a love of the Beatles; and even brought Vanessa as her special guest on vacations.

Vanessa convinced Aunt Maureen to have a series of cats — and gave them Beatles-inspired names: Penny Lane, Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

We shared Thanksgivings and Christmases, with family games, and sometimes silly hats, and rounds of Jameson whiskey, with Aunt Maureen and her family.

Aunt Maureen was Vanessa’s confidant; they talked about everything, and laughed a lot. Vanessa and Aunt Maureen were in touch every day, and when Aunt Maureen could no longer use the phone, Vanessa was at her bedside holding her hand, telling her what a gift she was to her while playing “Imagine” and “Let It Be”.

There isn’t a good title for someone like Aunt Maureen. She was somewhere between an older best friend and a second mother.

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Fortunately, Vanessa also had friends and family who grew up with Aunt Maureen and understood that relationship. People were there for her; they knew how important Aunt Maureen was.

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We face a difficult balance as we seek to understand without feeling invasive. While people often have natural curiosity in these difficult situations, I want to keep asking myself if the question I am about to ask will actually help the person who is suffering (perhaps by furthering my understanding in a helpful way) — or if it will address my own curiosity, but not be helpful.

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2) Reaching out personally

Individual gestures meant a lot when my birth mother died in October 2022. Friends, family members, and people from our Social Centers community called right away and talked and prayed with me; sent cookies; traveled across the metro region to the wake; sent a book about loss; helped with childcare; traveled from out of state; came despite limited mobility. My birth mother’s favorite priest spent much time planning with us.

This tapestry of gestures helps us remember, celebrate, mourn. They mix moments of joy in with the mourning.

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3) Remembering to follow up:

“For the year after, you just feel like you’re in a fog. You don’t even know how you’re making it,” my father has said of their loss. The pain doesn’t just end after a year either.

Healing after the major surgery doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to find the new job.

New birth or adoptive parents continue to have the wonderful and very overwhelming experience, for a lifetime.

Unfortunately, after outreach to someone who has experienced a loss, I find it can be easy to slip back into the busyness of day-to-day life — and to forget to be there.

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Vanessa inspires me. She checks in with our family and friends in the midst of tough situations — and keeps following up. She is a great cheerleader in good times. She knows just what to put in care packages.

I know I could have been more present for some readers (and non-readers). I could have done more when people have faced tough times. I hope writing this can help me do better, and hope it might be helpful for some readers too.

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I’m thinking about concrete, simple steps I could take more often:

· Setting calendar reminders to check in.

· Following up again (and again — but at the right cadence) when someone doesn’t (maybe can’t) respond. We never know how much the gesture might matter.

· Asking again (and again — but at the right cadence) if they need anything, even if they said no before.

· Still sending something even if I really should have done it a month before.

· Calling and being available for a real conversation.

· Putting meaningful dates — like death anniversaries, and of births of loved ones, in my calendar, to reach out. Reminding others who might want to reach out about those special dates.

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When we’ve experienced the loss

The balance I’m striving for is expecting more from myself when others have experienced a loss — but not expecting too much from others if I do.

In my times of need, people have stepped up in beautiful, transformative ways. If someone ever doesn’t step up or show up, however, I want to recognize people can only do what they can do, given where they are in this time. I think 1) if we need something, we can try to ask so they have the opportunity to know and respond; and 2) beyond that, not stepping up or showing up doesn’t have to mean someone isn’t a good friend, etc. It can just be about that situation.

When a good person (or people) don’t meet expectations, and the person who has suffered (understandably) wants to shut them out, (a) painful second loss(es) can compound the first loss. I think we can often bounce back better from our losses if we can let go of some of those very understandable expectations and accept people where they are.

Of course, every situation is different — and some relationships reach a natural end — but I want to always be careful about judging too harshly if I’m in a position of pain.

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We can all meet each other and build communities that are more resilient together.

Stay joyful, East Boston. And as we reach out to those who aren’t experiencing joy right now, let’s stay present.

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Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Look out each week for our posts about boosting joy the only way we can: in community.