Grieving Friends Who Fall Through The Cracks
Recently I’ve been navigating a surge of grief, thinking about friends who died recently, “before their time.”1 One person in particular has been visiting, someone I supported through part of the massive crisis leading up to her death. Much of this time she was in a nursing home, languishing in a medical system that didn’t even begin to know how to help her. She’d text me about intolerable medication side effects, battling with insurance companies while trying to stay alive. Her struggles with eating and swallowing. Her episodes of altered states that became more frequent and unpredictable.2 How desperate she was to get out of the nursing home. How terrified she was that she would die there. How everyone she loved and supported in their own times of need had abandoned her.
I replied, Googling medication side effects, giving her scripts to use with the doctors and insurance companies, brainstorming ways to make eating easier for her, wracking my brain to try and come up with solutions or action plans or honestly anything, any little fucking thing, that could possibly help in any little way. It all seemed absolutely pointless when the medical system itself was shutting the doors to care. Every plan I came up with was shut down by the system for some reason, or no reason at all. Every time she’d text me, Please help me, I’d have less to say.
After a while, her texts grew less frequent, and then stopped completely. Even though I was worried, I didn’t reach out. I’d pick up the phone and start to think of what to say, start to look through our old messages, and I’d feel this wave of nausea - fear mixed with the reality that I couldn’t do anything to fix it for her. Months went by, and I didn’t hear from her. I heard from a friend that she finally got out of the nursing home and back into the community. I felt relieved and made a mental note to check in with her, but I was navigating my own life changes and forgot.
I remember exactly where I was when I got the call that she died. I was going through the process of separating from my ex-domestic partner, and my mother, my ex, and I were all in my living room. I went upstairs to my office to take the call. I don’t know that the details of her death are needed here, but I often think about how utterly fucking lonely she must have felt in her last days.
I thought about every time I looked at my phone and put off reaching out. How I didn’t know how to keep holding space when I couldn’t help. How I didn’t know how to navigate that feeling of helplessness, a type of bone-deep exhaustion I still can’t really describe. I wish I could have done more to just sit with her in her pain, build the capacity to hold space and check in, rather than try to solve things for her and subsequently get burnt-out.
People I’ve shared this with tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty. I understand the sentiment. I’m no one’s savior, and I know that my knowledge and capacity are limited and finite, especially as an individual. I’m not looking for absolution, but answers. What does it mean when we each agree that someone who desperately needs support isn’t our personal responsibility? Over and over again, another person pulls back their support, and the care gap grows wider and wider still. A crack that becomes so much easier for someone to fall into. Where does that leave the people who are hurting and forgotten?
I feel like I lack the words to properly express all this, because the concept that we should care for each other is so forcibly removed from power majority US culture. Hyperindividualism, bootstrap mentality, so deeply rooted they even show up in therapy sessions that use colonial health frameworks. Our institutions of health are not places of healing, and we can’t trust them or expect them to take the place of community and companionship. We’re told that it’s okay to let the people around us fall through the cracks, because they aren’t our responsibility.
I do think we are personally responsible for each other. Not in a paternalistic or savior-like way that denies people agency and autonomy, but in a moral and collective sense. The people we come into community with and the connections we foster are irreplaceable gifts, and we want people to know that and feel that while they’re still here.
In the past year especially, I’ve felt like I was falling through the cracks. At times it feels like punishment, or some sort of divine lesson, for not being able to hold space for the people I’ve lost. I know I’ve internalized a lot, including colonial helping mindsets, but I’ve found solace in continued learning from more collectivist healing cultures and practices, especially liberation psychology. I’ve taken care to weave grieving into my daily life.
Still looking for answers, though.
“Before their time” = as a result of the failure of our oppressive medical systems
Also known as “psychosis” in the predominant US mental health frameworks