Am I Holding On Too Tight?

What happened when I stopped coaching for twenty minutes and let someone coach me

Last week, on a Zoom call with my grief coaching cohort, I volunteered to be the client.

That’s how our class works. I’m part of a twelve-week cohort at the Confident Grief Coach School with Pat Sheveland, and each week one of us sits in the hot seat while a classmate coaches them in front of the group. Twenty minutes on the clock. Everyone else turns off their cameras and watches. Afterward, the group offers feedback.

I raised my hand before class, full of gratitude for the program and confident I’d come up with something worth working on by the time my turn came. I didn’t. Not really. Instead, I had a question I’d carried for so long I’d stopped noticing its weight.

My husband, Ken, died fifteen years ago this past June.

Ken was full of grace and hope and humor, even through more rounds of cancer than anyone should have to face. During his illness and after he died, I blogged prolifically. I wrote about him, about us, about what it was like to lose him. This year I finally published the book I’d been working on ever since. My whole working life has pivoted around that loss: the journals, the coaching, this blog.

And somewhere early on, a few people close to me gave me the impression they thought I wasn’t letting go. To this day, I’m not sure whether they implied it or I inferred it. But one comment I didn’t have to interpret. About five years after Ken died, someone once close to me told me that if I kept writing this kind of stuff, I wasn’t going to find another boyfriend.

I was furious. I told them exactly how inappropriate that was. And then I carried that sentence around for the next decade.

The earworm

That’s the best way I can describe it. Not a constant ache, just a little bug that buzzed up every so often. Are the people closer to me just too polite to say it? Have I geared my whole life too much around something?

On paper, I had decent counterarguments. I’ve had one relationship since Ken. It didn’t last, but we’re still friends. I see people, though, as a committed introvert, one social event per weekend is about my limit, and some weekends not even that. I don’t really date. It just doesn’t interest me. I met Ken by fluke at a bar one night, back when I used to leave the house, and I’d never really dated before him either.

I talk to Ken. I talk about him constantly. When someone dies, and people are looking for a good story to lift the room, I always have a Ken story ready. And in my journal, I’ve written more than once that I am unapologetically never letting go.

I meant it. I still do. But “I meant it” and “I’m sure it’s healthy” aren’t quite the same sentence, and the gap between them is where the earworm lived.

So that’s what I brought to my classmate when the timer started. Am I holding on too tight? I told her I didn’t think so. I also told her I wasn’t sure I was the right person to judge.

The question behind the question

My classmate didn’t argue with me, and she didn’t reassure me. She did something better. She offered me a different question.

What if it’s okay that you haven’t let go? What if wherever you are in the process is completely okay?

My body answered before my mind caught up: it felt comfortable. It felt like something I’d been telling myself all along, only now it came from someone else, without the defensive edge I usually bring to it.

She reminded me of something I write about and tell other people all the time: grief is your own inner experience and your own journey. It has nothing to do with what anyone else, however well-meaning, thinks it should look like.

I know that. I teach that. It’s remarkable how differently it lands when someone hands it back to you.

What my body knew

Then she asked if I’d be open to a short meditation. Close my eyes. Feel my feet on the floor and my back against the chair. Ask the question again, and notice where in my body it seemed to come from.

It was a tie, I told her. My heart and my brain.

And then, while I was sitting with it, an answer came.

No, you’re not.

It wasn’t my voice. It was Ken’s.

I’m not going to make claims about what that voice was or where it came from. What I can tell you is that I hear Ken all the time, because talking about him always seems to bring his voice forward, and in that moment he was as clear as he’s ever been. I got goosebumps. The doubt simply wasn’t there anymore. What was there instead, and I said this out loud, was joy.

Not relief, exactly. Joy. A big, all-encompassing feeling that what I’m doing, the writing, the coaching, the keeping of his light, is the right thing. That it’s okay. That it’s mine.

Why it took someone else

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Afterward, I said I should have just asked Ken in the first place. That’s true, sort of. But I don’t think I’d have gotten there alone.

I journal a ton. I’d sat with this question on the page before. I’d circle it, argue with it, set it down. What I needed was a mirror: someone outside the situation, not tangled up in the history, holding steady while I looked. Not to give me the answer. To give me a better question, and enough quiet to hear what I already knew.

Sterling put it well. When a comment comes from someone you love, it gets into you like a bee sting that becomes an irritant, and every time you start to doubt yourself, it wakes back up. An outside person gives you a safe place to see yourself clearly.

Grief researchers have a name for what I’ve been doing all these years: continuing bonds. The idea is that healthy grieving doesn’t require severing your relationship with the person who died. The bond changes shape. It doesn’t have to end. I’ve known that research for years. Last week I felt it.

What I’m doing with it

At the end of the session, Sterling suggested I get pen and paper and write down my clarity, so that if that little mother voice ever comes back, I’ll know my truth.

She didn’t have to ask twice. It’s been documented in my journal. It’s also going on sticky notes in a few places around the house, because some truths deserve to be visible from the coffee maker.

I’ll be journaling about this for weeks. There are plenty of other questions I haven’t resolved, but this one, the one that’s been buzzing in my ear for the better part of fifteen years, is settled.

If you’re carrying your own earworm

Maybe someone told you you’re grieving too long, or too publicly, or too much. Maybe nobody said it at all, and you’ve just been wondering.

Try the question Sterling gave me: What if wherever you are is completely okay?

Write it at the top of a page. Before you start, notice where you feel it in your body. Then let the pen go.

And if you can’t get there alone, that isn’t failure. That’s why we have each other. Sometimes the answer is already inside you, and you just need someone to hold up the mirror.

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Ron Stempkowski is the author of The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us, a memoir-in-essays about learning to move with grief instead of moving on. If this story resonated, you can grab a signed copy—complete with a handwritten note—at ronstempkowski.com, or get your copy wherever books are sold. And if you'd like more stories like this one, join the journey and get them straight in your inbox.