“No. I’m sure you feel like one—that’s more normal than you might think.”
I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be comforting or not.
She went on, “You’ve spoken a lot about wanting to keep not just your substance abuse, but your grief out of your team’s sight.”
Shifting uncomfortably, I stared down at my hands and nodded. “They already saw me collapse once. They don’t need to see that again.”
“Did they respond negatively to it?”
“Not…” I chewed my lip. “I mean, they didn’t get mad at me or anything? But I could tell it messed with all their heads. Seeing me lose it like that. I’m thecaptain, you know.They’re all struggling with what happened to Leif. They needsomeonein the room to keep it together.”
“Do you think they expect that someone to be the person who was closest to Leif?”
The sudden lump in my throat almost made me choke. “I… I don’t know. But I also… I mean… I shouldn’t be this much of a mess. Not just in the locker room or in front of my teammates, but—I mean, Leif was myfriend.”
Shannon tilted her head slightly as if she were trying to read me. Something she was scary good at doing most of the time. “Leifwasyour friend,” she acknowledged. “So everyone—yourself included—should fully expect you to be grieving.”
“But this hard?” I hated how my voice shook. “It’s beenmonthsand I feel like it’s still the night he died.” Those last two words slammed into my chest, and I had to close my eyes and pull myself together.
“You feel like you should be back to normal by now.” It wasn’t a question. I almost took it as an accusation, but rewinding it in my head—no, it was just a gentle observation. Iwantedit to be an accusation. Iwishedit was. Wasn’t that what I deserved for being such a broken mess?
“I feel like I should be…” I chewed my lip as I gathered both my thoughts and my composure. “Like, Leif was my best friend. We were really, really close. But the way I’ve been since he died—” I sniffed and swiped at my eyes. “Should I bethismuch of a mess over him?”
Shannon was quiet for a moment. “Do you think you shouldn’t be?”
“I think it would make sense if he’d been my boyfriend or a family member or something, you know? Rachel—ofcourseshe’s struggling. She lost her husband. Her kids losttheir dad. I lost…” I had to fight back the lump in my throat, not that it helped much. “I lost my friend.”
Again, she was quiet, this time as if she expected me to continue. When I didn’t, she asked, “Am I understanding that you think you shouldn’t be grieving this much for someone who wasn’t a family member or a romantic partner?”
“Exactly,” I whispered.
She nodded slowly, then folded her hands on her tablet. “I have to say, Avery, this is one of those unfortunate areas where society has failed everyone. Especially men.”
I blinked. “You—wait, what?”
“In our culture, we’re expected to mourn different people in different ways. And to some extent, we do. You might feel sad over the death of a colleague you didn’t know well, but you won’t grieve like you would if you’d lost a spouse or a sibling.”
“Right,” I said, nodding but still not sure where she was going.
“When we lose a friend—whether because they’ve passed, moved away, or there’s been a falling out that ended a friendship—I think we’re often blindsided by just how hard that grief hits. And people around us often don’t expect it either. They don’t honor it or know how to deal with it.” Shannon sighed. “Probably because another area where our society often falls short is when it comes to non-romantic and non-familial love.”
I tilted my head. “What do you mean?”
“The bond of friendship can be as important as a romantic or familial one,” she went on. “People love their friends, but we don’t realize or acknowledgehow muchwe love them. And then when they’re gone… we don’t know how to grieve that love, and the people around us don’t know how to support us through it. Thanks to toxic masculinity, that problem is even worse for men—you’re not allowed to acknowledge how much you love your friends when they’re here, and you’re certainly not allowed to when they’re gone.”
My throat was getting tight again, and I swallowed hard. “So this… It’s normal?”
“Very,” she said softly. “We don’t know how to love people who aren’t our families or partners. Or, well, we do, but we don’t know how to express it or to grieve it. And it’s not just how we love and grieve people. I have a lot of clients who sit right where you are, sobbing their eyes out and feeling like failures or like there’s something wrong with them because they’re grieving a pet. Our society unironically calls dogs ‘man’s best friend,’ but then they wonder why someone is an emotional mess after their dog passes away.” She folded her hands on top of her notepad. “We’re much the same with our human friends. We form very, very close bonds with our friends. We love them far more deeply than we say out loud. It’s not at all uncommon for people to refer to their friends as being like siblings.”
I swallowed. “Like me and Leif.”
“Exactly. That isn’t just something people say—there are people with stronger bonds with their friends than with their siblings. But we expect them to grieve a lost sibling far more than we allow them to grieve that close friend.” She paused, pursing her lips. “I worked with a veteran several years ago who struggled because he’d been granted permission to take leave from a deployment to attend his brother’s funeral. He wasn’t overly close to his brother, but they had a good relationship. Then he deployed again, this time into a warzone. When his best friend was killed right in front of him, he didn’t even have the chance to watch the casket getloaded onto a plane, never mind attend the service or take some leave to deal with his grief.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “He just had to… keep on fighting after that?”
Shannon nodded. “Obviously there was a lot of trauma there relating to being in a combat zone, but the absence of time and space to properly grieve his friend played an enormous role in his struggles. And I think, in a way, you’re having that same difficulty.”
I shifted uncomfortably and avoided her gaze. “Except I’vehadtime and space. My team, everyone around me—they’ve been supportive.”
