Healing With Hope: Rabbi Earl Grollman

JANUARY 17, 2008 – HEALING WITH HOPE: RABBI EARL GROLLMAN. Rabbi Grollman is a noted writer, lecturer and teacher. He is the author of twenty-seven books on crisis management. He was Rabbi of the Beth El Temple Center, Belmont, Massachusetts, for thirty-six years before taking early retirement to write and address countless groups around the world. He was one of the founders of Samaritans, a national organization for suicide prevention and intervention.Â

Dr. Grollman also helped establish Good Grief, which helps schools around the nation deal with grief. His twenty-seventh book and newest book is Living With Loss, Healing with Hope: A Jewish Perspective.Â

Rabbi Grollman: I think it’s true for many of us especially if we lived in an urban community. Adults say I can’t handle it. How can my poor kids understand it? And so I think this is true with adults consumed with their own pain and with their agony, with their own torment, and the children. What do they know? The children are the forgotten mourners. I remember as a clergy person, I’d walk into a home, talk to all of the adults while the kids were all by themselves crying their eyes out. And so we somehow felt that the children were too young. They couldn’t understand. And this is the great problem that we’ve had dealing with children is not understanding that a person is a person no matter how small.Â
Rabbi Grollman: The important thing is they want to talk. Don’t say how are you? because the child will say fine. Let them know that you are in pain, too. Let them see where you are. Encourage them to participate in the family sorrow. They need to express their own emotions to the ceremonies of death, whether it’s the wake, the funeral, the shivas, the interments. Don’t plan a one tell it all. You know, I already told you. It’s a continuing dialogue. You have to go over and over and over again.Â

Rabbi Grollman: You validate a child in grief. When someone dies, a child often feels many things at once. It can be confusing, overwhelming. It’s scary. In addition, the feelings are new to them and it makes them even more frightened. And the child asks the questions and needs to validate their feelings. Don’t minimize their feelings. It’s very common not to know what to say in answer to some of the questions and sometimes it’s okay to say I don’t know. I’ve often wondered about that myself. Let’s talk about it. Tell me more about how you’re feeling.

Rabbi Grollman: Don’t argue with people in bereavement. Even people who go to church or synagogue or the mosque regularly say there is no God. How could God do this? Don’t argue and say what do you mean there’s no God? Just say isn’t it nice that you can say this to me? And throughout the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. So I have to tell you when I was called to Oklahoma City after the bombing, I will never forget saying if some of you are angry, are you angry at God? I give you permission. I’m speaking at a Sunday morning service in a church of a thousand people. If you’re angry, God can take it. For the first time ever, people stood up and applauded me. The people whose family had died stood up and applauded.Â

Rabbi Grollman: When I was a little boy many years ago, I was taught angry thoughts make bad people. Angry thoughts make very human people. We’re angry because life isn’t fair.

Rabbi Grollman: Grief is an emotion it’s not a disease. A grief is as natural as eating when you’re hungry, drinking when you’re thirsty, sleeping when you’re tired. Grief is nature’s way of healing a broken heart. When someone you love has died and part of you has been buried with your loved one and that anger and pain and fear wash over you in waves, you may hurt so much that you may even want to die too. And at that moment, you wonder if you will ever survive.

Rabbi Grollman: People grieve in different ways, according to so many different variations. Their ethnic backgrounds. If you live in the Middle East you can cry and scream and that’s okay. But somehow people will say to me, I hope I don’t cry. I don’t want to break down. Especially if they’re men because there’s often a great differential in the way men and women grieve. And I will say to them, cars break down.

Rabbi Grollman: Then you can say isn’t it nice you can. The important thing to do is not only to validate their feelings but to ventilate their feelings. The most important thing I say to people wherever I go. After school shootings. After Ground Zero. If I can say grief is not a sickness. And you’re not crazy. This is what most people think that happens. I’m crazy. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. I’m driving my car. I come to a red light. I forgot whether the red light means stop or go. I go to make out a bank deposit slip. I forgot how. Don’t tell anybody. What I’m trying to say is when someone is dying, part of you has died. When someone has died, life will never again be the same. And the idea, is there closure? There’s no such thing. So all of a sudden two months later or six months later, it’s always there.

Rabbi Grollman: Time is neutral. It’s not time heals. It’s what we do with our time. So in terms of healing, the first thing we do is we validate their feelings. How you feel, Heidi. Whatever you may feel, it’s okay. These are your feelings. Accept these feelings. They’re not good. They’re not bad. These are your normal feelings and everyone is different. It depends upon your relationship to the person, how you handle other kinds of stresses in your life, and what kinds of support are you receiving. After that, I think what you have to do is after we validate, we have to ventilate. We have to let it go.

Rabbi Grollman: People have to find their own answers. I’m their eye doctor. I put their spectacles on so they can see more clearly. I’m most helpful when I can tell them places where they may go to be of help. The solitary heart has to throb with others. The people who could help people were people who had been through it. To say, I felt the same way, or it’s okay to feel this way, and then all of a sudden, one touch of sorrow makes the whole world kin. Sometimes you’re stuck in your grief. You can’t get up in the morning. You don’t want to be with friends. You don’t want to go to work. Life after a period of time has no meaning whatsoever and going for professional help is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength. It means you want to take charge of your life but make sure that the therapist that you’re seeing has had a background in grief therapy.

Rabbi Grollman: Grief is like weeding a flowerbed in the summer. You have to do it over and over again until the seasons change.

Rabbi Grollman: We talked about accepting your grief, expressing your grief. You still have to monitor your health. Eat as well as you can for your own body needs nourishment after the grueling experience of grief. Depression can also be lightened by biochemical changes through exercise and put balance back into your life. And I’m finding especially with older people now, avoid the abuse of alcohol and drugs. Drugs and alcohol can sedate for the moment but they ultimately leave the nervous system in shreds. I think the importance of sharing the pain of your darkness with a friend or friends. Don’t withdraw from others because by your silence, you deny them the opportunity to share your own inner self. And I think sometimes by helping others, by diverting your energies to people and causes, you learn to face your own reality. You become more independent and let go of the past by living in the present.

Rabbi Grollman: It’s the people who have been through it who can say, this is what helped me. Now it may not help you, but you might consider it. So again, all we can do is let people know these are possibilities that you might like to do and if you’re a friend, let them know that it’s not over and that you’ll continue to be with them. This I think is the most important thing of all. To let them know. To continue to call and visit. Remember holidays and birthdays and anniversaries. Do all of the things. Send a personal letter.