Exploring Societies Male Grief Expectations

By: Jarie Bolander

I have a confession to make.

I cried when my wife Jane died of leukemia on April 3rd, 2017.

Uncontrollable sobs. Running nose. Watering eyes. A full and complete meltdown.

I did this after the fire department came to pronounce her dead, the coroner came to certify that there was no foul play, they zipped her up in a body bag, wheeled her down the two flights of narrow stairs on a ratty old purble gurney, my in-laws and brother-in-law left, and I was alone in our apartment.

Alone with the grief of realizing that I would never talk to her again.

Never kiss her.

Never hear her laugh.

I waited to ball my eyes out because I was taught to suck it up. 

Walk it off.

It’s just a scratch.

Boys (Men) don’t cry.

Thus began my journey into understanding my grief over Jane dying, how to express it, and more importantly, how to talk about it.

How to Express the Emotions You Feel

Crying, like laughing, expresses your inner feelings to the rest of the world. Unlike laughing, which is acceptable for anyone to do, crying has a stigma for men that’s rooted deep into our culture and is making men both sick and distraught.

For men, well most men, the expression of a vulnerable emotion, one that exposes your weaknesses, is more frightening than the dumps of cortisol that slowly eat at your insides. Some even find it so unpalatable that they would rather take their own life than deal with it.

The Complex Emotions of Grief Brought About by Trauma

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, explains how our bodies react to and absorb trauma. This accumulation of trauma leads to all sorts of physical and mental abnormalities that create a cycle that is hard to break out of.

Coupling that with an unwillingness to express a natural emotion, at the time it’s occurring, makes it even more difficult for men to release the tensions that get locked down deep inside.

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives,” says Dr. van der Kolk. 

It’s this challenge of feeling safe to express oneself that men struggle with and society reinforces.

This gets even worse when dealing with a stressful, traumatic situation where you have to make life or death decisions all while trying to suppress your grief so you can give the impression that you have your act together. 

Some Perspective

Let’s step back a bit and take a more pragmatic view of grief and the expectations that society has on men.

One of the best phrases I like to use to encapsulate the general view of grief is

It’s okay for women to cry but not get angry.

It’s okay for men to get angry but not cry.

This view seems to encapsulate the problem since both anger and crying are emotions all humans can (and must) express yet the stereotype that men should not show their grief stems from society's expectations that men remain stoic in the face of challenging times. Men’s job is to protect the tribe from aggression and to be ever vigilant.

This responsibility does not lend itself to being vulnerable and expressing grief.

Some Hope

I do have some hope that attitudes will change, not from general society but from the military, who recognize the fact that 22 service members commit suicide every day.

Most of those suicides are men that have lost their support network and can’t express the grief and sorrow over the loss of meaning and direction in their life. This is similar to the challenges that many men face nowadays in a world that continues to stratify towards accomplishment and less towards being valuable as a human being.

Some Actions

Grief comes in many different forms. The grief I’m most familiar with is over the death of a spouse.

What’s tricky about death is that society does not handle it well. In the US, we’re all about the happy ending, everything is Instagram awesome, and I can handle anything.

This is blatantly wrong.

What I have found is that when most folks deal with a grieving man, they tend to get stuck in an empathy loop that freezes them into platitudes like “sorry for your loss” or my favorite “Anything I can do to help?”

In order to escape the empathy loop, we should try to rapidly move to compassion so you can take action to engage in the uncomfortable, messy, and difficult work of processing grief.

Here are a few things that I have found that help me and those around me process grief.

1. Get past platitudes and take action. Simple things like “I’m going to the store, need anything?” Or “I’m trying a new restaurant, want to come?”

2. Ask a specific question about the dead person like their name, favorite food, what they loved about them, etc.

3. Listen and don’t give advice unless asked. It’s tempting to want to help but listening is the best way to support someone.

4. Acknowledge that what happened was horrible. Don’t try and justify whatever happened.

5. Have a ritual that you can commit to. Like “I’ll call you next week” or “coffee in two weeks”, etc. If you can’t commit, don’t.

Small Things Matter

One last thing that’s important to remember is that the small things matter to a grieving man. There are no magic solutions or a single thing that will solve a man’s grief. Rather, it’s the little, consistent things that build over time. It’s the support that’s both present in the moment or the feeling that you’re not alone that makes a difference. It’s this connection to others and that someone cares about you is what all people, especially men, need while grieving and we as a society struggle to provide them.

Jarie Bolander caught the startup bug right after graduating from San Jose State University in 1995 with a degree in electrical engineering. With 6 startups, 7.75 books, and 10 patents under his belt, his experience runs the gamut from semiconductors to life sciences to nonprofits. He also hosts a podcast called The Entrepreneur Ethos, which is based on his last book by the same name. When he’s not helping clients convert a concept to a viable strategy, he can be found on the Jiu-Jitsu mat (he’s a blue belt), interviewing entrepreneurs on his podcast, or researching the latest in earthship construction techniques. He’s engaged to a wonderful woman named Minerva, her daughter, and their Bernedoodle, Sage. Currently, Jarie lives and works in San Francisco, where he works as head of market strategy for Decision Counsel, a B2B growth consulting firm.

Madison Davis on Following Interesting Threads

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Madison Davis, author of The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead which is the winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I had a few! The Loved Ones first existed as a number of different projects. The real “idea” was to weave these disparate threads together into a non-traditional memoir. 

There is a section in the book that follows my research into the death of my great uncle who was killed in action in WWII. This storyline began with something like a “bolt of lightning” moment. I had always been fascinated by the story surrounding my great uncle, but I was driving one day—mind wandering in stop-and-go traffic—when I first thought has anyone in the family really looked into this? I realized that the story had been loosely filtered down from my grandmother in the form of scattered details and questions, but no one had tried in earnest to track down answers in the age of the internet. What followed was years of research culminating in a trip abroad to visit the place he died. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I tried a few different ways to weave the content together. There are a lot of moving pieces—names, places, dates, and familial relationships over generations—so I needed to find a structure that a reader could follow. Ultimately, I decided to dedicate a section of the book to each of the central figures. Then, after all my main characters had been defined and the details of their lives and deaths had been told, the final section revisits each through the lens of the funerals and physical remains. Once the reader is well-situated in the narrative, I found I could take more leaps in that last section, draw more connections. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

For the most part, my writing evolves on the page over many (many, many) iterations. There is rarely clarity in my mind before it’s on paper (and not for quite a while after that). I find a lot of enjoyment in editing the raw material. I love taking a piece apart and putting it back together in different ways until I see something new in it. Of course, there have been times that I believe something will work but it just falls apart on the page and requires total reimagining.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I’m always writing. Most of the little threads go nowhere. Other pieces combine into a project or grow into a whole piece of their own. At some point in my life, I began to see everything as writing material, for better or worse. I never know which seeds will grow, but I rarely experience a lack of ideas; a lack of time is the more common problem!

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I tend to have various projects percolating. I try very hard to follow my interest. If I’ve lost interest in a piece, it probably won’t become interesting if I force it. If there is something to it, I’ll find myself pulled back to it again down the road. It helps to have 2-3 projects in a rotation. If I’m stuck or struggling with one, I can pivot to another. 

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I write alongside my dog, Stevie. She’s an excellent writing partner. She reminds me to take walks every so often but is otherwise content to just snuggle up and listen to the typing. When I’m struggling to focus, I like to enlist a human writer friend to work near me. It’s great to feel the productive energy in the room for a specified amount of time (set a timer!) and then have a fun, rewarding break with a friend. 

Madison Davis is a writer and editor based in Oakland, California. She is the author of the books Disaster (Timeless Infinite Light; Nightboat 2016) and The Loved Ones (Dzanc 2023).

The Meaning Behind the Title Find a Place for Me

By: Deirdre Fagan

When we are in the early throes of grief, our lost loved one dominates our every thought. We find ourselves angry that other people are going about their days doing ordinary things like getting gas or groceries, going to work, or kissing a partner, because we feel that our own lives have stopped. How can the world be going on when our loved one is no longer in it? How can anyone be thriving when our world feels ended? If we grieve wholly our world has truly stopped. But this feeling does slowly begin to pass. Soon we not only have to but can get up from our place of grieving and emotionally begin to place one foot in front of the other. We can begin moving towards a future where we are still alive while without the one we miss so terribly. When someone we love dies, we hold them in our hearts and minds forever, but we can eventually thrive despite the grief we will now forever carry.

My husband Bob and I experienced two great losses together five years before he was diagnosed at the young age of forty-three with the terminal illness amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Five years before, my father and brother had died two weeks apart, both suddenly, and we had been those people in shock and stunned into a world without them, wandering through it in a fog wondering how we would ever be able to look fully forward again. For Bob and me, it took nearly a year and a pregnancy with our second child before we began to comprehend that we and our son, and now soon daughter, had a future without my dad and brother where we needed to be very much present. We needed to not only embrace this future but learn to thrive in it for our children and for those who had left us behind. After all, our loved ones would not want anything less for us. They would want the best, and the best would mean a life of full-throttle living.

When Bob was diagnosed, we were both devastated, but ever the philosopher—Bob had a doctorate in philosophy and was a university professor—the day after his diagnosis, Bob told me he wanted me to love again. He said he had come to terms with his death in his twenties and he was also well aware how much his love blessing would mean to me and the children. Bob knew we would not thrive if we always remained in that early place of mourning. He knew he didn’t want me to be alone. He also wanted the children to have another person invested in their lives to guide them. Bob could do nothing to stop his illness from taking his life but he could help us continue in ours.

When Bob first told me to love again, I wasn’t at all ready. I could not go there. I was one foot in the grave with him and I didn’t want to get out of it. It was going to be a lot of work and I was going to not only be grieving the love of my life, but managing our children’s grief, and the full lives that we had once managed together. I was going to be a single mom doing all the work of a household, continuing to be a university professor myself, and somehow getting myself out of bed in the morning when I would want to do anything but.

As time went on, I began to realize Bob was right about love. The way to thrive was going to be to open my heart to the future just as we both had after losing my dad and brother, or I had earlier in life when decades before I lost my eldest brother and mother. “You have done it before and you can do it again,” Bob would tell me when I wanted to give up and said I could not go on after losing him. He believed in me. He believed in love and in my ability to love. After all, the measure of our grief is the measure of our love. If we love deeply, we grieve deeply. If we love deeply, we can also love again.

When Bob was sick, he made videos for the kids and me. At the end of mine, Bob says, “You are going to need to find a place for me,” and knowing Bob so completely, I knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, I needed to find a place for him that would not dominate all of my feelings or thoughts. If there was going to be room for me to go on, love again, and thrive in the face of the devastation of losing him, I was going to need a different place for Bob.

When I first started writing Find a Place for Me, I titled the book after Bob’s book of poetry, written during his illness and self-published a month before he died: After Thunder. My manuscript was therefore titled, After Lightning. During the publishing process, however, I realized that that title, while meaningful to me, didn’t say much to readers about the book itself

Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death is very much about Bob teaching me and others how to not only live well but die well. It is about our love for each other and how it transcends. Bob’s parting gift to me was to generously help me find a place for him that was forever and wholly his but also made room. I have found a place for him in this memoir and in my life. I hope upon reading it, readers will find a place for him too

Deirdre Fagan, D.A., is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Dr. Fagan, also a divorcee and the sole survivor of her birth family, is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me. For more information visit deirdrefagan.com