After the Storm

A few weeks ago, an intense storm hit my neighborhood. The aftermath and destruction left me with some thoughts about grief.

I live in the Phoenix area and every summer our intense heat and sunshine are broken up by monsoon storms. These storms can bring rain, wind, or dust — and sometimes all three. We had a particularly dry monsoon season this year, but one night in early September we were forecast to get rain, which was good news.

As I let my dogs outside before bed, it was a bit windy and I could hear some rolling thunder but it didn’t seem like a major storm was imminent. Imagine my surprise, not ten minutes later when I heard the sky unleash. The rain was coming down so hard, it almost looked like my patio was being power-washed. The wind was wild, and I had the feeling we should stay away from our windows. Soon our power went out. It was too dark to see much of anything, so we went to bed.

In the morning, the news reported we’d experienced a microburst. Curiosity brought me straight outside. Almost all of our neighbors were outside too. Branches, leaves, and grapefruits were everywhere. We live on an old grapefruit grove and still have many (too many) grapefruit trees in our yard. The metal pergola in my backyard was blown off its footings and bent in strange ways. We were lucky and had very little damage, besides the pergola. Our trees stayed standing, our roof held out, and our outdoor animals endured the storm just fine in the barn.

Many of our neighbors were not as lucky. Our neighborhood is older and has a lot of huge, established trees. It’s one of the things that drew us to this neighborhood. After the storm, it looked like a scene out of hurricane country. Big trees were down everywhere, tiles blown off roofs, someone’s garage crushed by a tree, a rogue trampoline blown out of the neighborhood and onto the side of a busy street. For two days all you could hear outside was the sound of chainsaws cutting fallen trees into smaller pieces to be hauled away.

Now, several weeks later, everything is cleaned up minus a few home repairs that are still underway, and if you didn’t know our neighborhood before the storm, you might not have noticed anything was different. But, I am still not used to how it looks! Every time I drive into the neighborhood, it’s like a fresh shock again at how different people’s yards look without their big trees. I feel like our neighborhood looks empty and wrong without those familiar trees. But on Saturday we had a worker in our home, and he couldn’t stop talking about what a beautiful neighborhood it is. He has no idea what is missing.

And that got me thinking. Isn’t it the same when we experience a loss? It feels so huge. The absence of who we are missing is glaring and obvious. Our days feel emptier. Everything feels wrong, and it’s all we can focus on. But to someone outside of our loss, the impact is not the same. They don’t understand the full magnitude of what or who is missing because they simply can’t get inside our heads or our hearts to see what was there before or what is there now.

It’s easy to assume someone is doing okay when you can’t see what their world looked like before the storm of grief. This is precisely why we can’t ever tell people, “I know how you feel.” Because we don’t — even if we’ve experienced a similar loss.

It’s also why we should keep reaching out to people we care about who are grieving even after much time has passed. Just because they seem okay on the outside doesn’t mean that they don’t still need remembering and support. Most people have wounds they are nursing that we know nothing about because they aren’t immediately noticeable.

In the days following the storm, neighbors were helping neighbors clean up. People texted, called, and stopped by to see what damage we had, and what they could do to help, which was so kind even though we weren’t in need. Volunteer groups came with gloves, wheelbarrows, and saws to help people with a lot of damage cleanup. We have similar needs for support when we are grieving.

Whether it’s a physical storm like the microburst we had in our neighborhood or the emotional storms of grief, we need each other for help, support, and healing. Someone on the outside may never understand what we lost, but compassion and our shared humanity can help us recover.

If you need extra support to recover from a loss, please reach out and schedule a free consultation with me HERE.