Talking to Girls
Sometime last December, I attended a bereavement seminar held by Hospice. The topic was how to handle grief and the holiday season at the same time. I didn’t count the people in the audience but I would estimate the attendance to have been around 50 or 60 people. Of those people, only four of us were men. I thought that was odd and when the seminar was over, I asked one of the facilitators about the ratio of men to women.“Is it because men die first and don’t have a chance to attend things like this or is it that most men just don’t care to attend?” He said women are much more likely to reach out for help than men and that is why they are in the majority for things related to grief. Men just don’t handle their emotions and their grief very well.
I can attest to that. Besides the imbalance at that event, I have noticed a common thread with men in general. We are not good with things like death and dying. My father-in-law has not been the same since he lost his daughter. I can’t blame him for that. Nobody should lose a child. It is against everything that’s right and just. But what I do blame him for is not seeking out help so he can better cope with his grief. I don’t see him as much as I should but when I have, I try to talk to him about Coleen’s death. He seems very reluctant to talk about it to me and I wish he would because I know from experience how much it would help him to express his feelings and thoughts about his daughter. Not just about losing her, but about loving her.
Boys are no good at that. Nor are they any good at listening. Sometimes that’s what I need most. Someone to listen. A sounding board. They don’t have to understand everything I say or feel, just be willing to listen and hear me once in a while. Men like that are hard to find. I have friends and brothers and it’s hard to engage them in conversation related to my wife’s death. When I talk to them, which is fairly infrequent anyway, they seem uncomfortable hearing about my feelings and journey. It’s not like I need to talk incessantly about my loss, but once in a while I might slip in a reference or two to Coleen. That usually doesn’t lead to many follow up questions or comments. Contact with those guys is usually generated by me anyway. Like I said, boys do not excel in helping each other with grief.
Which is why I much prefer talking to girls. They get it. Girls have the emotion DNA that most boys are lacking. They are intuitive, sensitive and know how to cry. I have recently been accused of having an overabundance of female friends. It’s true. Most of the people I have become friendly with over the past six months are girls and there is a reason for that. I like them better than boys right now. The women in my life all listen to me when I talk. They ask how I’m doing and listen to my answer. They are interested in my interests and appreciate my talents. And they let me help them with some of their burdens. I can also listen to people and provide guidance and am much more likely to do that with women than men because men never open up enough to ask for help.
I am very comfortable having a lot of female friends. I get along well with most women and on the whole, I enjoy their company more than men. I have made new friends from new affiliations, from yoga, and from my support group. They are all women. I have also become quite friendly with a very special woman who was a friend of Coleen’s and I continue to meet new people from the places I keep putting myself in. What began as practitioner/client relationships with my massage and reiki therapists have both evolved into valued friendships. I can lean on many of these people for support and that doesn’t even include my daughters who almost have to listen to me. All the women in my life are important to me. When I have the need to be heard, I’d much rather be talking to girls.
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