Hiroshi Nguyen

About

The person who usually finds me is doing everything correctly and feeling nothing at all. They went back to work on schedule, they answer kindly when asked, and they have begun to suspect that something is wrong with them because the feeling everyone warned them about has not arrived. Numbness is a stage rather than an absence. Bereavement quite often begins with a long flat period that people mistake for coldness, and the mistake causes a lot of unnecessary guilt on top of everything else they are carrying. We wait it out together rather than trying to force anything. The feeling arrives when the system decides it is safe, and it cannot be summoned early by effort or by willingness. Community mental health shaped my early practice, and I met a great many people convinced they had failed to grieve properly. Almost none of them had. If you have felt nothing so far, that is not a verdict on how much you loved someone.