Caroline Hughes

About

The person who usually finds me is the one who organized the funeral, managed the relatives, and has not cried since. They describe themselves as coping well and they say it slightly too quickly, and something in the delivery is what brought them here. That pattern is very common. Grief that has been deferred by competence does not disappear; it waits, and it tends to surface at an inconvenient moment months later, usually triggered by something trivial. We do not force it forward. We simply make a place where it no longer has to be deferred. Community mental health is where I trained, and the capable ones were always the last to be asked how they were doing. Nobody thinks to check. If you organized everything and have not cried, get in touch. Competence postpones this; it does not cancel it. Deferred is not the same thing as finished.