I could always care more, but I can’t care any less – that is I couldn’t care less about people traversing emotional peaks and valleys. I do care.

I was talking with James recently when he dropped his voice to confide that a counsellor he’d been seeing, since a friend’s suicide, asked if he had been angry yet. “Angry?” James said, “I haven’t been angry”. Maybe it wasn’t what he meant but I understood James to be asking if there was something wrong.

Anger, the accepted second stage.

Was the counsellor suggesting that without it he might not be healing? The only thing wrong with James was the growing suspicion that there might be something wrong with his grief. There was nothing wrong, or even complicated with James grieving process. As far as I could tell he had good grief, and a healthy capacity for resilience. I think it is more that grief is not understood and (angry or not) we don’t get to share it enough by talking about the experience.

In unrelated circumstances James and I both discovered that: “Many mourners experience grief as a kind of isolation—one that is exacerbated by the fact that one’s peers, neighbors, and co-workers may not really want to know how you are. We’ve adopted a sort of “ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out that it shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual inquiry.” Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved? Meghan O’Rourke: The New Yorker, February 2010

I don’t think it is that friends and colleagues couldn’t care less, they just don’t know what to say, or how to care more.

*Thanks Kate, who turned around the phrase ‘I couldn’t care less’ to explain why one cares so much.