Grief alumni tea

The North Shore hospice has a tea, on a weekly basis, for those who have been through a grief group, or individual grief counseling.  I think this is a great idea.  Bereaved people need social contact.  They REALLY need social contact. 

It would be good for those who have been through grief counseling to meet together.  Even if they haven't been in a grief group, meeting other bereaved persons will help.  It will help to know that there are others who feel the same way.

I've seen this over and over again in grief groups.  Someone who has been having a rough time, will finally open up and admit it.  When they do, others will chime in about feeling the same way. The person who opened up will heave a vast sigh of relief to know that other people feel the same way, and that they are not crazy.

It's good to talk to other bereaved.  The grief counselors definitely mean well, and some of them are terrific professionals.  But many of them have their own opinions about what grief should be, or should look like, or how it should feel.  Having conversations with people who really are bereaved, and who do understand what it feels like, can sometimes be an awful lot better than having a grief counselor telling you, essentially, "no, you are not doing it right."

Those who are in the grief industry are generally kind, gentle, and sensitive.  Unfortunately, grief very definitely is not.  The bereaved are having trouble sleeping.  Their judgment is not at its best.  The bereaved are angry.  They are REALLY angry.  The bereaved are desperately lonely and definitely do not want to tell a grief counselor that he, she, or it has no idea what he, she, or it is talking about.  That's not the way to win friends and influence people, and the bereaved, being very lonely, definitely want to win friends and influence people.  So, in a sense they are not being honest.  Not honest about their anger, not honest about their pain, not honest about whether or not some newage psychobabble is helpful or not.

Of course there are dangers.  There is the danger of the anger.  There is the danger of the loneliness, and the danger of forming inappropriate attachments.  That is why it would be a very good idea for this kind of a group to be limited to those who have already had some grief counseling.  They would be alumni.  Alumni of all institutions have teas.  This could be the grief alumni tea.

Which got me thinking about tea.  I used to drink a lot of it.  I can't really drink it right now, except for orange pekoe, and then with a spoonful of sugar in it.  Otherwise it hurts my stomach. 

Which makes ordering it in stores difficult.  Ask for tea and they ask you what kind.  When you ask what they have, they start rhyming off all kinds of herbal teas, and Earl Grey, and if you're lucky somewhere in there the word pekoe or breakfast floats by.  (If it's a breakfast tea, it may be English Breakfast, or Irish Breakfast.  English Breakfast is lighter and weaker, and Irish Breakfast is stronger and darker.  Irish Breakfast is for those who want a dash of caffeine and some milk and sugar for nutrition before going off to work, and English Breakfast is for the refined palette that doesn't want any reality intruding on the morning.)  That is the indication that you can actually get tea at that place.

I used to be pretty good at determining what type of tea people served.  At a house where I lived while going to university, we had a bit of a game after dinner.  We had about 20 different kinds of tea and the person who made dinner would choose one, tear off the label, and put the pot on the table.  Then we'd all have a go at determining what it was. 

When that got too easy, the person who was making dinner would pick two different *kinds* of tea.  Even at that game we got pretty good.  (Except for one American student.  He was never really any good at it.  One time there was a mix of Lapsang Soochong and Darjeeling.  He thought it was a breakfast tea.)