Dr. Betty Murray argues women don't avoid grief itself, but the time to feel it. Endless demands like patient care, childcare, aging parents, and household tasks crowd out any space to grieve, so it gets postponed indefinitely.
Women don't skip grief because we don't feel it. We skip it because we don't have a slot for it. There's no calendar block that says fall apart today for 2 hours, but make sure you get your shit back together before the Zoom call. There's a patient waiting. There's a mother who's waiting. There's a mom who needs her meds to be sorted. There's a kid that needs to be picked up from school. There's a boomerang child that can't get it together that is now moving into your basement for the 3rd time. There's a dissertation chapter due, right? So we do what we've always done. We table it and we tell ourselves, We'll deal with it later.
