It was the afternoon, almost, when I paced in the backyard on the phone with a friend. We were debriefing the class we’d taught in the city, and the sky was gray and gloomy.
I was tired and ungrounded when my then-husband left for work and I barely noticed that I had gotten a message from my parents’ number.
The message was short and tense. It was my dad asking me to call him back.
Since that was unusual for him to call, I immediately called him back.
I wish I hadn’t. But that news was coming no matter what I did or didn’t do.
My mom was killed. It was on the news. I stayed calm enough to make sure my father wasn’t alone, but he already was. A part of him died that day too.
Long Enough to Know
This happened seven years ago. SEVEN. I don’t live in that house anymore. I don’t pace in that backyard. I don’t talk to the people I first called.
I don’t have to remind myself that she’s dead anymore.
Healing is weird though. The rubric is awkward and the categories vague. The first day you don’t think of them, you think the grief is over. You think you’ve moved on and you can re-enter the world without them in it.
The first time you don’t feel absolutely gutted is the first day you realize you want to feel gutted. What if their memories lived in the gutted places? What if losing that pain means you lose the love too?
Now, I don’t think these things. I never did. Maybe it’s the poet or the emo in me, but I think grief is glorious and wondrous. I trace its outline between joys. I check up on its social media page to see when they have updated their profile.
I know where grief lives. I have a key. I stop in sometimes when I want to remember that particular texture of longing. The one that remembers the absence, but also remembers why it hurts so much.
Grief is exquisite, but anger is righteous.
What is Hidden
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”―C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
These many years later, I have lost more people to death or to life’s complexities. Maybe it’s time and perspective, but I do not get knocked down anymore by the violence of grief. I remember it will take me time to get to a sense of safety again, but I will get there again.
I notice that I have been angry these days, more so than in the past. The world offers so many reasons for rage, but this sensation is different. It follows me to the bathroom, to the office, to the store, to the ocean. It doesn’t yell, but it doesn’t leave.
I recognize her as the tense muscle along my shoulder, the one that wants to fight. I see her in the way I crowd my days with responsibilities. I notice her out of the corner of my eye as the dialogue of expectations I never say out loud, the ones that grow into fields of resentment.
I see her, but I don’t see her.
I decide to look her in the eyes, which was easy because she was my height. I found that strange because she always seemed so much bigger than me.
I could see how she wants to protect herself with a loud voice and impossible instructions.
I could see how she wants to get large enough to be hard to miss, impossible to forget.
I could see how she will do whatever it takes to be safe, even if it requires making up stories that fit the way she thinks she should be treated.
I could see her.
When she saw me see her, she relaxed her neck, and the coat dropped off her left shoulder. And that’s when I saw the shaking. The skin covered in bumps, the arm moving back and forth in an inconsistent rhythm.
That’s fear. That’s sadness. Oh, that’s grief.
I see you now.
It’s been a while.
***
The thing with being a human is that it hurts. It hurts up and down and sideways and diagonally and in all the parts of your body inside and out. It hurts to exist in so much uncertainty. It is painful to live in a world where accidents can make you mother-less on a weekday.
And anger wants to put on the brave, but defensive and ‘all-knowing’ face. The one that strolls up to life with its chest thrust forward, trying to intimidate these moments until they make sense. Anger boils red because it feels grief trying to find its most ticklish spots. The anger keeps moving away, trying to stay in control, until it just can’t scream one more time.
And it puts its head in its lap and unbuttons its coat.
And grief spills out with fear and sadness and all of the waters of emotions and maelstroms.
Seven years is a long time, but also a short while.
Grief returns to my shore in new clothes, the kind that can look put together from a distance—but aren’t.
I keep my eyes open for the rumbling that happens beneath the smart dress and the trendy fit.
I decide that death decomposes the body, but also the ability to recognize it in the dark corner of the places you try not to go.
I decide that in the transition from then until now are places and faces my mom will never see. And that does make me angry, but more so it makes me sad.
There is nothing I can do but look these moments in the face.
Eyes wide open. Willing.
The way she taught me.
hank you so much for sharing this.