“The deeper the sorrow that carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
–Kahlil Gibran
My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief and its idiosyncrasies.
The sorrow I felt—and we all feel when we lose someone we love—had a language and texture all its own, one I’d never been versed in. Take a culture that is death averse, mix in a family upbringing intolerant of tears or sadness, and throw in a pinch of narcissistic control freak and there I was—bereft and fumbling with my response to loss. When would I be over this? Get back to my normal? Segue into my old life once again? I had things to do and people to be.
So I did what my journalism training taught me to do: drink more and do research. I learned about the stages of grieving, the physical symptoms, the scientific blah blah blah of it. Armed with all that information, I felt soothed. And after a respectable number of months, I thought I’d tidied up my grief. The knee-buckling weeping, the dream-state numbness, the radioactive sorrow were in the past tense, and Dad was tucked neatly into my memory. I’d made peace. Found closure. Was moving on.
Then I ran into a friend in a bookstore. She looked haggard; her eyes leaked sadness. She had that dust cloud around her like the “Peanuts” character Pigpen, only her dust cloud was made of sticky, billowing grief. She told me her father had died a few weeks earlier, and this was the first time she had left the house.
“You lost your father too, didn’t you?” she asked in a trembly voice. She looked at me, and the world went small. We didn’t say much after that. We leaned against a table full of books, crying and holding hands. Familiar and dreaded feelings resurfaced, and I was again swimming through oatmeal, back in the gluey clutches of grief.
I felt as if I were backsliding or caught in a perverse version of Mother May I, getting sent back to the starting line for an unforeseen infraction. Amplifying my grief was my shame (I should be getting over this faster!), my confusion (Am I a freak?) and my fear (I will never feel good again.). My grief was formidable, and the more I sought to fold and bend it into shapes that suited me, the more it gormed all over me like some giant dough ball run amok.
I was a novice then with my grief and myself; loss is now more familiar, and so is the grief that accompanies each loss. I know now that grief has riptides. Grief is bossy. Grief drops by unannounced.
Instead of resisting grief in some sort of futile wrestling match, I’ve chosen to see it as a time to yield to tenderness. I soften in the face of it, am made vulnerable and fragile by it. I look for the unexpected places that it tucks tiny gifts: the reminder to be grateful, the opportunity to savor the vista of my life, the urging to be among the living as deeply as I can. Grief feels these days like a long foreign film with no subtitles: I am not always sure what is going on, but if I roll with it, the end comes, and my confusion eventually dissipates.
The call came last week. A longtime friend had died. We were once lovers, neighbors, buddies. He was my age, and he died doing what he loved. As I heard the news, my stomach swooped, the world went out of focus and my eyes glazed. I blurred into the gauzy dislocation that feels like some kind of jet lag. I called my voicemail to hear him and try to hold him close just a bit longer.
I’ll go to my friend’s funeral and mourn with the others. I imagine I’ll have trouble sleeping and will find myself crying when I speak of him. I’ll consider my own death, the wide span of my fortune and see the faces of people I love. I will let grief do what it does and teach me what it will.
