In mourning
Grief is a tidal wave that overtakes you,
smashes down upon you with unimaginable force,
sweeps you up into its darkness,
where you tumble and crash against unidentifiable surfaces,
only to be thrown out on an unknown beach, bruised, reshaped…
Grief will make a new person out of you,
if it doesn’t kill you in the making. –Stephanie Ericsson
I have been doing some reading on the web about grieving. Apparently, everything I’m going through and feeling is “normal,” the irony of which is enough to choke on, and its taste is bitter. I guess there is some solace in that, though, because I’ve been feeling some pretty weird shit, calmness and calamity alternating at their seeming whim. This morning at Jamba Juice there was a different couple sitting outside at a table playing cards. They were probably in their mid-to-late 50s. He had a gray goatee and was wearing a baseball cap, and I looked away very quickly, the tears already springing to my eyes. But I looked at him again when I walked out, and watched him light up a cigarette. I wanted to scream “NO! Don’t you realize what you’re doing??? Do you want to hurt that lady across from you like that?” and I started crying in the car. Life has become so precious to me, life by the second, and the idea that anyone would fritter it away on something known to kill, when people die for seemingly no reason…that just wrecks me. I know, intellectually, that this is the stuff of life, and you cannot live with the constant spectre of your own death in the forefront of your mind. I didn’t, before. But right now, it seems to be front and center. I worry about everyone. I worry about me. Everything’s so uncertain and unpredictable and dangerous now to me.
The most compassionate article I came across so far dealt with myths about grieving, most of which involved timetables and expectations of others as to what it should look like. It also talked about the difference between grieving and mourning. Grieving is the internal emotional work; mourning is making that public, visible on the outside. In days gone by, there were rituals for this, including wearing mourning black for a year, so that people knew to handle you with care until you felt ready to relinquish that mantle, until you’d healed enough to rejoin the world in some kind of forward-looking way. Nowadays, you’re just supposed to stuff it down and stoically go back to the “important” work of shuffling papers at your desk and washing dishes and worrying about weeds in the back yard, which is totally ridiculous, but there it is. I got an e-mail at work this afternoon, exhorting me to be excited that July was going to be an over $1 million month for our company, and all I could do was think “so?” and delete it. I talked to my mother and father Sunday, and my mother offered up my cousin’s wedding as something to look forward to. I am not yet ready to look forward too much; I’m still looking backward, awash in memories, in feelings of loss, missing him as I spend time rereading and pouring over his pictures until I can’t anymore. I am sad. And I have a right to be.
Instinctively, I seem to have found those old rituals for myself, despite their formal absence in modern American society. I am not dressed in black every day, but my grieving does inform my dress. I have been choosing comfortable shoes and soft shirts to cuddle me, and shorts with pockets to hold my hanky, salt-streaked with tears, to which I’ve attached the grasshopper pin A gave me last Christmas. I wear no makeup. I wear no jewelry. I wear no perfume. I’m not shaving my legs. I stick a barrette in my hair and call it good. I am clean, and clothed, and ambulatory. That is the best I can offer right now, and I make no excuses or apologies. I have printed out pictures of him, and when I finally get them into the frames I bought, (wood, of course, because he was a cabinetmaker, and most of them in natural finish, because that was his favorite, both aesthetically and because staining’s a lot of damn work), I will put together what will amount to a shrine, or in the Mexican tradition, an ofrenda, a memorial that I hope will, in time, just bring a smile to my face to see his and remember the life and love we shared. I started writing to him in my journal last night, pages and pages until I was spent, to tell him all the things mundane and personal I meant to tell him the next time we talked. I don’t hold back when I e-mail friends about him, and they ask about how I’m feeling, and I talk about everything with E, who is my hero in all this. It takes a giant of a man, with the strongest and biggest of hearts, to hold his wife as she mourns her lover. Every site I read said that’s a good thing to do, to talk about the loss and hurt, and the person lost, and truly, it’s the only thing that takes the sharpest edge off the pain. I let the tears flow when they come, and am not particularly interested in putting on a brave face for anyone. I’m working slowly at work, doing what I need to, as I need to, to cope with my feelings, and I’ll just have to be excused from being brilliant and efficient for awhile. This is a big damn deal, and I have to take my time. I have no choice. As with anything else, it’s pay now or pay later, with interest, and grief will not be denied. You can postpone it indefinitely, but there is nothing more patient than death, and it will wait for you, and trip you repeatedly until you stop and pick it up.
I’d had it in mind that I would not put too much of that mourning here, because I know it’s hard for people to stand in the face of such ongoing, relentless expression of naked emotion. I know no one knows what to say. I wouldn’t, either. I know dealing with a friend’s loss brings up uncomfortable thoughts for everyone, as the reality of mortality hits a bit too close to home. But then I thought “fuck that.” When I think, when I need to work something out, when I’m troubled, I write. (I was A’s favorite writer, edging out no less than long-time favorite Joseph Conrad.) It’s how I operate. And I need people to listen. No one has to feel compelled to comment or try to cheer me up. I just need patience, understanding, and time. This is something that I cannot go around; going through is the only option. My life has changed, and there’s no undoing that, as much as I’d like to. I have to learn how to make my way in this new life of mine, and it affects E, too. His strong wife has become fragile. So many routines we counted on have just vanished, and it will take an adjustment on both our parts. I have to tend my wounds. I’ll know you’ve been by, and are “listening,” even if you don’t say a word, and believe it or not, it’s enough. That’s what I need—sympathetic ears to listen to me as I walk this dark path for awhile. And if it’s too hard for you to read, I understand that, too, and maybe you’ll check back in awhile. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. But I need to do what I need to do, and it seems the only way to ease the pain inside is to get it outside. I know I have more calmness when I do.
I’m in mourning. Please, handle me with care.