I am the sponge, koo-koo-cachoo
Lately, I have had an image recurring in my head, an image of the way my adjustment to my loss of A has progressed, and it is that of being a grief sponge. Not a brand-new sponge, fresh from the plastic wrapper, pliable, and supple, but one that’s been used before, and then thrown under the sink until it’s completely desiccated and hard. Throw a sponge like that into the bucket of its life, sloshing and spilling over with grief, and it cannot immediately soak up anything. It floats on top, twisting and turning with each passing wavelet. There is no control, no reason, no understanding; it can’t even do what sponges are supposed to do. It is at the mercy of the grief, just trying to stay afloat.
Given time, the sponge starts getting damp around the edges, and in time it has soaked up the contents of that bucket o’ grief, absorbing it instead of drowning in it, swelling to encompass it instead of being emptied by it. The grief hasn’t gone away; it’s just become a part of me, which is both bad and good. It’s bad because, well, I’m full of grief. I’ve lost someone I loved, and that’s always going to be true. But bit by bit, I have absorbed that truth and it doesn’t completely flatten me every minute of the day anymore.
Sometimes, though, it’s too much, and I have to wring myself out, twisting and twisting until every last tear and all the grief are back in the bucket again and I am empty for the moment. But I’m still in the bucket because the bucket is my life, and I absorb the grief again as I am able. I carry the grief with me, but somehow it’s now integrated. That sounds like it should be bad news, but it doesn’t feel like bad news. It feels like progress.
You can slowly learn to get used to carrying an extra 20 pounds around your middle gained over the long holiday season, but if someone handed you two bowling balls right now and said, “Now go about your day,” you’d have a hard time doing it without struggling. I know I’m mixing my metaphors, but I was done with the sponge thing. (I’m a professional; please don’t try to mix metaphors at home.) I’m getting used to the extra weight, and my life has had to buy bigger pants to accommodate it, but I notice it’s a little easier to move about despite it. I guess that’s what they call “acceptance.” But it’s not just accepting the death; that’s just one piece of it, (albeit the biggest part). It’s accepting the sadness that will inevitably resurface. It’s accepting the tears that will come unbidden and unexpectedly. It’s accepting that the future will not look like you thought it would, like you wanted it to. It’s accepting the weirdness of your friends in the face of your grief. It’s accepting yourself as one grieving, and accepting that it’s okay to feel this way, and accepting that you’re going to, on and off, for the rest of your life. You don’t have to like any of it, but you have to accept it all.
I thought that I had surrendered to my grief, and in many ways I have. I cry when I need to; I feel no compulsion to be stoic at the cost of my own frazzled nerves and fractured heart. I stay home when I can’t face the world. I say a mental “fuck you” to people who can’t find it in themselves to be sympathetic, and don’t let it change what I need to do; I merely exclude them from further participation in my life. I take it easy. But I think deep down, I thought I could, and would, eventually outrun grief. It was only when I accepted that that wasn’t going to happen, that this loss and the aftermath was going to be a part of me forever after, was going to inform how I approached the world from here on out, and how I related to others, that this whole horrible thing was part of my story now, that I felt I turned a small corner, absorbing the reality instead of raging against it. I’m wary of assuming much is a trend when it comes to my emotional state lately, because it is much like weather in the Midwest—wait five minutes; it’ll change. However, I have felt a shift in the last few days, one ever so subtle: I have grief; grief doesn’t have me.