The Wheel
When I was at the San Francisco Airport on my way to camp, I’d wrestled all my crap onto the elevator, trying to get to the train to meet my friend B. Joining me for our one-floor excursion was what looked like a mother and daughter, the mother in her 50s, the daughter my age or maybe a little younger. They were quiet, and once we were all settled and the doors shut, the mother sighed, leaned into her bag, and was suddenly a million miles away and looking tired. My first thought was that she was worn out from traveling, as I already was, and I spoke. “I know just how you’re feeling.”
Her daughter answered then, and said “I hope not” in a tone that had volumes unspoken behind it, and her mother gave me a tight half-smile I recognized because I’ve given the same grimace to many in the last 6 months. It is the half-smile of one who’s thinking, “You have no idea what I’m going through, despite your importunate audacity, but you are a stranger, and I’m not going to share my burden with you in any case, so I’ll just try this silent smile, and maybe you’ll shut the hell up.” And it suddenly occurred to me that a mother and daughter traveling together…they might be bereaved, and that’s why they were coming to San Francisco in the middle of a weekday. All the signs pointed to a reality I knew too well.
I felt bad, then, that I’d intruded, even though there was no way I could’ve known. But once I did know (or rather, guess), I was sad for them. Because, in fact, I did know. I know it intimately. And then I wanted to reach out to them, but it would’ve been inappropriate. So I shut the hell up, the only kindness I could offer them.
I let them off the elevator first, and struggled with all my gear, but despite being laden with 100 pounds of stuff, I caught up to them within a short time. They were moving that slowly. They seemed concerned that they were holding me up, but there was no way I could pass both of them in the configuration of backpack, duffle, guitar case, and purse I was carrying, and I told them “No worries—I’m not moving real fast anyway.” And I said a silent prayer to their backs, wishing them peace and strength until we parted ways.
I have watched the wheel of grief turn, sometimes with me under it. I haven’t been the newest person at my online grief group in some time, and that makes me sad for those who have to join this club, every one of us unwilling. And I’d been that woman, eyes leaden and seemingly empty for being turned inward, the very act of standing up exhausting. And at that moment, I was a different woman, attempting to make amusing small talk in the elevator with people I realized too late weren’t in any mood for such rubbish. And then just five minutes later, as the train moved out into the open and I saw the city of San Francisco again, alone, and for the first time without him at my side, I was the woman who was crying on the train, holding the pole with one hand and wiping her eyes with her scarf with the other. The strange thing about grief is that I can be any and all of those women within the space of a day, an hour, even. You never quite know what you’re going to feel at any given moment, and because of that, you learn to live in the moment and hope that the better ones stretch into a streak of good moments, knowing that it could end at any time.
All the sages have said that that’s the way to do it, living in the now, for that is all we have. I never really understood the concept before. I do now. The cost of this enlightenment has been the blackest darkness I have ever known, which is either ironic or perfect in its cosmic symmetry.
Many times, we say “If I could go back and do it all over again, knowing what I know now…” I think grief is a lot like that, being reborn, but with everything you knew. You are thrust into this new world that is not comfortable like where you came from. It’s all vaguely familiar but foreign enough that you are lost for a time. You cannot walk; you are totally dependent, and it is instinct alone that keeps you alive. The shock of a noisy, demanding world around you overwhelms you, and it takes a long while to acclimate to it. You need a lot of naps. And then one day you smile, and everyone seems quite excited about it. You learn how to live in the world once more, but it’s not easy. As you learn to walk again, you stumble, you fall, and sometimes you just want to stay down there and cry until someone carries you. Everybody else seems to know how to do this thing called life, and you can’t quite recall if you ever knew, how to eat, how to care, how to worry about crabgrass. And even being born with everything you knew, a lot of it is now suspect, either in its truthfulness or its importance.
Everyone said there would be gifts to be had out of this process, and I can see that there are, but I still don’t think of it as a fair trade. I think of it as my salvaging whatever I can out of a terrible situation. And when the course is this difficult, you owe it to yourself not to waste any lessons that can be gleaned from it, so that there isn’t a cascade of secondary tragedy. It is not optimism; it is the desperation of trying to save something, anything important when the house is afire.