What does strength look like?
I’ve been thinking a lot about strength. It’s a word that any grieving person who has not thrown herself off a bridge or checked himself into a mental ward will probably hear sooner or later. “You’re handling this so well. You’re so strong. I don’t think I could do it.” You know what? I don’t think I can do it, either; never have. And yet, somehow, I am; the “how” of it is a mystery to me.
I don’t feel particularly strong, though people tell me I am. I think back to where I was emotionally even just a few months ago, and while maybe no one else understood the extent of the mess I was, I did, and I scared myself a little. I was so very broken. So maybe it was a blessing that no one else knew. They might not have been able to handle that truth. But strong? I don’t think so. I still don’t. Maybe it is just that discretion is the better part of valor. I managed to put up a semblance of outward order awhile back, but inside I had fallen apart, and stayed apart, for a long time, unsure if I would ever feel alive and capable again, let alone happy. It is only recently that I’m starting to reintegrate on the inside. I don’t really think I did things any better, any stronger, any braver, than anyone else who has survived the loss of their beloved. All I did was keep breathing, choosing to feel better when I felt had a choice in the matter, and feeling horrible when feeling horrible was all I could manage.
I don’t know what people expect. What would weakness look like to them? And would they ever witness it? Because even in the midst of the worst of your grief, I think you know if you actually acted out what you really felt and began howling non-stop as you curled up in a ball, alternating that with catatonia, they would be scared shitless. If they knew that you contemplated every bridge you passed over for its fatal potential, they would be frantic, and the mental ward would become a reality. If they knew that you wouldn’t mind if your heart, that hurt so terribly, physically and spiritually, just stopped beating, they would never understand.
And neither would I have, until it happened to me.
I wonder if we are all equally strong, but not all of us are given this particularly difficult opportunity to find out how strong that is. (Not that they escape testing; there’s certainly no shortage of tragedy in this world.) How do we measure strength, particularly emotional strength and mental toughness? Because by all my personal measures prior to losing A, I thought I was like the Hulk when it came to my psychic fortitude. But after A died, I had none of that. It disappeared so completely that I began to wonder if it’d ever really been there. Like many grieving persons, I thought at times that maybe I really WAS going crazy, and in a way, I was. I wondered what the distance was between where I was, and a complete and total nervous breakdown that would have me counting holes in ceiling tiles in a dim, dusty hospital room for the rest of my life while I ignoring my lime Jello.
I don’t think you ever get cozy with Death, particularly when it has stolen from you. I think once you’ve decided you’re not jumping into the grave or the cremation furnace with your loved one (however tempted), you just slowly get back to the business of living, learning quickly to self-censor because people just can’t deal. So you don’t talk about it, and they’re grateful, and tell you how strong you are. The weird thing is, as I get better at living with this new reality, no one else is getting any better at dealing with me regarding it. I speak very matter-of-factly about death now, about my feelings of loss, about the inevitability of death coming into our lives, and our lack of control even in the matters most important to us. The horror is no longer shocking to me; I’ve lived through it, and I talk about it as an experienced traveler. I can say “When A died…” without becoming emotional. But when I do mention him or his death in passing, I get a look, or sometimes a word, both of them saying the same thing: “Awww.” And I’m not even looking for sympathy. It’s crazy—when I wanted the sympathy, no one had it; when I’m not looking for it at all, they come up with it. And it leads me to believe they’re not really listening, or that they’re totally unequipped to do so. Maybe it’s because they only have to deal with the concept when they’re talking to me, and therefore, their process is necessarily slowed. Of course, I am me, and I do not have the luxury of not processing it; this is my life, here. I deal with it all day, every day. But I largely keep it to myself now, more for my comfort than theirs.
Maybe I’m at the point where I truly accept this reality (even if I’ll never understand how it came to be), and therefore can speak of it so. I don’t like the reality, and it is not required that I like it, but I live with it, because the alternative is to let it kill me. I live with the acceptance of many terrible realities in my world: child abuse, murder, war, famine, domestic violence. I hate those realities, and they hurt my heart, but they are there nonetheless, and somehow I have to keep living my life and find what joy I can in spite of them. Losing A is a different heartache, personal, vastly intimate, not something I read about in the papers, but I think I’m coping the same way, for the time being. It is not anything I would’ve ever wished. It remains the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I wish it hadn’t. But all that wishing doesn’t change things—he’s still not here with me. I hate it, but there is nothing I can do about it. I suppose that to one who has never traveled this road, resignation and strength can look a lot alike. However, I can testify that this journey has been humbling, and has made me feel weaker than I have ever felt in my life.
I have grown stronger; I wouldn’t ascribe that to any particular virtue of my own, but rather the strength has grown as it would if I had been debilitated by a long illness and then turned a corner. I had to get stronger, because I couldn’t possibly get weaker without dying myself. I feel strong enough to withstand the vagaries of life now, because, honestly, what could the world possibly do to me that would be worse than this? Every formerly difficult thing seems such small potatoes compared to a loved one dying.
I guess, after writing all this, I come to my point, which is this: I don’t know what people mean when they talk about “strength.”
Do you?