So, yeah, it’s been a while since I touched back on my grief, my sadness, the piece of me I carry with me every day while, at times, pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, if I stayed in touch with it every moment of the day, I’d simply be debilitated. But it doesn’t change the guilt, when I finally realize that I’d spent a day or two without thinking about him, without even a hint or a shadow of the door opening, quick as I can be to shut it when needed. That’s the rub, you see. Little chunks of time feel…..normal. Feel like they did Before. I hear the hospice nurse every time I think of the word “Before”. I hear her saying, “This will always be a point in time in your life. You will have Before he died, and then you will have After.” At the time it made sense in a foreign, removed way, like part of me was hearing her and writing it down, while the other part of me just stared at the place mat, willing myself to maintain adult control, to behave as he would have wanted me to. And I hear those words, so kind and wise, but they take me back to that very moment and the pain is so palpable. It is a an undulating pool that rises quickly, spilling out my eyes, visibly moving through my body, I hate it and I welcome it and it has become so private, so ….. mine alone.
Because I can’t walk around every day feeling it in full. It’s toxic in its purity. The thoughts in my mind, the things I see and remember, each one breaks my heart like it was yesterday, so I think them, in private, in the dark, or when I’m alone, or sometimes they roll in at inopportune times and I muster all my resources to regain control. And I think, “Is this it? Is this what it will always be like, carrying a dead body around like it’s normal and in the normalcy I begin to not see, not even feel the weight?” Or is it self-preservation, the times of blurred forgetfulness, because the alternative is not a life of living? I watched a former friend spend two full years after her father’s death, flinging herself into her own personal pool of grief on a daily basis. Unable to leave her house at times, paralyzed in her pain. I swore I’d never be her, I’d never let it consume me, and yet I have found, perhaps, a little less judgment now. Granted, it was still not the best path, remaining trapped and caught in her grief, but I can see, too, that there is nothing natural about finding the balance, swinging between forgetfulness and focusing your eyes past the pain, and then in a blink of the eye you are back to feeling it, like it was yesterday, like it was happening anew.
I feel like a drunken monkey, swinging wildly through the jungle, slamming into trees, losing my grip on the vine, falling to the forest floor, alternating between scrambling and slightly stunned, and knowing that I just have to keep going, going, going, because stasis is nothing, it is staying stuck, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t help, but even in the bruising and the pain and the momentum, I know I need a map, a compass, some sort of orientation to the sun. A little more direction and a little less hitting-the-trees-face-first.
