Do you have any words (yours or by others) on grief/grieving a loved one?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I got it. I know this will sound strange coming from me, someone who writes not-infrequently about grief in the context of fictional characters, but you have to understand this: A frame makes a thing look like art. It’s easier to do things when they’re made to sit on a wall. So I’ve written and erased a dozen things, because I’m not sure how to talk about it when it’s me saying it. Which I guess is sad in its own right. That’s fine. This will have to be what it is.
Some people have never been touched by death.
I know it’s true, but it surprises me every time. I think all people of a certain age think they’ve lost someone, but there’s losing, and there’s being touched. If you’re coming to me with this question, you must know what I mean. You know someone who died, and that’s a little sad, you miss them, and you think of them from time to time. Grandparents, great-grandparents, classmates. Celebrities, if you’re weird enough.
But then there’s being touched. I’m not sure I could have described the difference, before it happened to me. Someone dies, and, the world changes in an immeasurable way. Nothing will ever feel the same again. Now that’s all a very well traveled and quasi-hackneyed set of ideas, but it is true. The world is shifted. Doorknobs turn the other way, and always will. You could have sworn that clock had a robin at six, and not a blue jay, but the jay is singing now. The coffee didn’t taste burnt yesterday, or maybe it did but it was right for it to be burnt.
The world is too still, and too loud.
Grief is a shared way in which we are alien to each other. No two people mourn alike, and no deaths are mourned the same. I have been furious in the first flush of grief. I have burned things and made sacred oaths to my eternal anger. My grandmother sold everything he owned the week of my grandfather’s funeral. My friend once sobbed picking up a box of cookies from the supermarket. If at no point in your grief could you be called insane by a reasonable person, you cannot possibly understand what I’m talking about.
You ever eaten a piece of gristle? I think grief is that piece of gristle. You chew and you chew, and you chew, but it just won’t go. You think, ‘if only I could get this down, everything would be okay’ but you can’t. It just sticks in your mouth, and it makes you gag, turning its oiliness over in your mouth.
I nearly died once, by accident, mind you, in the grips of grief. It happens. You gag.
So I think about that a lot, because its true what they say that flowers grow best where there was rot, and that’s true, but the trick of it is, that before the flowers can grow, that rot has to be broken down. It has to be chewed. And that takes time.
There was a bar we went to. It was a fucking dive with shitty food and badly-poured beer, but PBR was a dollar on Mondays and you got a free basket of bacon. That’s where she told me she was dying, and I told her if she planned on doing this, she might have paid more than 3 bucks for my tab.
They tore it down, shit, seven years ago now? And I remember thinking, ‘No, they can’t do that. They can’t get rid of that bar. It has to stand.” and I couldn’t have articulated to you why it had to stand, why this place I never thought much of and in which nothing good had ever happened to me had to stand, but I it tugged at me so hard. Because I could still hear her voice echoing there, and I could still hear what she told me. And if that bar didn’t exist anymore, than maybe it was never really real.
Because that’s the insane part, right? You have individually and personally experienced 9/11, but everyone around you doesn’t realize the massive change the world has gone through. You are screaming at the smoldering pit, the scent of jet fuel in the air, and someone gives you that pitying look and goes, ‘How you holding up?” because the world is not different for them. You are fully prepared to have your knitting needles confiscated for the next twenty years if it would just make you feel safe again, make things feel right again, but this asshole standing in front of you has no idea.
Grief changes us, but it’s wrong to think of that change as a ruining.
The grand canyon is nothing but but a ditch dug by time, and wear, but people travel from all over the world to see it. A silver bowl tarnishes, but in the tarnish there are patterns and plays of light the new silver never dreamed of. Then again, that shitty dive bar is now a gastropub that serves burgers with aioli and has a gluten free menu, so some change is ruin, but that is not settled law. You can be changed and just be different. Different is not always worse.
I think every person I’ve lost, and there have been more than I’d like, has changed me in some way. I’ve been a drunk, I’ve been destructive, I’ve been religious and reflective, and I’ve been a planner. I’m not any of those on a full-time basis anymore, but I see them all in the mirror, looking back at me. All those Docs, all the ways she has felt, still exist in me.
My grandfather, he of blessed memory, used to say that you don’t ever have to get over things, but you do have to get on with them. I think that’s what I’ve tried to carry with me.
That’s the first step to breaking down the rot. Chop wood, and carry water. You keep it moving. You carry that with you, and you carry them with you. Sometimes thre’s nothing to do but the work.Then one day, you realize you told a story about them, and you laughed. You didn’t even think about crying. So then you cry. Time comes you spent a whole day not thinking about them, and then you cry again. But slowly, life starts to take shape there. Things grow in around the ruins, and maybe it’s even more beautiful than before. You fly their memory like a kite, bright and bouncing in the wind of your life. People can see it in you, even if they don’t quite know what it is. It’s just a pretty, dancing thing in the clouds.
And then you realize, you don’t want you knitting needles confiscated anymore.
I recently laid years of anger to rest over someone’s death. It was the first time I cried about it. As soon as I stopped being mad, I had to let the sorrow in. After you clear the rot, you still need the rain, I guess.
You get better. There are still trenches dug in the French forest from WWI, but the forest is no less green for them. Tragedy above all others. Covered by the willingness to grow.
I feel like this fucking ramble makes less sense the more I noodle on it, and in many ways is more about how to move through grief than what it feels like, so, I don’t know, the best I have in the way of a poetic thought is that sometimes grief in the way all the clothes end up in the hamper now, and the way you stop halfway up the stairs with a cup of coffee before you remember, and the way you never walk past that cafe with the little pink cakes. That sharp, cold knife is small, and fits in so many places.
But it can’t stop the grass from growing.
