Richard Siken
@richardsiken
Grief is a man in sad pajamas that you keep locked in a room because he's proof you used to love something. Set him free. Let him leave (or stay) if he has to. You have other proof. Setting him free is not a betrayal of your love. Healing: not a betrayal. Don't romanticize it.
✨Death Parde God Hell✨
@lithropanic
i do feel the same way, as if someone was living, suddenly but seemingly indefinitely, in my home. i'm tip toeing but also i want him to feel like he's safe here too. i'm waiting. that doesn't have to create a hostile environment.
i've lived in hostile environments, particularly ones with unexpected cohabitants. the softness of the fight is always so confusing, because we are taught to be accommodating, to be understanding. i didn't want to live here, why should i not be understanding of a person who would leave their previous circumstances to come into my life, because they thought it was better?
that's different, however, from grief. grief is not an unexpected boyfriend or girlfriend or a parent or sibling, it's not a friend that your partner will cheat on you with after months of giving them both grace.
grief is: i am not a mother, but i am caring for a man in sad pajamas. i do his laundry (or sometimes, i don't); i feed him (or sometimes, i don't); and i make sure he is housed, because that is paramount, and the most so many of us can expect.
i am not a mother, but i am in charge of this entity. i can accept and love him or shove him out and treat him like a tumor. or i can just give him space, try not to exacerbate anything, and hope that he feels safe enough in my home to do what he needs do.
i've been grieving for my family since i was 7 years old. i think that might be the expectation of a child of divorce, but it's more than that. i knew from a very very young age that raising myself was going to be my job. learning wrong from right, learning how to regulate, learning how to love and hate and interact appropriately--those are fine lessons to learn on your own, but they're hard when you know that every single example you have ever been given by the people you are expected to love is something that can never serve you.
my family is an ill-tended garden that i ran away from, all milkweed and bramble and choked-out flowers. i could have made it my job to cultivate it, maybe appraised myself as its savior, but my family let me know that (as the adopted and youngest sibling) i wasn't allowed to know anything. i wasn't allowed to say anything or have any power. i wasn't enough of them to help save them, but instead they were my springboard (by choice) and it was my job to get far away. i never thought that was fair. i still don't. i was a doll that they used and tossed when i asked too many questions; i was a sympathetic ear, a reaffirming plush toy telling them they deserved better, or should be better. a tchotchke on the shelf that they could glare daggers into and feel good for not being so overt about it in person.
i like to think i am powerful (and i have made myself so, as much as i can), but i don't think there is anything i could have ever possibly done to be fully allowed or accepted into any of these families i had. a decoration, a charity, an honor roll bumper sticker; that's all i was.
i've been grieving my mother since she had a heart attack, shortly after my father abandoned the family and i had to go live with my grandparents, because we were in foreclosure and homeless and i'm sure there are so many logistics i will never know about. she didn't die then. but i had to grieve for her.
i've been grieving my brothers since the time they brought me home from elementary school and i deduced from the outlandishness of them taking me and the giddiness of their behavior (strange; they didn't like me that much) that the family bought a puppy. they were mad when i guessed it on the car ride there. they were disappointed i'd ruined the surprise, like i'd done that time i snuck into my mother's closet and found our christmas presents. always ruining things. couldn't i be a good little sister and give them the joy of being older brothers just this once?
i don't think i remember many positive interactions after that that weren't intentionally cut off by my mother. she was so terrified of them being a bad influence on me. maybe she was just afraid of them talking to me, of letting me learn anything. my oldest brother recently said he thought he'd have to keep my (poorly-kept) adoption a secret until his grave. i was 26 when he said that. how fucking stupid.
i'm grieving a future i wanted but knew i was never going to have. i think i'm the kind of person who would have gotten married and had a child in a desperate attempt to keep someone near them. i sacrificed so many years to someone who so very clearly didn't actually like or appreciate me, was only using me as a youthful dalliance to assuage the pain of her own stupid life choices up until then. i have to believe that she's stupid because even now i can't handle the idea of five years of maliciousness, of holding my sobbing body at midnight on four different occasions and thinking good. i feel powerful. i reduced this good person to this stupid miserable thing and they will do anything to keep me here. i won't give them anything in return. i will regularly make them feel stupid, and useless, and childish, and ugly, and worthless, and every time they sob in my arms i will feel comfortable being even more distant, even more cruel, because it's power i never had over my own life. i can't believe that someone i loved with all my heart would think that of me. maybe it's true, the evidence is there (in years of writing and speaking about it, of sobbing in other people's arms and then begging them not to think too hard on it), but i can't find it in my heart to malign her. surely she is just the most useless fucking lesbian that has ever lived, too selfish to see beyond herself. that's so much easier.
my mom died a rotting, living corpse, still abusing my brother until the moment she died and the police accused him of murder despite the proof of her constant and vehement refusal of medical care. my brother described the extent of her unmanaged diabetes, her drug use; the glisten of bone and sinew. i saw her putrid imprint on the recliner she lived in for the last few months of her life. but i'd mourned her for years already.
she didn't have a funeral. i helped my oldest brother insist on that. she would have hated anyone waxing poetic over her body when they didn't care about her in life. we had her cremated by the county and my brother buried her under a bush on the property she grew up in but did not own.
my father stopped trying when i was 8, and eventually i stopped putting in the effort for him. he showed up at my high school graduation and i felt furious and betrayed. i met them once for a few hours for a holiday and then never again for ten years. and then, most recently, it was still me reaching out, me demanding correspondence because there had been too many years of people refusing to answer questions about my adoption. even now, i am in my car on the way to visit and at the last moment they cancelled. my excitable dog is confused that after the hubbub of getting ready for an adventure, we're just returning home. I didn't realize you could be a grand-pet of divorce too.
grief is a man in sad pajamas. he lives here, with me, and it's uncomfortable. he's not welcome but i want him to feel safe.
i've lived with this man since i was at least 7 years old. he's sat silently with my in the kitchen, watched as i self-destructed, was never a comfort but has always been there. he's family. i can't tell you whether or not i love any member of my family; they've held me so far away since i was so young that i have no idea. "love" is a word you say on habit, as mollification. but this man in his sad pajamas has never asked anything of me, has never expected anything of me.
i hope he moves out soon. i'm tired of being a human receptacle for grief i was never given the framework to properly process. i don't know that i can ever stop feeling so alone, or so commodified--so furiously resistant and terrified of connection--until he leaves.
but i understand that he'll leave when he needs to. as it is, i am living alone for the first time in my life, and i can't say it isn't a small comfort to feel him tip-toeing quietly to the kitchen for a cup of tea in the middle of the night.
maybe that's what family can be. a weird queer with their cats and dog and their lifelong manifestation of grief. what a beautiful holiday gathering!
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