The Unbecoming [This is How the Grief Reshapes You]
Sometimes, I think my Grief will undo me. As though I were caught in a Purgatory, swirling the drain until I descend, once more, into Hell. Into Madness. The unreality of reality brightens like the lightheaded sensation which strikes when one arises too fast. I am having lots of internal back-and-forth around this idea of Unearned Wisdom. Learning a thing too fast, experiencing too rapidly, and caught in a breathless haze where all pretense of sense has dissolved and evaporated. Disappeared on high into the Heavens, or been sucked down deep into the Earth. And I am left tethered only by my fear…
I know that on the other side of this, there will be a kind of understanding which will be foundational in all the things I will see, experience, and feel, in my life. All the ways in which it will grant my own soul peace, and all the ways in which it will, in turn, offer solace to others. Where this will be a touchstone moment, anchoring me in reality void of illusion, where I see and know the intricate bonds which forevermore connect me, to you. But that moment feels an impossibly long way off. And I do not know if it is quite an offering I wish to be able to keep near me, in the knowing that it is to be served in helping another. It feels impossibly cruel, to shape this grief in such a way, where it is entombed in silver-linings. It will go on living anyway, so why not as a prettied thing?
My writing is more cynical than I actually feel. It is a flimsy barrier I default in erecting. I know the grief will suck me down again. Will barricade me behind empty walls, open rooms, skylight too far out of reach for me to climb up to and feel more closely warming against my skin. It is a room, I know, which should be inviting. I can make it into anything I so choose. I can splash upon its walls any color. Add any décor. Re-form. Re-fashion. So much freedom, is terrifying. It feels like a trick, a trap. I know it will tap my shoulder to get me to turn around, and scream into my opened mouth, again, and I will balloon with its echoes squeezing past every organ, every cell, until I am swollen with it. Until I am lighter than air. If only I could see that it is trying to lift me higher—and not instead, fatten me up to lead me off to slaughter.
I have never quite envisioned Death as I do now. I have never quite been afraid of it, as I find myself now. It has been months, perhaps a year, in the making. The fear is a foreign intrusion, I know this. Something I have picked up from the land, or perhaps in bumping the people here, bumping into their philosophies, and sightless seeing. I have remarked, more than once, that this is a land of hungry ghosts, that it retains all the trappings of what might be my own personal hell. Why am I so reluctant to escape?
There are things I am trying to remember, to recall. There is a tangible terror I have, in forgetting. At times it is hard to discern whose forgetting, and whose remembering, and I realize I have been grieving a long time. That I have carried with me, a lifetime of memories, that I have been too afraid to set down, lest it be forgotten. If not me, then who, will do the recollecting? If not me, then who, will carry these things which are too precious to be dropped, and then forgotten—how will we ensure that we will not repeat the sins that we remain burdened by? I realize that I have never been good at hoping. It requires a kind of trust that is unfamiliar to me. That I can be my most vulnerable that will not, in such a way, be seen as an invitation towards my own exploitation. My own betrayal. I have been conditioned to believe, that there is both an inevitability of suffering, and an all-seeing-father, who will allow such suffering to continue on. That bliss only comes at the end, and its payment is a forever rejection and denial of the self’s pursuit in love, or joy, or adoration not directed at one’s simultaneous saviour-torturer. Grief is shaping me in a real way, to let fall away this impression, and I am struggling against myself, to believe in a kinder hoping that protects just as much as it empowers, just as much as it Loves. There are parts of me, long-buried, forgotten as an act of survival and sanity in this insane-world, which are clawing viciously, to get back to the surface of my Being. They are aching to seize this moment that might pass too soon, and are activating a lifetimes-strategized push where so much feels at stake. And at the center of that all-or-nothing of the world which hangs in the balance…is a little girl, with an intensity about her, that in a moment, might be snuffed out. Who is curious and wild-eyed, and confrontational. Who recognizes the god-like in all things, and is frustrated that no one acts in reverence of the same. Who is a seasoned warrior, trapped in a vulnerable body. An old woman, reduced back to a tiny mouth and tiny hands. A big heart which threatens to explode. An incarnation of Love that is slowly wilting. Petals falling steadily, the seed sucking back its leaves, its stalk. It's Life.
This moment is asking me to grow again. Against a backdrop of a lifetime of world-reality fears. It is begging me to grow, again. Death has always been a birthing process, it says to me. Something must die, in order to be willed back into Life again. This is a place, a time, for you to be shaped by nothing but your own mind, guided by nothing but your own hand. To open your heart, and let the incorruptible nature of your Being, at long awaited time, be allowed to become.
There is nothing easy about this process. I do not know, at many times, if I will make it, if I can hold enough of myself together, to continue on, when so much insists on falling away. I have forgotten why I compel myself to remember. I have remembered why I always choose this forgetting. The fear advances, a sound of wind being sucked somewhere deep and far away, grows louder…and before I slip back down again, I feel a faint press of moist cold against my skin which says to me, without words, “Remember, I love you, and you are a thing of love. Remember me, as I remember you. Come find me…”