Grief

My Old Friend

The first time someone I loved died, I was too young to feel it. I never really accepted that she was gone. Even when she was in a hospice, scrawny as a hatchling, I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge how near she was to death. I went to see her in her last days. She looked at me with eyes full of words. I should have leaned in, let her whisper in my ear. I should have held her hand and told her I loved her. I should have said goodbye. But I didn’t dare, I didn’t know I was allowed and I didn’t know how. I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and said ‘see you soon’.

My next encounter with grief was slow, strange and then intensely soul crushing. My children. The ones that never got to be. These were the years I learned that life is fragile, that you don’t always get what you want or deserve. I learned to feel, because the pain was so deep I couldn’t not feel it. In that way, it brought me to life.

The first miscarriage was sad and surprising, the second was infuriating and disappointing. But I hadn’t really seen these pregnancies as real. I hadn’t connected to them in a tangible way and I didn’t allow myself any space to do so. My third pregnancy lasted 23 weeks. I knew this baby, I had felt him, I had sung to him, I had planned and bought and finally felt safe to expect him. When he died it was as if a part of me had died and to this day I miss him as if I am missing a limb, even though he never took one breath in the outside world. I am used to this missing part now, four years on, but it will never leave me. The space on my chest where he lay, briefly, will forever be lacking that touch, that weight.

It amazes me, the depth and breadth of grief, that it can span years, that it can ebb and flow, or consume your whole being. You can say goodbye one final time, and then, unannounced you have circled back to churning and despair. There is no plan to be had, no order or finality. There is no timeline. It is not linear.

On Saturday, my dog Gracie died. She was my truest companion. I spent more time with her than any human. She was my shadow. She had been with me through my marriage, my illness and my losses. She was also (everyone said so) such a joy. So easy to love. Losing her has brought me back to a place that I find difficult to bear. In my mind, I know that death is important and that she has left this earth to bathe in eternal bliss. I believe this to be true. But the pain within my body, the fact of her not being here with me, brings waves that knock me off balance and wound me so deeply that I almost cannot bear to be alive. They don’t last long, but it is a scary and dreadful thing. Again, intellectually I know I must allow the feelings to exist, to be felt and to pass through me, but how can one tolerate such a thing? What I want to say is, ‘No, I don’t want to suffer, This should not be happening, Why must I lose that which I love? I cannot take it’.

But grief does not only take from us. Only something as huge and altering as grief could give us the power to change. It has changed me. Each loss has shaped me into something new, someone more real. Perhaps it is part of my life’s journey to become acquainted with death and help to bring it into our world in a way that is less foreign, less frightening, to bring the unspoken to the lips of others. Perhaps it is my path to traverse both worlds, and it’s true, I don’t fear my own death as others might. I know I will dissolve in to the arms of my child, finally. I should be an expert in grief by now, and yet I still find it all so confusing. At times I can see the deep wisdom, and at others, I don’t understand it at all and I rage against its reasonless daggers. I do not expect to ever fully comprehend it. My goal now is just to allow, and that is challenge enough.

Grief can transport us to other realms. I feel it now as the storm subsides, and remember it from the months after Indy died. This deeper, darker, more mysterious side of myself, as if I am part ghost, wandering in a world halfway between here and not here. Between earth and the underworld. And I like it. Yes, it is solitary and brooding. But it is also laced with magic. This is one of grief’s gifts, that you can belong for a time, with the spirits and the wind and the one you lost. And I know I’ll miss it when it’s gone, when I can no longer find the secret door, when I live again, squarely on solid ground, as I know I must. It’s beautiful to be transparent and calm and deathly, but I owe it to my husband and my garden (and myself?) to become whole again, to walk in the sun and feel joy bubbling in my chest.

I know that grief will not spare me, that it will find me again and perhaps one day I will greet it with grace, as an old friend.