What was one thing that surprised you about your grief?
Okay I AM SO EXCITED, to be read in an Oprah sing song, EXXXCIIITED!
I started reading Strangers by Belle Burden last week. I mostly started reading it because it was sold out everywhere, and I wanted to know what was up; I like to know what is up. I like the book, but that’s not my point. My point is, that as I was reading it I had a thought that her ex husband probably went to Yale Law School with my mom. I googled. I realized I was correct and then I wanted MORE THAN ANYTHING to call my mom and ask if she remembered him. No big deal, gossip basically. Mom, do you remember this guy, well he was a shitty husband in the end; it wouldn’t have effected either of our lives, but I can’t call her, and that broke my heart. And then I got mad! Just when you think you have worked your ass off to accept that the life you knew would never exist ever again, just when you have found all the glory waiting on the other side of all that pain, there it is again, grief, missing, the powerlessness of not having a mom to call and tell the most dumb, basic, silly things you think about.
My grief surprised me in so many ways, and continues to do so. I was so surprised by how physical it was, how I could actually feel my heart closing in on itself. I was surprised by how fearful I became, flashback to me pumping gas on Maui before a flight and being convinced I got some on myself and if I got on the flight I would explode; this absolute insanity after hundreds of flights and a whole lot of gas pumping. I was surprised by it’s violence after only seeing the sweet crying and missing and laying on big white beds in sunlight for days version of grief.
It took me a decade to realize the shapes that grief had made of my life after my first major death at 29. It is important to me that people can see themselves in other people’s grief experience. It is important to me that people know that their grief might look different than mine, but that they are not alone.
So I had an idea… I asked people, WHAT WAS ONE THING THAT SURPRISED YOU ABOUT YOUR GRIEF ? And this newsletter is dedicated to those answers. The answers are anonymous. In most cases I am including exactly what was sent to me, because who am I to edit that experience for anyone. It may be a little long, but come back to it. I have had so many YES moments reading them. I have had so many little tear duct pools of gratitude that anyone would answer this intimate question, and how lucky am I that I am surrounded by so much grace, wisdom, and honesty?!!!
I love you lots,
Jen
At times it was everything I thought it would be. Terrifying. Unbearable. Panic attacks on the bathroom floor. Wishing god would take me so I didn’t have to feel it anymore. But it was also loving. Kind. A friend who really met all of me and loved me anyway. Grief became my cheerleader. Like a protective aunt it layered me in armor, showed me what I was made of and ultimately mirrored back to me the commitment to life and living i signed up for when I decided to walk through it’s door.
*
I was surprised by how invisible grief can be..how long I carried it without knowing it was grief, and how normal it felt to live with it.
*
My first true grief was losing my mother at 19 years old. My little brother died 13 years later. At that point grief was the worst thing I could imagine. It was isolating and persistent and heavy enough to prevent rising out of bed on too many occasions. What surprised me most about grief was how much of it I would experience in my life and how I would come to embrace and even cherish my grief. Yes it is heavy and painful, but it does not have to be isolating. In fact my trail of grief has led to open doors and heart to heart connection with others who have or may soon experience grief. As an ER nurse and as a care manager working with older adults I've helped people who are in or surrounding grief every day. Grief over my brother's death is what led me to become a nurse in the first place. If I could not be there at the moment of his death, then I wanted to be there for others and provide to them what I could not for him.
There is a mantra I once used to berate myself regularly after the loss of my mother, "life is just about loving people and losing them and then one day you die" It was a hammer I used to remind me not to love, not to get too close, not to be a sucker in this no win game of life.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that the words are undeniably true but the message had been perverted. Yes life is about loving people and losing them. Losing family, losing friends, losing clients I have become close to, and grieving them. But also, keeping them. I've kept my mother and brother (and aunts, uncles, mentors, friends) with me since their passing. I talk to them, I indulge in memories of the times we had together. When I'm lucky they visit me in dreams. I've collected an ample group of dead friends and family. People I can turn to for counsel, comfort, and even confession (who are they going to tell?). People who make the black box of death and it's after less frightening and more real somehow. In a way I've become surrounded by Angels and from that perspective, grief could not make me more fortunate.
So yes life is about loving people and losing them. But also keeping them and continuing to love them anyway. Then someday, in someway that we do not have the language or measurement for, when our time comes, joining them.
*
What surprised me most about my grief was that it took me a long time to fully wrap myself inside the grief. I was stunned and maybe to some degree in denial. It took me through some turnstiles of emotions I couldn’t quite accept.
*
That it lasts.
Whichever moment grief decides to arrive in, it grounds me. Not like tethering me to the earth, but like grounding a plane. It says, you cannot fly right now. It puts me in my place, keeps me there, and touches all of me. Like water in the clouds, when it becomes too heavy for the rising air to support, it falls as rain and drenches everything—a continuous cycle. Like waves, it keeps coming. Like grief, it lasts.
*
One way that my mother's death (very sudden and also, very slow, if you have had any experience with a chronic alcoholic's death) surprised me is the way that my three sisters and I processed it so differently. She died in New York and I was in Los Angeles visiting my boyfriend and doing my show at his art gallery. After I got the news I was walking in Elysian Park by myself and I said, "I'm so sorry." I was speaking to her and the difficult time she had in her life. And then I said, "She was so small," as I cried. My mother was teeny, barely 5 feet and 98 pounds and that just came out of me, this feeling that she was too teeny for this world, that she got run over a bit by life and I felt very sorry for that. My sisters tell me they did not cry, they did not collapse in doorways or burn things at the stove in the weeks after her death. I am the youngest, the stereotypical "baby" of the family and so I suppose that kind of emotionality is expected of me. And for the first time I didn't mind that pigeonholing because she was my mother. I was happy to do cry for her, happy to cry for us all.
*
I was surprised by the courage, or perhaps "permission" grief gave me to pursue my own life. If I'm being very honest, some of the best, riskiest decisions and positive changes I made were spurred by the deaths of the most important people of my existence. Which is a bizarre concept and way to say that l have been surprised by the gratitude I have for my grief—and for the good things in my life that came from the worst and still unimaginable losses.
*
I am so surprised by the space around grief that continues to grow so much over the years.
And so surprised that the size of my grief hasn’t changed, that its size is equivalent to the amount of love I had and still have for the souls that have graced my world, for the experiences, and things I am grieving over. That size seems so endless.
And yet the universe leaves enough room for the space around those grief time periods to grow.
And this isn’t my idea but rather I learned it from someone else’s illustration. So many people and experiences have been a part of growing the space around my grief and for that I am grateful.
I see space. I get to be in both spaces. I get to grieve and breathe and live and remember and continually make space for new moments to all be a part of this lifetime.
*
I remember my first thing about grief was when I was a little kid and our ancient dentist died. And I remember just being shocked at how sad I was. New feeling. And I was little. I may have been seven. And when we went home we watched the state of the union address. I remember my mom not being happy with my sisters who let me watch Brian’s Song and I was a wreck. And then in college, I had a friend of mine kill himself. I can’t listen to the cranberries without thinking about him. What surprised me about grief then was how it was not just in my head put in my body. How it shook me up and down, an invisible force that randomly would grab my spine like a drum major’s staff and shake me up and down like a maraca. I’ve lost five people since then now that I’m 62. Two of those were my parents and those deaths 10 years apart still remain seismic. Remembered daily. Now grief has entered the realm of physical, mental, and spiritual. Like standing on a dock and watching boats shove off. The weather is always different, but the feeling evolves not to complacency but regret for time not spent and good wishes for their journey and hope for good lives for all.
*
I felt completely thrown into outer space - time meant nothing - my world froze - my orbit didn’t exist. I didn’t even know she was my orbit - so yeah, I wasn’t expecting that.
As a mother - my own mother dying felt very similar to my first baby being born. I saw absolutely everything differently.
*
I was surprised that grief made me question my memory of my lived experience with that person, and without the person existing to verify, I doubted if the experience happened at all. I found myself wondering if I imagined those beautiful moments instead of being comforted by the memories of them.
*
Ok I’ve been thinking. The one thing that surprised me about my grief is that it still allowed room for other emotions, and not just sadness. Does that make sense? Like even though I felt and still feel a giant hole in my body, I can still experience so many other emotions at the same time.
Also, truly shocked I survived it. Not even kidding.
*
What I discovered in my grief, if I’m being entirely honest, is a sense of gratitude not only for the lives of my parents and the time and experiences (good and bad) we had together as a family, but also that they’re immense suffering was over. For both of my parents, the third act was indelibly stained by prolonged and inhumane cruelty. That’s just the simple truth. To my knowledge there were no great lessons, revelations, or reconciliations that came from these seasons of merciless tedium, just a slow erosion of the people I knew and loved. To themselves, they became unrecognizable, and it was impossible to watch. When my mom died, it the moments after, I stood over her with my dad and sister and thought “if it’s gonna happen, it’s going to happen now”. But, “it” didn’t happen. “It” came out in other ways over the following months and years. More time to myself, more laying on the floor, more (for better or worse) evaluation of life and it’s futilities. Being grateful, for life, remembering all that it was, but also being grateful that all that it should never be, for anyone, was over. Both are possible, both are healthy. I’m also grateful that my experiences with death weren’t sudden. If I’d gotten “the call” entirely out of nowhere, assuredly my convictions would be different. So, in that way, and only in that way, I’m grateful for the slow (and cruel) dissolution of the people I knew as “mom” and “dad”.
*
Grief is painful and confusing- you loved someone that is no longer in this world with you- and you keep going it’s confusing.
*
What surprised me the most about my grief is how many faces it has. I didn’t expect to feel so much anger while also experiencing so much sorrow. I also didn’t expect to feel relief and joy alongside longing and heartache. I learned to see my grief as different weather systems coming in, each day a new forecast… sometimes it was a sun shower and sometimes it was a devastating storm.
*
I suppose what has been most surprising, and both the most protective, as well as the hardest part of grief, is how afraid of it I am of it, and how well my being/heart/mind/soul has locked it away. Like those wooly mammoths that they find locked away in the glaciers. Fully intact animals locked away in the ice for hundreds of thousands of years. Looking like they did the day they died. It's as if my brain can't comprehend that the person I was closest to, a person that has been there ever since I took my first breath, is gone.
*
The thing that surprises me over and over again about my grief, is how it keeps reminding me of my own capacity to love. How I weirdly keep falling in love with it, because it teaches me, somehow, of how beauty and pain, sorrow and joy, are all kinda the same thing.
*
I dreamt that I was invisible but watching my Mom sitting at the kitchen table with my Dad standing up holding the newspaper under his arm ready to go to the washroom - his morning routine. They we're having a pleasant, meaningful conversation (they often did at that time of day). As the conversation wrapped up my Mom said, "Well, you're looking so much better than you did a couple of weeks ago" and my Dad said "I feel a lot better too" and then the scene kind of became slow motion as I became aware that I was watching them with my mouth open, my jaw was dropped ... I gradually realized it wasn't really happening, my head made it up, that my Dad was gone forever. As the idea that it was a mirage and not real sunk in I began to cry so hard that I could feel so much pressure in my head like it could explode and with the pressure I could only hear the sound of the bottom of the ocean - the sadness was excruciating. Then I woke up for real
and realized the entire thing was a dream and felt the pain I felt in that dream and started to cry the same way only this time awake. But I wanted to hang on to the scene of them talking in the kitchen. I didn't want anyone to see me cry that hard. It felt so incredibly private.
*
I didn’t know my father as a person until after he died. I knew him as someone who loved me. As a father. The man who put out cereal every morning before school, each box lined up perfectly on the table. Grapefruit in a bowl, every sliver carefully cut so I wouldn’t struggle with the spoon. The man who reached his arm into the backseat while driving, squeezing my ankles and announcing, “Found them!”
That was how I knew him.
I missed my father’s death by forty-eight hours.
“Take vitamin C and don’t drink too much.” The last thing he said to me. I was supposed to arrive in Boston that Friday, finally playing my hometown after a month of nonstop touring. Even before I got the call that Wednesday, I knew I was never going to see him again. Sometimes, we just know these things. I knew it was the last time when he hugged me in the kitchen, wearing his blue robe, unable to look at me.
When he died, he left behind his journals, tucked into the nightstand, the bookshelf, a desk drawer, the back corner of the garage. His thoughts written in pencil, pages filled with poems he wrote and poems he copied, some mathematical equations finished and some ending in question marks.
My mother did not want to read them. She said it felt like an invasion of his privacy. Or maybe she wanted to remember him only as she had known him.
I was the opposite. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to understand him. I thought if I could understand him, I could understand myself.
What I found through reading my father’s journals was that his last days here were spent in search of the shape of the universe. An MIT quantum mechanics scientific mathematical physics mastermind, my father was a very private man and these were his very private thoughts. I didn’t know until after he died that he was trying to figure out additional dimensions in time so he would understand where he was going and we would understand where we could find him.
With each page I read, my memory of him became more contoured, as though he had once been an outline and I was slowly adding color. He was complicated, sad, sweet, curious and he never found the answers he was looking for.
The more you learn about someone after they die, the more it changes the way you miss them. Grief is strange that way. My grief is no longer just for the father I knew, but for the man who lived among us, who I am only now beginning to know. Do I regret reading his words, if they only deepened the pain of missing him? Sometimes I wonder if my mother had it right. But I’ve come to believe that the truest way to honor him is to miss the person he actually was, not just the person we thought we knew.
