[April 18]
First
there were días nefastos. And those were hard enough.
Excruciating if I
am going to be honest.
I would do any thing to numb myself, food,
drink, binge tv, sleep if I could manage it. And if I could get through
those days
without crawling up into a ball on the floor then I could make it
through the month.
But
then April struck again and again, with a vengeance unimaginable if you
haven't suffered loss after loss.
It really is like trying to keep your
head above water as the waves crash around you and the riptide tries to
pull you
out into the ocean of grief.
The valiant thing would be to face the grief. But the truth is I don't always feel I have the strength.
I
was taught to not cry. I was taught to be the toughie as my dad calls
me.
For better or worse I also carry in my DNA the tendency to hold
things in. And to explode when I cannot stand completely still or can no
longer keep the
lid on.
Picture the bottle of soda exploding. A bottle because it is clear And you can see the eruption coming.
In
the past five years I have sometimes practiced not exploding. Noticing
and holding back even as I could feel the emotions course through my body: back
pain, stomach aches, stiff neck and painful jaw.
No matter how hard to try to hold back the tide, it comes.
Explosions inside your body are painful. And dangerous.
[April 19]
The first tears are the hardest. They cut. Hot, painful, angry tears.
If I get one out, the anguish of getting it out leaves me exhausted.
I fight the urge to get through that first tear like a baby fighting sleep: irrational, angry, self-destructive.
A friend had asked me, maybe more than once, what I had planned to do. She asked what support did I need. I was confused.
It is not that I had forgotten. It was that I was trying so hard to forget. Work had obliged piling insane amounts of tasks in front of me. I greedily volunteered to do more work! What a team player.
But then I was just hiding.
And feeling grumpy.
Something stupid happened at work. I left super late. I was upset as I walked to my car (oops to the parking lot where I usually park but hadn't parked).
Everything felt stacked against me. Hot tears in my eyes for no apparent reason.
Then I remembered. It was five years since I had talked with my sister.
And the memories came flooding back, but not like memories, like the most vivid deja vu you have every experienced.
I remembered the pit in my stomach when my brother called to tell me that my sister was in the hospital. I had just sat down at my favorite cafe to work. Work was not easily achieved at this point only seven months in from my brother's death. Quiet time to work usually set me down the grief spiral. But I had been determined to work, to be productive, to concentrate long enough on something to make progress.
I breathed deeply and tried to talk myself off of the ledge.
I called my sister's phone, and she picked up. She gave me the briefest version of what was going on ... the doctors did not know what it was. She sounded tired. She sounded scared. But like the dutiful older sister, she pivoted the conversation. I told her about my committee giving me a hard time about setting up meetings so that I could move forward with my exams. [I had already had to postpone them after my brother died. Seriously, though, what was I thinking, I couldn't focus for an hour, how was I going to make it through seven days of writing their three damned papers?]
She told me how sorry she was that they were making it so hard for me.
She comforted me.
That is exactly who she was ... not wanting to talk about her own grief over our brother or her fear about this mysterious illness. [Now we all wonder if this wasn't her body exploding because she did not talk about the grief.]
Tears streamed down my face as the memories flooded ... not the hot tears that fight their way out of my eyes. These were the faucets tears, they stream right down my face, no strangled breath, no heaving chest, no visible emotion, just the tears channeling rivers down my face, splashing onto my glasses and creating wet spots on my shirt.
If my tears could work this way on the regular, maybe ...
[April 24]
For the next several days, I said aloud I was grieving to quite a few people.
Yes, I do want an award for that. It is hard.
Maybe it is especially hard for me to ask for help.
Maybe I just needed to say aloud that I was grieving so I could encourage myself to continue to walk through that door.
It did not get easier to relive the horror of those days five years ago. There is no closure to be had.
But it did get somewhat easier to release some of the grief through tears... usually at 4 am which is weird and tiring. I spent the entire week exhausted. I hid from people over the weekend.
I want to acknowledge that beyond being really hard, I was able to notice pleasant.
I take them as signs from the universe encouraging me to be grateful that I am breathing in and out regardless of how much pain I feel.
There was the gray fox waiting for me to pass by on the road home.
Of course, the dog and cat greeting me everyday with their comfort, sometimes portrayed as their need for attention.
There were all the pink trees and flowers blooming because spring has finally sprung.
There were countless check in texts and messages reminding me that I am loved.
And there were these signs, chalked strategically outside my home ... I know they were not meant for me, but they sure felt like they were speaking to me on that day.
