For 20 months the tenth of the month has been more difficult than any other day. I felt the familiar emotions building days ago. Sometimes the anticipation turns out to be worse than the day itself. Other months the anticipation is dwarfed by the power of the day.
This month I tried something new. I tried to treat today like any other day–beyond my visit to Jane’s grave. I got up this morning, vacuumed the house, picked some tomatoes, went to the bank, and the post office. I took myself out for breakfast, watered the garden, put out some letters and some thank you notes. I listened to the radio and watched some TV.
I wish I could say staying busy helped a lot. It didn’t.
Grief is not what you think
This thing we call grief is a strange creature.
At first you believe that eventually you will get over it. It is what you have read and what you have been told and come to believe. Gradually you begin to understand that things will never go back to what they were. You have to adapt to this “new normal,” and there is nothing normal about it.
Someone tried to tell me once that grief is like a bad break-up or a divorce. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Grief is Hell
Night has come on and I feel as alone as I ever am. Her absence is as palpable as it was the night she died.. The house is as quiet as when I came home from the hospital that night. But the numbness has long since worn off and the raw pain of it is like the Puritan description of hell. If you have ever burned yourself you know the initial searing pain of it. Now imagine he numbness that follows never happens. Instead, you discover that initial pain was numbness by comparison.
That is Hell–and that is grief.
Except it can’t be Hell. The denizens of Hell perfect their evil in their pain. They almost revel in it for all its pain. And given the opportunity they are more than willing to inflict even more pain on their fellow sufferers.
Yet grief-stricken are not demons
Yet those battling grief are among the most kind and supportive people I have met in my life. Weep, and they will set down whatever they are doing and lend you whatever shoulder, shirt or ear they have. Laugh, and they will rejoice that you have found the strength to laugh again. Love, and they will praise the strength that allows you to risk again the towering sorrow that comes with death.
I cannot explain the paradoxes of this new life I live. I can only observe and report on what I see and what I learn.
And I would really prefer that no one have to experience this new normal, this indescribable pain, this endless empty plain.
Grief strikes us all
I know half the population is stuck with this eventual fate. I would like to delay your experience of it as long as I can. It is why I walk against this disease and that disease–why I do what I can to feed the hungry and heal the physical and mental wounds that war inflicts.
Grief comes to us in many ways and in many packages. All are painful.
