Expectations
Expectations are a funny thing. They can be dangerous or at least emotionally risky. Expectations are a crap shoot, a gamble, and a comfort. They are natural, and help orient us to the next scene of life. Knowing what comes next based on previous similar experiences gives us a schema or map for life that makes going through our day more efficient. We do not expend so much energy on learning on a daily basis because many tasks and environments are familiar and repeated. We can focus on the novel, staying curious and engaged with the little differences that occur. Or, we can coast, gliding through with our muscle memory. The neural pathways we have carved out over our lifetime are the maps that help guide us through life. When the maps match the territory, it creates ease, and it is the best part of our conditioning.
Based on our experiences over time, we can comfortably walk into a bank, school, work, or a family dinner with a set of behaviors and assumed conditions we can depend on from ourselves, others, and the environment. Often, we only become aware of our expectations when they are shattered with the pangs of disappointment or the thrill of surprise. One is definitely easier to live with than the other. Both disappointment and surprise create a new pathway that jolts us into unfamiliar terrain. When the map doesn’t match the territory, we must orient ourselves to the new conditions.
Grief and grieving are a learning curve that carve new neural pathways and mind maps after a loss. And, building these new roads against the backdrop of what we expect is painfully unfamiliar. It is crafting a path out of what is not.
If the previous expectation was Edmond walking through the door at lunchtime and again at dusk, the new threshold between the front porch and my entryway is that the door doesn’t ever open and he never appears. Before, the familiar way to spend a Sunday was to go to the grocery together to pick up what we needed to prepare a meal. Now, I plan a meal and shop without him. It is walking through my day with a void beside me, an open hand, and a silence where there was once a human being, a hand in mine, and a response to my question. It is the strangest map of blank space, and the planet where I live is bizarre.
How do I form new expectations, hope even, in this utterly desolate and unfamiliar earth-scape where landmines of memories suddenly explode beneath my footing and send me spiraling into the depths of sorrow?
Again, I find myself saying to myself that I am the luckiest unlucky person to be in this particular position of loss. The good part about being a grief and loss counselor for the last decade is that my expectations are based in the familiarity of being among grieving people for a long time and through a variety of losses. Having worked with and supported individuals and families in midst of major transitions for my entire 30-year career has given me a whole library of possible expectations and scenarios as a reference. I did not know I would have to live the learning so personally through the many losses from my own lifetime that happen tl match the maps of the losses I have witnessed. The territory is all my own, but, and there are others who have walked here before me and beside me. I certainly did not expect to lose my partner, best friend, and true love just as we were stepping into the best of each other and all that we built. Neither did so many others.
The truth is that Edmond’s death, his absence, is part of me. It will never not hurt. As much as I would like to cut the painful parts of my life away and not feel this intense pain, it belongs to me. It is the extension of our relationship that I will tend for the rest of my existence.
People live with chronic pain and disease all the time. The loss, whether physical or mental, illnesses, diagnoses, pain, and discomfort follow, walk beside, or lead many through their day and night. Intense grief and loss are not different in that it must become part of our expectation. To not expect some amount of sorrow and longing each day is unreasonable.
To allow myself to feel surprised when there is more joy than sorrow in a memory of or moment without Edmond is a good day. To feel the disappointment when there are tears from the time I wake until I finally fall asleep is a really hard day.
Life for those without such an intense loss has disappointment and surprise and a range of possibilities in between. For those of us living with intense grief, we have a spectrum that perhaps supersedes or is juxtaposed over the normal range of expectations. It is another layer upon the layers of life, and it is heavy. It intensifies everything in one direction or another. It makes somethings matter much more and some things matter a whole lot less. Chronic anything shifts our perspective as it carves its way into our whole being.
I am a glass half-full kind of girl, so lowering my expectations or even forecasting the worst so I will not have to feel disappointed is not really in my nature. I know people who are this way, and it is an interesting and perhaps more probable way toward contentment. Instead, because I have to be in my nature, I am taking this new filter for my life and trying to absorb it fully as part of my whole being. The parts that are not yet seamlessly sewn into my new nature create gaps (and there are many). The gaps are the ways in which this loss takes me under, terrifies me, and makes me not want to stay. My work is in the gaps.
This kind of living has, for me, created some stability within the chaos and destruction of loss. It requires that I remain someplace longer than I would like at times, and that I move only as fast as the slowest part of me. Sometimes, there are parts of me that are frozen in time and not ready for anything new. And, so, I wait. Like the part of me that is a dark stone sitting at the bottom of a glass well, I will wait with her until she is ready to close the gap. I will not abandon that precious part of me to move on or do the next thing. I will not leave any part of me behind, not anymore and not ever again.
In this choice to return to the present with a wide horizon of non-specific outcomes and without a certain path forward, there is also a call for patience in the unfolding and feeling into the micro-losses. Each step is a commitment down a particular path and a letting go of a step on a path no longer available. Taking a step toward my future without Edmond means letting go of the path we were once on together.
You were there in my dreams again, in the periphery of the action and near to me, not interfering or even really participating, but present. When I woke up and made my coffee, I lit the candle like you always did. I cried, again, way too easily, missing you especially when the coffee was not so good. It was when I lit the candle that I remembered you were in my dreams. I expected to feel you with me while the sub-par cup of coffee was steeping, and I could not feel you as much as I wanted. Wanting what I cannot have is getting old. It is starting to piss me off. Today, I feel tired of grieving. It has only been seven months since you left us. And, it has been such a long, long time to live here without you. Seven months is too short of a time to expect less pain I suppose, but still I wish it was not so palpable all the time, right there just below the surface. I don’t have a choice in this. It is a pain equal to the love we had and have. I miss you. I love you.
Sometimes, when you are in my dreams I wake up with a smile on my face and feel your gentleness linger into my morning. Like a few days ago, when I woke after I had dreamt we were having another baby, a little girl. I kept forgetting to tell you the name I chose for her. You hugged me letting me rest my forehead in the center of your chest where it fit so comfortably. You were wearing the plaid shirt, the one you wore the last day of your life. The dream covered me for nearly half the day. I wish I did not expect or hope to feel that way again, but I do. And, when I don’t, it only compounds the pain of knowing you are not coming home. I love you. I miss you.
I try not to expect Edmond to be around every corner in waking life and dreamtime. Sometimes I do, and I realize he is my filter for life that may keep me from seeing the whole path before me, narrowing my horizon, shortening my foreground, and making my footing less steady. Falling always hurts like hell. I look for him in the water, clouds, moon, and wind. I hope to feel him communicate with me through the feathers, birds, deer, and dreams. I try to become very still so I can feel his presence.
Was that you touching my head, brushing my hair with your essence so gently? Your touch sent tingles over my whole body. If I stay still in the same spot as yesterday, will I feel you there again?
Becoming Edmond-centric is alluring even when it narrows my view, and I know I ultimately must widen my horizon to be open to the possibilities, to stay, and to live a life here. How much of my day am I spending looking for him? Probably a lot, and it is the way of grief. I must exhaust all the possibilities of his familiar presence, turn every stone before I can go on with my day without him. There is hardly a moment of time when I am not talking to him from my heart in my head or out loud. Even as I type this now, I want to feel his approval and connection, or hell, even his disapproval. I just want to feel him at all. It is this part of me, the part that longs for Edmond in a form and a shape he can no longer take that waits at the bottom of the well and is not ready to step in any direction, or even look for one. Maybe I am expecting too much of myself.
This small stubborn stone part of me waits for you to return to me in some familiar and physical form. My heart remains blindly loyal to the love and companionship that was ours. This part of me has unrealistic expectations and a hope beyond the laws that govern this world. It causes me to obsess at times, and feel the painful disappointment of impossibility. This resistant, defiant part of me wants what I want, and it may even be dragging the rest of me down to the bottom of the well where wishes sit heavily. Unopened heavy wishes wait, and part of me waits there too until there is a clear next step, a way to defy gravity. Call me egotistical and arrogant or persistent and determined, but I want to find you here until I can be there where you reside. I want to find the crack in the system that lets us be together. I do not like these rules that keep us apart. If only your legal mind could find the loophole, the creative solution. If only I had a way through to all of you. I miss you. I love you.
I feel on the edge because I cannot see that I am at the tippy top of the wave cresting. I feel like I am alone, adrift, and on the verge of being tossed into the unending abyss. It is in these moments when I want to fly away or allow myself to be thrown into the void that I know I must find a tether — a friend, a child, a purpose— that holds me here. I must find the tether, feeling around in the darkness, the one that tugs on the back of my neck, my waist or ankle, the one that annoys me even, so that I can look back to see that I am actually apart of the entire ocean. I am but a wave in the current, one moment, one part of the sea of beings alive here together.
This will be the greatest integration. When I know without a doubt more often than not that I am part of the sea of All that Is. I will finally have my footing. When this happens, I probably will not need my footing or this body or any of these words I am now typing on this page. Perhaps this is my next iteration of hope.