Flavors of Grief

There are many flavors of grief. In fact, every time we experience a loss, our grief is unique. It is like a thumb print on our heart. Grieving Edmond’s death is specific to me, based on our relationship, the particular threads of experiences that were between us. He shared very different connections with each of our children, his friends, and family members. Even though we have lost the same person, the grief comes through in an original way for each of us that reflect the gratitudes, regrets, and love.

Grief also has directionality. The regrets of the past pull us backward in time. We find ourselves wanting more or wishing we had done better or different. The anxiety of the future sends us flying forward in panic about plans that will not happen.

My second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. It was devastating, and the souring grief, for a while at least, began to grow in the fetuses place. I took the loss of my planned second pregnancy as a punishment for having become pregnant before marriage with my first born. My twenty-four-year-old self had some pretty antiquated, self-loathing capacities. This kind of belief system does not just show up once, and unchecked can take you to some dark recesses of the psyche. 

Both reflections of my Catholic roots, I worked through the guilt, shame, and sorrow by collecting crosses of all kinds. I hunted for crosses that met me in my particular flavor of the day grief-state. It was a ritual action that would not allow me to discard or hide this loss, perhaps a type of public confession. Each cross was a unique, beautiful piece of art. They were my way of honoring this life that was not to be and respecting my experience and sorrow.

When my first marriage ended, it was a double scoop of bitter grief with some special toppings including the familiar sprinklings of guilt, shame, anger, and blame. These were the infusions of my perspective and belief system at the time. It felt humiliating to have failed at the one thing I believed my children needed most, a two-parent family. Scoop two was the loss of my children when they were with their father on weekends or holidays. This disturbance to my expectation and familiar way of parenting was devastating. 

Grieving this loss meant taking a long, hard look at my cultural conditioning and belief systems that had shaped my self-perception and expectations. I had to own my part in the dissolution of the marriage and the reinvention of my family. Expanding my self-awareness to see myself more fully, shining the light on the shadow parts, helped me to enter into transformational work. 

Grief is layered. We can only move through what is within our awareness and capacity. There are always deeper, more complex and vulnerable layers available should we continue to expand our palate for the depths of what grief has to offer.

Overtime, if we choose, we can dig into the depths to discover the real gems of who we are both for ourselves and the world. These hard things, if we allow it, shape us and polish us. We learn to love the parts of ourselves that have been partitioned off from self. 

During and after my divorce, I cultivated many ritual actions to find my way through to the next iteration of myself. Letting go of who we believe we are, our identity (wife/husband/a particular kind of parent) can be harrowing as we see parts of ourselves we would rather banish. 

Knowing I had to do something with all of the heart strings that were once directed toward my husband and the father of my first three children, I began meditating daily. I wrote, painted, and made art. At some point, it occurred to me that those dangling heartstrings belonged to me, and loving myself at this agonizing time meant redirecting those heartstrings back through my own heart. I was almost thirty-one and the mother of a two, five, and nine year old. What the hell did I even know about myself or the world? I had become pregnant when I was twenty-one and had three children before I turned thirty, so my 20s looked quite different from most of my peers. I really had no idea who I was outside of motherhood.

I decided to marry myself. I even bought a ring. Relationship to self is critical to the grieving process. We come to know ourselves in layers and over time. 

My losses have transformed me, and continue to offer me subtle, nuanced perspectives when I take the time to tend them. The great losses have ultimately been beautiful lessons for which I am deeply grateful. I would never have thought so when when I began cramping and bleeding in the first trimester or when the slow crumble of my marriage finally unraveled.

I have continued to mine these losses for the gems that are hidden behind secret walls and pockets of my being. The walls and pockets served me, kept me safe until I had support and capacity to peek behind and empty them.

When Edmond died twenty-one days ago, it was raw, shocking, too cold and too hot at the same time. The bittersweetness of this loss still turns my stomach more often than not. It is nauseating me now as a memory from our ski trip in January suddenly pushed its way up from my belly to my throat. We stopped for a picnic lunch at a park in New Mexico, and after I walked around in the wind and sun with Ellie while Edmond and William threw the baseball. The sour liquid of my stomach as I write in the pre-dawn hours will likely not allow me to fall back asleep.

We loved each other all the way, totally tangled without hesitation. We did not want to play it safe just in case it did not work out. We were all in. I am not sure I could even find all the heartstrings or know which were mine and which were his. That ripping away from the love we shared here has been excruciating. The best meal we made burned, ruined. 

I do know our love continues. I feel that sweetness too, and it isn’t the same. This letting go of identity and familiarity continues to be a painful process. There is no getting around it. 

Memories are a double-edged sword. Some memories make us all laugh and bring joy, and invite Edmond into the room. Some sweet moments that arise are so sweet, I find myself pushing them away. Without memories, we have no meaning to all that has been. With them, at least in this moment when the gentleness of our life together shows up on the screen of my mind, I feel gutted.