Not Better
This unrelenting Texas summertime heat, the triple digits for so many days and weeks in a row, might just be a near match for my intense grief. The last two weeks have been hard. Or has it been three? It has all been so very painful, all 15 weeks and 5 days of living without E. I am tired of crying and feeling so much all the time.
Grief is physical as much as it is emotional. My hair has fallen out. I finally had a period after three months of not having had one. My eyes are so swollen, maybe forever swollen. The congestion is a constant in my chest and head from all the crying. My upper back aches and stings with muscle spasm along my spine, between my shoulder blades, and up my neck. My throat cannot open fully to find the words or the scream, and so it joins my jaw and tightens. The heaviest grief sits in the back of the heart. In Chinese medicine, grief is associated with our lungs. My heart and lungs and body are doing their best under the circumstances.
I know it is hard to hear, to continue to witness. But, this still hurts like hell, and it is not better. I know there have been other losses in our community. Big losses call for big love and support. I know my loss is the biggest loss for me, and that it does not eclipse the pain others feel when their grief is intense. I know that for most people. being with others in deep pain is excruciating. For some, it is impossible and must be avoided. Our cultural condition and the status quo do not prepare us with skill and tolerance for feeling this kind of pain with others. We suffer from a collective lack of imagination—imagining how other’s feel and feeling it too— because our own ability to empathize so deeply terrifies us. Humans do actually come biologically equipped to share and connect over all emotions, not just the pleasant ones. We are hard wired for it. However, for so many reasons we have lost our way through grief as a community.
People in power and authority who are part of the systems that deal with death often have not dealt with their own trauma, pain, and grief, and so they cannot show up for those of us swimming in it. Personally, I appreciate direct communication. You cannot soften the blow. There is no making this worse or better. Edmond is dead, and it fucking sucks, and there is no way around it. So, speaking plainly and truthfully meets me where I am. My mind actually cannot absorb much more beyond the information I need to move through they systems that regulate our existence and non-existence. I am not angry with those who cannot do this with me, who cannot bear witness to intense pain, and prefer to dance around my appendages of pain with placations. Ultimately, I have compassion for them and their untended pain that must be enormous and terrifying to not have been addressed over their lifetime and is likely buried deep inside their pockets of the past.
There is anger for sure. I am angry at some of the (well intentioned) behaviors and actions from some who perpetuate a systemic imagination problem within our fear-based culture. Most of the anger that comes up for me has been sidelined, pushed off to the edges of this horrible path I am on. If it is still there when I have capacity to work within the periphery, I will deal with it. I will speak to anyone, particularly professionals, willing to hear direct feedback about how we might be better to each other during intense grief. I care about our connection enough to want to repair and sustain our relationship, even if it means having a hard conversation, and even if it means not having a hard conversation because there is not mutuality in the capacity and desire to speak plainly about pain of this sort. I cannot stand the thought of one more disconnection.
I get it. Sometimes, the pain is more than we can sustain, and so we have to lock it up. I can understand how these thins happen over our lifetime, how that room where we keep the horrific and traumatic can become impossible to tend. The pain is unbearable at times. It is too much. The other day, a Tuesday in fact, it was way too much. I was just so damn tired of feeling so much, at such an intensity for so long. Having shed too many tears, I decided to set the pain aside. I poured myself a glass of sparkling wine and ended the day at 4:30pm. I was done with all the hard feelings for the day. They were waiting for me the next day, leftovers and fresh ones. I am not quitting permanently because I have decided to stay. But, I did quit for the day. It has to be done sometimes, the quitting for the day or even a few days.
Grief is also psychic. It plays with the mind, taking up too much space, commandeering memory and processing speed. I ask the same question again, forget to do what is on my list even though I also have a reminder on my phone. My mind tricks me into thinking this will end or go away or get better. It will not. Some part of my mind, the part that wants to survive at all costs, pushes me to the next mile marker. Something in me keeps looking for the next place to put my foot so that I take steps into the day: Use the bathroom, wash my face, make coffee. And the coffee has not been good. I have tried all the ways, but it isn’t satisfying. Like this grief, it isn’t getting better with more tending or time. The coffee isn’t better not only because E isn’t making it, and he isn’t here next to me to drink a cup. The coffee doesn’t taste right, and I don’t even enjoy it. I might even quit coffee.
The survivor me makes meals for my kids, takes them to their camp or makes their chore list for the day, walks the dogs, adds items to the grocery list, does the laundry, and goes to sleep. Survivor me talks to an attorney, a financial planner, looks at bank accounts, pays bills, waits for updated death certificates. Survivor me double checks with the funeral/cremation home about the death certificates to find out I have to order the new ones that list his cause of death from the state of Texas, so I do. It will take 20-25 business days for the new death certificates to arrive. I am grateful for people who give me tasks to complete, one thing at a time. I am not even upset at the lengthy time it takes for some things to get done. The slowness and inefficiency of bureaucracy serves my resistance to moving too quickly or at all, and it keeps the change that inevitably happens a little further off.
I see clients and that feels different somehow. It is not a silver lining. It is not better. But, it is the same presence I have with my children or loved ones. There is a deeper purpose in those relationships, something rooted. We are all in this together on the same ship surviving life at sea, in a riptide, or washed ashore on an island, and so we join hands. This sense of purpose and connection are why I have chosen to stay. It is how I am able to stay, to allow survivor me to guide my next step.
There is not one thing about Edmond’s death and his not being here that will ever be better. There is no silver lining. I am grateful for him, his existence, our relationship, our children, our time. But, there is no silver lining to his permanent absence. I will never stop wishing he were still here. Never.
Do not even about “God’s plan” with me, or that sidelined anger will come front and center. There is not a lesson or learning in his death. It is terrible, awful, and without a moral or happy ending. We don’t live in a more present purposeful way because we had already found ourselves on that path together. His death simply made our beautiful, meaningful, imperfect life together stop.
Nostalgia is the emotional cancer that consumes me. I am haunted by the beautiful memories, flashes, smells, sounds, visuals, tastes, textures, and dreams. The way the road sounds under the tires of my car, the rhythmic beat of rubber and road in the heat of summertime, it should have been our road trip and drive to visit my daughter in Bastrop for the day. He should have been driving with his hand in mine, our clasp resting on my thigh. The sun vanishing on the day, poorly hidden behind scattered clouds, should have been a beauty that we witnessed together. So many road trips and day drives into the Hill Country that we loved and that loved us back will never ever happen again. The hills, rivers, lakes, limestone, and I have been deserted. I cannot recall the historical dates and facts Edmond recited like it was his own story. I don't even care to remember. It hurts too much and my mind cannot find things like it used to. What is the point of the stories of this land and its people if he is not here to tell them?
What we did together and what we were going to do eats away at the fabric of joy and hope that used to live and grow wildly inside of me. The internal landscape is not much different than the garden-scape outside my kitchen window, drought stricken and barren. Even the weeds look pitiful and thirsty. The figs might not survive, and I don’t have the energy to save them. Maybe the birds will take them away so I do not have to look at what E and I would have enjoyed in bounty for the first time since we planted the tree.
My tolerance for change of any kind is severely diminished. My restricted ability to take in one more thing that says life continues without Edmond guts me and nauseates me. The new stop sign on CR 1492 at Chaparral did in fact stop me in my tracks both out of my tendency to obey traffic rules and my shock at its invasion of the familiar. That is our road where he ran with and without our dogs, where we walked together for over 17 years. We walked that road through my last two pregnancies. He walked so slowly as I lumbered in the last days before William was born. We made it all the way to the river with our dog Zeke. I know it took forever, and he was so patient. I sat there at the river’s edge on a large rock while he went to get the car to bring me home and then to brunch at the Leaning Pear. He insisted on getting the car, and I enjoyed the quiet by the river.
Damn it.
Why are we not laughing about this together right now? Why can’t we cuss the speeding cars whose drivers do not appreciate the slower pace and beauty of this landscape? You were a more emphatic curser than me, but I was at least catching up in my lengthily descriptive curses. Are you and Zeke, our famously fabulous lab, together now? I miss you both tremendously, forever. It is so hard to see our beautiful girl get braces, see her face and body changing without you here to appreciate what only parents can. And, William, he is so handsome and getting more muscular and strong in his growing teenage boy body. I wish you were here with me like you were for so long and not nearly long enough to enjoy these changes. I am aching in the changes that come developmentally and with a life that goes on. I love you. I miss you.
Lately, I struggle again with abandonment. It isn’t true that he abandoned me, at least not willingly. But the feeling is real. The left behind aloneness is palpable. I cannot even find him in my dreams for the last few weeks. Each morning, I review the images, messages, and strange scenes from the night before. Scouring forward and backward over the night’s reels, he is nowhere. I have been forsaken even in dreamtime.
Where are you? Are you with me and I just cannot feel you through this pain? The kids hear you and feel you when you play games with electricity. Jade and Ellie heard you hush them when they were chattering and eating in the kitchen at 2am the other night because I was trying to sleep. I wish I could feel your powerful touch, smell you or your good coffee again. When will you come see me? The dogs miss you, too. I am not you. Ruby-the-90-pound-lap-dog does not even attempt her move that always worked on you. Bayou misses running with you. Buck misses his rough and tumble play-person. I have apologized to them for not being you, for your absence, for what I cannot give them that you did. There are so many dogs here that miss you. Your people ache for you, too. My heart cannot stop its ache.
This last, long stint of sadness, sorrow, and crying feels like a an enormous, constant wave of grief, a riptide pulling me out to sea. I have mostly allowed it to carry me without resisting. It is the only way to not get pulled under, I think. Those who know the water ways used to tell us to swim at a diagonal toward the shore to escape a riptide. Now, new technology says that the way out of a riptide is to surrender, relax into it, float until it spits you out. I learned this when I was in Florida this summer. My outdated swimming rules were updated with this important information that feels so intuitive now that I consider it. When will this riptide spit me out?
Resistance to natural forces or acts of God are typically futile if not deadly. We cannot over power a hurricane, tornado, or tidal wave. When it is man versus nature, nature always wins. Grief is Nature, a powerful force of nature, the nature of loving. All that we love will die, and we love anyway. It is our nature.
I was writing in my journal document on my Mac, and out of nowhere an ad began to play from a thesaurus tab on my search engine that was not open on the desktop but in the gutter at the bottom of my screen. I heard a truck backup beeping noise began, and before I could pull up the tab to close it down a man’s voice says “You deserve better.” …. I do. Or at least I want better, I want him here, that would be the only way to make this better.
To my friends, my Soul-People, thank you for listening to me, hearing and seeing me and this awful painful grief. Thank you for not looking away. Thank you for reaching out because you can hear my grief calling when I cannot pick up the phone or text. Your hand touches me in this tangle ball and holds me until I feel not so alone. It helps, allows me to release what I cannot carry any longer, what is too heavy, what burdens my breathing and body. There is relief in the unloading of what has exceeded my capacity, for a little more space at the top of the dark, damp cave. I can sip air again until the next time I need your witness and willingness to feel with me.