How to let go
When Rusty died, in that instant, on the hospital bed, all I felt was a deepening hollow. Seconds later, a dam broke and the hollow was filled with an anguish so profound I fell to the floor shaking. Minutes later, I hunched over and held him in my arms. My hands gripped his body, his face alive one minute, lifeless the next, desperate to jerk him back to me. I didn’t want to let go.
Eventually I did, and a different journey began for me. In the preceding months I’ve done what I thought, felt I needed to do to get over Rusty’s premature death.
In the first month I was all efficiency: I took charge of Rusty’s funeral is his hometown in Loudoun County, Virginia; I organised the memorial service and reception in New York; I packed and dumped, and hoped the clearing of his physical objects would lead to a clearing of my emotional debris - the aftermath of a traumatic epilogue.
In the second month, I let my grief develop into full-length motion picture where I was the star, and the script a monologue of my sadness and isolation from the world. My head whizzed from thinking, obsessing from inside an emotional lockbox. My body whirred, buzzing with a lightness that only came from too little food and even less sleep. My heart, in its desperate loneliness, night after night sought out drunken fulfilment with drunk, faceless men in an attempt to replace what it had lost.
Nothing I’ve done has really helped me on this winding road. Part of this is because I think I’ve been entirely mistaken about where I actually want this road to take me.
At first, I clung to my grief as my only connection to Rusty. Grief was the one true expression of my love. “Moving on,” seemed impossible, if not irresponsible. They were two little, dirty words that would diminish the memory of our love, tarnish the purity of my pain, trivialise what I, what we, had gone through together as warriors against this unrelenting cancer.
At the height of my depression, however, all I wanted was to be able to move on. Life became the subsequent, more organic expression of that love, and so in the third month I busied myself with life, hoping that my now more conscious (and more conscientious) act of living would somehow prod my emotional self to move along with me.
It is only now, a subway ride ago, walking on 19th St in Chelsea in the summer heat, midway through my blueberry white tea, midway in the trenches of reaching the fourth month, that I realised I had missed a pivotal step going from emotional wreckage to embodying all the signs of a healthy, high-functioning individual.
I haven’t accepted what had happened. I still hadn’t let go.
Acceptance is a tricky devil. It can happen in a second, or it can take decades just to figure out what exactly you’re trying to accept. I don’t know if I’ve accepted Rusty’s death, and all that’s happened in the months and years leading up to it; I don’t know how long this step will take to reach, and complete; but I know, and I know it simply and absolutely, that at this moment, I’ve accomplished the first, most crucial act of acceptance: I understand.