Two Lucky

When you’re grieving, any little thing can unravel you. All your senses are vulnerable. It can be a street sign, an old song, the touch of a man. Sometimes you know it’s coming, sometimes you don’t; either way, you try and pull yourself together. Stitch yourself up. Don’t make a scene, you say. Keep the drama inside.

The problem with keeping it inside, is that you rarely come back to it. You let life run on, occupy your days on the outside, happy - grateful, even - to anchor your thoughts on activities, errands that need to be done, not felt. At home, or at work, you arm yourself with lists, divide your time into sections of accomplishment. You tuck away your sadness like a flyaway strand of hair.

Much of what I’ve been doing since Rusty died has been exactly that. It’s not that I haven’t allowed myself to cry. I was, and continue to be proud of every single tear I give up to my love.

But after weeks and weeks of lying prostrate in your own pool of blubber, it gets a little too much. Emotional breakdowns are hard to endure. They drain the heck out of you. When you can’t seem to stop crying, it gets difficult even to breathe. You want to stop so you can get in a gasp of air. The day is just beginning; you want to shake it off, but here’s the problem: How do you shake off something when it’s coming from inside?

The quick answer is that you can’t. In trying to, I’ve ended up isolating my grief from myself. In trying to turn it into something separate from my existence, I’ve muddied my own attempts to heal.

Instead, I must make a map of my grief, to know its geography, understand its peaks and valleys. Acceptance can only come by allowing grief to become familiar - not to cling onto, but to hold gently. That is the first step to finding a path; it is my first step to becoming less afraid of this new world.

The English writer Daphne du Maurier, when her husband died, wrote:

“Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief from yourself. Little by little, just as the deaf, the blind, the handicapped develop with time an extra sense to balance disability, so the bereaved, the widowed, will find new strength, new vision, born of the very pain and loneliness which seem, at first, impossible to master.”

Little by little, I’m understanding the truth and necessity of her words. I’ve begun to pray, to meditate every morning when I wake up, and at night before I sleep.

When I close my eyes, I let my mind recall images of Rusty. I feel his skin, catch a whiff of his hair; there are times when I hear sobbing, only to realise seconds later that they are my own.

With each memory, I embrace it with all my heart. “Yes, I remember, I love you,” I say under my breath. I acknowledge it with a soft nod of my head, and let it pass. Sitting alone in my bedroom, I reach back into years of our life together.

When I next open my eyes, there is only a quiet stirring inside me. It’s been half an hour. My body feels lighter. For a while, my grief is at last silent, and at peace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.