The Wisdom of Grief

The Only Way Out Is Through

October 11^th my dad passed away. We had the service Wednesday and cleaned out his apartment the rest of the week and weekend. Monday I delivered cookies to his wonderful girlfriend and the staff of the assisted living center where he lived.

Everything is past tense. It is surreal. I cannot stop by or call.

I have work, kids doctor’s appointments, soccer, lacrosse and band practice. I have dinners and lunches to make, groceries to buy, a house to run.

Grief rides shotgun.

There are brief leaks in my efficiency machine. Uncontrollable bursts of impatience, sadness, exhaustion and overwhelming gratitude. But mostly grief allows me to drive and is respectful of our agenda.

Friday to Sunday we have to fly to Chicago for the wedding of our dear friends and Leo’s godparents, only daughter. We go. Unsteady, but sure it is the right thing to do. My dad would have wanted us to celebrate their joy over our loss.

Joe and I dance like we did at our wedding in 2003. Filled with joy and light-hearted freedom as if inside these movements we might be able to temporarily live outside time.

Live in a bubble of being.

We sit down and I remember how much my dad loved to dance. It makes me smile. Perhaps he can see us. He’d be overjoyed.

There are these moments, wherein I feel like I am with him, wherever he is, looking down on the scene that is my life and smiling. It is a peaceful oneness. A kind of spiritual union disconnected from time and need and longing.

And then we depart.

At the airport, before we lift off into that liminal space between leaving and arriving, it breaks wide open. The grief. His death. The way it all happened. The brevity. The finality. The reality.

There is no saying no.

No, I will do this later. No, I will wait for a better time. No, I will not do this in an airport full of people. Grief has waited for me. And now I will make space for it. I know we will be spending time together the next few weeks and months and years.

I know grief to be one of my closest friends.

I know this from my moms passing. And my poppop. And our dogs Wally and Otto. It is a strangely textured thing, grief. Vastly different for each soul. And shifting as time elapses.

Sometimes a dull ache: sometimes breath-takingly sharp jabs. Sometimes it comes sporadically in devastating tidal waves: others in a low-hanging perpetual fog. But regardless of how it enters or how long it stays there is always one truth.

Until I let it in, there is no letting it go.

And without letting it go, nothing new can come in.

Or rather nothing new can be wholly felt. Life comes in, of course, because time does not stop. But the ability to soak in its warmth, revel in its brilliance or navigate its complex mystery is compromised at best, paralyzed at worst.

It is like living in emotional limbo.

Grief is the only springboard into cleanly moving forward.

And grief, not just for the big D deaths in our life, but also for smaller losses along the way. The stages of childhood, fading friendships, old versions of our selves that must evolve or grow stagnant.

The only way to keep shining is to keep grieving.

Everyone, these days, wants to be happy all the time.

There is an underlying, unspoken but very clear message: Buck up! Get on it with it! Don’t dwell. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Don’t be such a baby. Sure, if someone actually dies, you can be sad. In fact take a full week of grace, maybe two.

But then, game on. Get back in it or be left out of it. Can’t live in the past.

We too, are most definitely a family of go-go-go. It was the rally cry of my youth and it runs in my DNA. Joe and the boys are definitely subject to a lot of let’s do this thing!

However, nothing trumps taking time-outs to process emotional complexities.

Absolutely nothing.

I have learned over the past four or so decades to recognize signs that I am stuck in a quagmire of unresolved feelings by a number of signs:

I am easily irritated or impatience, act dejected and quiet, bump my knees into furniture, power-eat cashews, almonds and pistachios and/or bounce between over-accomplishing and being catastrophically tired.

This happens with Joe and the boys too.

Not so much the overeating nuts or having spatial challenges issues, but definitely acting impatient, dejected and detached.

Leo was acting this way when we got home on Sunday. As if he hadn’t slept in days and was being hit by a tidal wave of too much.

Too much everything.

I know this feeling well. It feels insurmountable. Unconquerable. Bigger than human tools can fix. But I know if I keep looking for a loose thread, we can untangle the hairball of overwhelm.

After we talked for a while sitting side by side holding hands, Leo let it go. He had a hard time with us being gone but knew there was nothing he could do about it until we got home.

Leo and I are great at handling extreme stress and crisis. We hunker down, get real calm, stay focused on what needs to happen and get it done.

But the aftermath is harrowing.

We break down.

And so it all came crashing down, over ice cream Sunday afternoon. The squabbles with his brother and never wanting Finn to get in trouble so always taking the higher ground and not being able to communicate with our sitter the way he does with me.

He is also eleven years old and beginning, without fully understanding, to transition into a different version of himself. This transition is confusing and unsettling. He longs to be closer to us, to sleep with us every night, to spend more time together.

He misses us, even when we are right there.

It is crushing.

I love this boy who I snuggle with on the couch and spoon as he goes to sleep and play with his hair and give him back scratches, hold his hand when we walk, this boy who asks for hugs in the middle of breakfast when he knows he is feeling off.

To know, at some point in the not too distant future, this beautifully intimate physical connection, will transition into something different is heartbreaking.

I know with every loss, I gain something new. And the harder you love, the harder the loss. And the harder the loss the greater the need for grieving, but it still sucks.

So, we are both grieving.

And just in case this wasn’t enough. Life always happens all at once. He had dream Sunday night that left him crying and sleepless.

At first he wouldn’t tell me. Too disturbing. Worried about upsetting me. I told him I wasn’t scared and that all dreams are messages we are giving ourselves. Our rational waking minds can’t always process complicated soul guidance so our dreams and nightmares help give us clues.

But it’s our job to decipher to them.

And the best way I know to do that is just to ask directly.

So, in tears Leo relayed his dream. His brother Finn fell down the stairs and became mostly paralyzed having to live in a wheelchair only able to articulate one-syllable words. Leo was at the bottom of the stairs so could only watch it happen.

I held his hand, squeezed it tighter and said okay we are going to dig in because that is not going to happen and I think The Finn of your dream has a message. I will ask too.

Leo and I became quiet for several minutes.

We asked the dream to tell us what we needed to know. Leo said he was told that of he doesn’t pay more attention to his emotional stairs he will end up hurting his emotional self. I got something similar.

The Finn in the dream told me that Leo has a big piece of Finn inside him (a fun, silly, irreverent, adventurous, free range spirit) and if he doesn’t let that part of him out, let that part of him thrive, he will reduce himself to a fraction of who he can be.

He will make his voice very small; his actions very limited.

This message was particularly striking to me as I am currently reading Elizabeth Lesser’s novel, Marrow, and she relays the lifetime of difficulty siblings have undoing the roles they are given as children.

I told Leo he is not meant to just be the first-born responsible, academically driven, team sports driven child.

He contains multitudes.

He is bigger than he can possibly imagine.

We all are.

We don’t know how big until we are forced to lose what we cannot imagine and after a while, after resisting and ignoring, denying and collapsing under the weight of grief, we begin to grow into a widening or deepening of our self.

We become what we didn’t know we could.