Context: What does a shift in your grief, even a tiny, momentary one, mean to you? What does it say about loss? Or Love?
You know how it is when you see something everyday and then one day you look at it, and you think, wait, did that always look like that?
That’s a good way to describe how a shift in my grief feels.
It’s like seeing a co-worker every day and only noticing that they got a new hair style or cut after they have had it for a few days.
After I found out about Sarah, Tyler and Lula, and until just after the celebration of life, I had a painful awareness of my grief. It was stuck in my soul like a splinter–raw, painful, and with varying degrees of pain and soreness depending on whether the splinter was bumped or not.
Until one day, I realized I wasn’t thinking about it constantly. The ache, the pain, the rawness went away, and I don’t know how long it was gone, but as soon as I realized it was gone, it was back, with its bratty little sibling, guilt.
How could I forget, for even a moment, the pain of this loss?
How could I be happy, for even a moment, when Sarah, Lula and Tyler are dead?
How could I not be wailing on the floor, beating my chest and renting my clothes (like my guilt EVEN knows what those things are!), when Arlo is now without his parents and sister?
Even typing this out is ridiculous.
Of course I can not think about it–why should I have to dwell on this terrible thing that has happened? Why can’t I allow myself a moment of happiness? A moment reprieve from the burning sadness? How could I berate myself for this?
It’s almost like the way our world works. It's expected that not only will we not forget their memory, but somehow we have to get over it too. I’m not sure how those two things are supposed to work together.
But I do feel guilt for not thinking about it all the time. I do feel like maybe I am not doing enough for their memory if I don’t think about them all the time. After all, one of the things we like to placate grief with is telling people that the person we lost will be alive forever in our memory. If that’s true, what happens when we are not actively experiencing grief anymore? What happens when it loses its intensity? What happens if we start to smile again, in spite of our grief?
Are we expected to wear mourning colors forever and sit in sadness our whole lives?
A shift in grief is not a bad thing. In my experience, particularly with old old grief, a shift in grief doesn’t mean that we don’t love the person we lost. It doesn’t mean that we have forgotten about them or don’t honor their memory. A shift in grief feels natural because in a lot of ways, our psyches can only hold grief so close, particularly when it’s a burning iron of grief, before we really get burnt badly. It’s a protective measure for our relationship to shift with grief.
Just because our relationship with grief changes doesn’t mean we have forgotten the missing person in our lives. It doesn’t mean we don’t love them. It has to change.
Because long term, we cannot survive with such an attitude toward grief.
My mother and I obviously went through grief when my father died. I didn’t get over it, exactly, but I realized that the best way to honor my dad was to try and live my life the way he would have wanted me to, and to live up to my potential. Maybe it’s because I was nearly 12 when it happened and my mom was an adult, but it seems like she never moved past the painful burning stage of grief.
She held the red hot poker of loss for so long that I don’t think she could even think of how to let go of it, for fear she would lose…everything. So she stayed angry and bitter, and it made it hard for anyone to get close to her.
I hope that I can leave room in my life for grief. I would hate to end up like my mother.
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