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When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
Many Americans don’t wear black or beat their chests and wail in front of others. We may—I have done it—weep or despair, but we tend to do it alone, in the middle of the night.
Although we have become more open about everything from incest to sex addiction, grief remains strangely taboo. In our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely silent.
I had gone dead inside. Psychiatrists, I read later, call this “numbing out.” When you can’t deal with the pain of a situation, you shut down your emotions.
When people are hurting they cannot always comfort one another; it was true of us. We had the same injury and different symptoms.
(If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)
What are we to do with the knowledge that we die? What bargain do you make in your mind so as not to go crazy with fear of the predicament, a predicament none of us knowingly chose to enter?
I will carry this wound forever. It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools.
ONE OF THE GRUBBY TRUTHS about a loss is that you don’t just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive.
