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Likewise, I wanted my distress acknowledged, rather than beguiled away with promises that one day I’d “heal” or “move on.”
It was a cold spring. A bitter rain came down for days on end, as if the gods knew my sorrow.
“The thing is,” Liam kept saying, “she’s the one who made me better when I felt like this. And that only makes this worse.”
(One downside of feeling better had been that it was easier to pretend I was OK. Then work I couldn’t do would pile up.)
It’s easy, when you’re grieving, to resent your suffering. My grief was not ennobling me. It made me at times vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.
If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new
contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset.
The lesson lay in the empty chair at the dinner table. It was learned night after night, day after day.
And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.
Then came the realization that the nightmare was real. I had dreamed I’d watched my mother die. I had, in fact, watched my mother die.
But I experienced an apathy nearly as intense as the one I experienced right after my mother’s death. I couldn’t focus, and whenever I slept I dreamed of her.
. I look at our favorites, I try and read them, but without you they give me no pleasure. . . . It is impossible to think that I shall never sit with you again and hear your laugh. That every day for the rest of my life you will be away.
I KEPT REMEMBERING days I’d forgotten.
Yet I was ashamed of my pain; it seemed abnormal.
Now I was stupid with anger at myself for thinking I was handling anything well. It just meant I was hiding everything.
I thought I was prepared for my mother’s death. I knew it would happen. Yet the reality of her being dead was so different from her death.
YOU REMEMBER her in flashes. The flashes hurt. They light up your stomach. Then you breathe, look out again.
You are learning the narrative. You are establishing the catechism, responses to the questions:
And you are thinking in some chamber inside your heart: Fuck, fuck, fuck. How dare you turn pain to reason?
In those moments I want to hurt, like an outraged child in a sulk. But quickly a day passes and I’ve enjoyed myself in the sun, or at dinner, having a glass of wine, talking to friends, reading, talking, not thinking about death.
I am always wanting either to hide away or to plunge into a “systematic derangement of the senses,”
With other people, with strangers, I count the hours until I can go be alone and get back to my secret preoccupation, my romance with my lost mother.
it gently reminded me how small my grief was without diminishing its reality.
Ruins remind us that mortal time is only one kind of time, because, in their transitional state, they dramatize death. They embody what we know to be true only abstractly: that we and the things we make decay, and our whole history is a dot in time.
the paradoxical wealth that comes with emptiness.
Three-quarters of a year after a loss, the hardest part is the permanently transitional quality: you are neither accustomed to it nor in its fresh pangs.
I began to write, The loss doesn’t pass, but the anguish does—it subsides. Then I thought: Who am I to say?
For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.
the newly bereaved often crave more information about the dead—stories that show sides of the person you didn’t know.
it’s just less fun and less good without her.”
I realized it was what I’d been feeling—I have suddenly become an outsider among my peers. Because many had not gone through a terrible loss or a major illness, they were still operating as planners, coordinators, under the star of entitlement, from which I had been abruptly banished.
She was living gamely despite her approaching death and it hobbled my heart. I still find it terrifying to imagine. It is like picturing one’s slow self-erasure, noticing the disappearance, one day, of a pinkie, the next of a toe, then slowly, all the toes, all the fingers, a hand.
I was hurt to hear him say that dumping my mother’s possessions at the Goodwill didn’t upset him. It is upsetting, I thought. And you should be able to say so. We’re always judging one another, we mourners.
It is easier to live in emotional hiding than with the likelihood of a future heartbreak.
A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one because they bear testimonial force: This person existed.
Holiday joy now comes with shards of pain.
I suppose it is a metaphor for my loss: by now, grief is not a fever, it’s an amputation.
“I think it was an important thing to do, especially for you guys. You know, the Egyptians thought there were two kinds of time, one linear, and one cyclical, one ritualistic, one everyday. After a death, everyday time easily returns to take over and rule your life. It’s one of the reasons they had so many rituals, I’m now realizing, to deal with the dead—it was to push back everyday time and make space for contemplation of the cosmic. When you do something like this, you step outside of everyday time for a moment, and that’s good.”
But I’ve started to be sorrowful that there is no well-marked place to go to be with her.
People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off—OK, you’re OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know,” she said, looking sharply at me, “doesn’t mean you are in control of it, or that you know what’s going on.
While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night.”
I realized that I had been on some level confusing speech—or language—with feeling all year.
The moment when I flash upon my mother’s smile and face and realize she is dead, I experience the same lurch, the same confusion, the same sense of impossibility. A year ago collapses into yesterday in these moments. Periodically for the rest of my life, my mother’s death will seem like it took place yesterday.
Just as my mother would be, should I ever have children: an absence I thought about all the time.
What strange beauty surrounds us, and how impermanent our vision of it, how palpable our loss when those we love no longer can view the world they would adore.
But to expect grief to heal is to imagine that it is possible to stop loving, to reconcile yourself to the fact that the lost one is somewhere else. So heal isn’t the right word.
Instead of looking back at time, we could look down into it . . . and now again different features of the past—different sights and sounds and voices and dreams—would rise to the surface: rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away.
Certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
A memory reaches out and touches my mind and I live proximate to it all day long—talking,
Perhaps it is fitting, too, that while my grief has lessened, my sense of being motherless has intensified.
