Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

To grieve is to frighten the people you love. My behavior seems to have scared my husband’s name right out of my family’s vocabulary. They treat me like a patient afflicted with a nameless disease. But patient or not, they do not leave me in peace.

Nobody tells you that irrational hope is a side effect of grief. And they should because it is dangerous.

But grief torches your capacity for both sympathy and empathy. I am nothing but a selfish collection of exposed nerve endings.

For outsiders, the atrocity is limited to knowing I am hurting. For them it ends there. And I can’t blame them. They have their own lives and for them the nightmare is already over. They are able to return to normality. There is a door they can close.

Carrying on with life is unconscionable. I have taken up my new full-time position of Professional Mourner. There is no room for anything else. And, I want to remind her, to remind everyone, it has been just over a week.

There is a timeline to all this. I only have so long to work my way to wellness, to reach “better” before my support system fades to black as they tire of me, of my sorrow. The outpouring of love from my family and friends, it’s like a weight.

But grief does not operate in a silo; it sucks everything and everyone into a vortex and the only way to escape it if you are not directly affected is to distance yourself from it. I glance at Bee. I am not ready for her not to be here. Bee

with her angelic children and her living husband, makes me want to scream. I hate her in the way only a person whose life has ground to halt while everyone else’s continues can.

I would harness my patience and try to explain to Q that being a Black woman meant having to skate across a lifetime of eggshells or be painted unduly “angry” or “aggressive” even on days like that day, when anger and aggression were warranted.

Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much so that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you.

Even as I say this, it dawns on me that my support system is tiring of me.

Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you. You may not have even registered that you don’t laugh anymore—another point on the itemized list of things grief steals from you. When you do laugh, you will freeze and your blood will run a little colder and it will dawn on you that this simple act, an act you performed routinely in the Before, seems alien to you.

Gone are the untold number of chances to disappoint. I always expected Q to leave me. I just didn’t know he would leave everyone else at the same time.