The Big G Word

Wading through the grief-mess.

I’m standing in a book shop, the inside rims of my sunglasses catching my tears at the opening lines of the poem Cariad Lloyd has put in the front her book ‘You Are Not Alone’.

“Welcome to the club,
I know you didn’t ask to be here…”

No I most certainly didn’t. And I’ve been stubbornly refusing to recognise that what I’m doing is grieving at all.

It’s been six and a half years since I last spoke to him. It’s been nearly 3 since he died. My friends said I seemed suspiciously stoic in the aftermath. Some ‘top up’ therapy (10 sessions should ‘do the trick’), deciding not to go to the funeral, prodding some old wounds and then jamming the ceiling hatch shut on the attic of fragmented memories.

Or so I thought.

Revisiting has been a word I’ve kept returning to over the past few months. Knowing I needed to revisit. When I’m more settled. When life is stiller. When I can create the right conditions. I kept telling myself.

My well-meaning manager in the cockpit trying to stay in control.

We’re bringing home a puppy on Monday, I sip my morning coffee on the world’s best terrace, I’ve discovered the majesty of jacaranda trees in bloom, I use my working hours towards something I believe in. Things are going well! The manager has done a good job at keeping this ship sailing.

And so the conditions were right.

And so, the leaden eyelid of grief closed down on my body. It’s time she said. You’re safe she said.

I was. I’d started therapy again. My partner was ready to hold me. I had the capacity and the courage.

Part of me was bracing for the deep dragging down that only those grieving can understand. In hindsight I see, ‘of course this was coming’.

But I still came into it with big WHATTHEFUCKISTHIS attitude. Am I peri-menopausal? Do I have an iron deficiency? Am I depressed?

(Fun fact, the same areas of your brain that are activated with depression are activated when you are grieving. The sense of hopelessness and lost-ness and futility? Grief and depression, one and the same!)

I was very still most days. Like my body was on another timezone. Groggy, muggy, foggy, fudgey, muffled. There was blankness inside, just reams of white paper.

Or never ending squiggles of biro. Not just how a room full of biro squiggles would look but the feeling of the act of making that pointless mess. Where monotony and chaos meet in this futile tangle.

My head was inside a sack of sawdust.

I was operating through a rain obscured windshield.

What is WRONG with me? I would ask my partner. Desperately yearning for a different answer to the one smacking me around my numb face.

I did not want to admit this was grief, because how in the hell do I grieve? My particular flavour is somewhat nuanced. Not just an ex-husband. Not just an abuser. Not just a childhood sweetheart. Not just an alcoholic.

Not just the loss of a life (his and mine). The loss extended to grief over lost time, putting my poor younger self through the hurt, the cruel words, the debt, the betrayal.

Was I even grieving him? Or was his death a layer on top of a grief I hadn’t yet unpicked?

(As I type this my shame is screaming at me to STOP TYPING, do not let people know this!)

But the blanket did not lift. The days became weeks and then months and my partner noticed how my lowly flickering spark was barely perceptible at a squint.

I had projects on that I once could only have dreamed of doing, and they just weren’t touching the sides. Joy wasn’t reaching me and that scared me.

I admitted something was wrong.

I told my therapist that I simply yearned for peace from this torment of shame and confusion. I’m ready to surrender. I’m ready to DO whatever I need to. I went to an energy healer, I had herb baths, I spoke to the moon, I spoke to my parts, I spoke to him!

I was reaching outwards to find a cooling gel. Something strong for my aching body that might wake me up and give me relief.

But at least I was reaching.

I finally told friends. I spoke to a wonderful coach who works with women dealing with the aftermath of leaving an addict. I told my new boss.

I stared at the grief section of the book shop I found myself in and gave my well-meaning manager a day off. She looked down at her white knuckled grip on the controls and gently released. She let me thumb my way through the first few pages of Cariad’s words on how to grieve, as the tears rolled down my cheeks.

I sat on the sofa yesterday on my 37th birthday reading the book I had now purchased, and writing in the margins.

“It was inevitable.” I wrote. Because a part of me waited for the day I would get that call. In a perfect world he’d have aced those 12 magic steps, written me and his brothers a lengthy and poetic apology and one day we’d have met for coffee and agreed we should never have dragged it out for so long.

But that was never going to happen. The writing was on the wall. And so was this grief.

I looked up from the pages with that unwelcome fist clogging my throat and saw my partner’s soft gaze. I admitted I was ashamed to still be grieving this. I listened as she reminded me again I had nothing to be… I know I know I told her. But my body doesn’t know. And I’m trying.

How can I tell that something’s shifted? It’s a feeling of getting up from the mat. An impetus to peek at the title of the chapter ahead. I can tell I’m dreaming again, writing my name on the sign up sheet. Letting some light into the attic.

Will this sparkly momentum last? Maybe today I’ll enjoy planning a future ahead. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take it slower.

But I’m realising it’s more a question of ‘how might you like to be with your grief today?’ Is there a little space to breathe around it? Can it go for a boogie at a piano bar?

I might take me and my grief-mess on a little plod to my local park, marvel at the lilac of the falling blossom littering the gravel of the pathways, show it that life continues to stretch out around us.

I see now that grief isn’t something to solve. It likes to be understood and heard but it doesn’t get finished.

As much as I hate this to be true, my younger self who shared a life with him is a part of me. His death is a part of my story. The impact of what happened, and what didn’t, is an inextricable knotty thread in amongst the web of my weave.

This ongoing revisiting has taught me to soften a little more. To look my gremlin in its deep black eyes and find some marginal acceptance that he’s not going anywhere. Just like my leg, or my heart or my eyelashes aren’t.

For now I’ll pat my grief mess on the back for writing this essay, I’ll thank you all for listening and I’ll read a little more of Cariad’s soothing remedies.

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It would be an honour to hear from any fellow grievers of complicated loss, whatever your grief mess looks like today. Sending love.