I’ve started this entry a number of ways. I can’t seem to focus. I have lots I’ve been thinking about, stuff I want to talk over with you, but when I shine a light on one piece in order to examine it more closely, that part evaporates.
This was my brain.
And this is my brain on grief — rapped smartly against an immovable object, whisked around a few times and poured — pssssssssttt — into the heat.
Any questions?
I read Patrick Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi, describe it this way in The Week, 2/5/10: “Looking back [over two years of living with his pancreatic cancer], all the sadness and grief that had come before he passed away now looks like an intellectual concept. The kind of grief I experienced after he was gone was literally on a cellular level. It’s something deep inside that you have no control over. …I can still feel the contour of his hand in mine.”
Loss on a cellular level. That’s how deep it runs. When two become one in marriage, then the death of one of those two really is like losing half of yourself. It’s not merely surface adjustments—Oh, now it’s on me to get the car inspected…Hey, guess I cut the grass now, too—though it certainly does involve that. It actually cuts to the heart of who you are as a person, where you’ve been, where you’re going, how you process life.
Awareness of exactly what you’ve lost intrudes on you at random times and for the slightest of reasons — at the sight of, say, Harvard beets or a flannel shirt or a set of clamps, or at the smell of wet newsprint or sawdust or Old Bay. It descends on you without notice, plunging you into deep water where you can’t hear or see too much but the vivid memory of that moment. It’s as if you are in a bubble, and everyone else is out there, and you are in isolation or off-stage in a soundproof booth.
You realize with some surprise that you are still here and your loved one is still not; a casual observer might think you have moved on and are coping fairly well, especially after the loss ceases to be news and slides into being the way of things. On the contrary, you marvel to realize that you can both carry on a conversation in the here and now while drifting to the place in your life where the one you loved was around, doing ordinary stuff near you. This, it turns out, is anything but ordinary.
It’s tempting to want to tie up these posts on an up note, tucking in the edges, trimming off the ragged pieces. But the truth is that grief is a work in process. It runs deep and in all directions. As the saying goes, Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.
Which is why I’m comforted knowing God says He keeps in perfect peace the one who has his or her mind set on Him (Isaiah 26: 3).
I’m going to try to remember that!