Reflections on grief, healing and transformation
Tags: Grief, Transformation, Healing, Parents

# 8 The world outside, the world inside

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Some may say I got off easy, and many times, I’ve said it myself. Last year, I was living through a personal crisis, but I was also raising a beautiful child whom I delighted in. I was being cherished by the most wonderful partner you could ask for. I was employed, with food to eat and all my things around me. I was quarantined from the pandemic in a house with a balcony that dried clean clothes in the sun and let in fresh breeze in whispers and gusts. I was and am grateful for these and many other things. However, gratitude and loss can and do keep each other company. Many times, I chastised myself for my inability and my unwillingness to “get over the dad thing, my god.” I read the news and told myself, Your problems are nothing compared to what’s going on out there.

It wasn’t at all healthy, and it wasn’t very self-care of me, but that was the bold truth. I framed my personal grief as an interruption to the universal grief outside. I resisted my diagnosis at my therapy sessions, saying “other people have it so much worse,” or “I can do everything I’m supposed to.” My therapist told me that trauma has many forms and shapes. She said that I like all children, learned to cope and adapt to my environment, but it didn’t necessarily make me stronger, more resilient or healthy. Well then, I had said, it’s terrible to have to come to terms with my trauma at such an inconvenient time. The world outside needed my politics, my outrage, my compassion. It didn’t need my crying about my father or my struggle to rework dynamics with my mother. In truth, the world needs me (and you), to take care of the self. To rest, recover and heal at a pace we determine. Yes, from my privileged position in the early months of the pandemic, I was a part of collective fear, anxiety, grief and uncertainty. I was also staring down the crooked roadmap of many of my life’s defining moments — my parents’ divorce, the sudden unexplained move to a whole new continent when I was 8 (“We’re getting passports because we’re going for a holiday. Don’t you like holidays?), having to grow up too fast and before I was ready, being grabbed by a man on a cycle when I was 12”. Both these states co-existed. Both these states were profoundly true.

In biology, detritus is the dead particulate organic material left behind by an organism — leaf litter, a layer of soil right under a blanket of leaves, the stubborn parts of our physical bodies that don’t disappear serenely into the earth, water or air when we die. In other words, a stubborn reminder of what once was. Grief forced me to look for who was fomenting under the blanket of my many traumas. Who would I find? I waded through each day, searching for her against a backdrop of a global tragedy that was changing many lives. I learned that sorrow is not obligated to make you stronger or wiser or tougher. It wasn’t my burden to feel responsible for mending a relationship with a parent when it was already irreparably broken, for somehow healing and comforting a world out there that was teetering on the wind-whipped edge. I was only responsible for myself and my child and that was okay.

Many months into therapy, just after I learned that my father’s sixth child (his third with his new wife) was to be born, my therapist asked me why I was holding on so tight with both hands. In my search for the answer, I realized something heart-breaking. I was afraid that if I cut ties completely, I would regret it when my father died. “I still have so much to say,” I said. She asked if what I had to say would change the dishonesty, the deceit, the power games, and the abandonment. She asked if the questions I had were designed to make it all go away. I realized that they were.

“You know,” she said, “you can start the process of mourning someone before they die.”

I had always known this, but I guess I had needed someone to say it.