Grief
Tags: Psychic Medium, Friendship, Death, Grief, Grief And Loss

I’d known this woman professionally for a few years and somehow we got dinner together after a work thing last night. Many people in my professional circle knew about the loss of my partner F, but it turned out that this woman hadn’t heard. So we started talking about him. She mentioned past lives at one point and I told her that I’d actually been so intrigued about it lately that I’d gone to two different medium/psychic type people. (That’s the sugar-coated version-when I do talk about my grief I try to tone down the rawness. The real story was that I was grieving him so much and I wanted absolutely nothing in my life other than to get in touch with him, somehow.) Among other things, I told her that they both said that he is still very much with me and has “committed to staying with me” until I have to leave this life! She then waved to the air behind me and said “hi F!”. I was like, “F, this is J” and she laughed and said, “nice to meet you!!!” I loved that little exchange so much. How she had a sense of humor and playfulness about it, instead of the awkwardness that I usually encounter when this comes up. I told her how F and I met — how I had been longing to tell that story again but no one ever asks! I miss talking about him, about us.

His death day is coming up on 6/17. My body knows, and I’ve found myself being tearful and feeling the grief so heavily again the last few days. (There’s been lots of ups and downs lately. Went through a period of very heavy grief and deep depression also because of the COVID situation back in March and April, then relief came May.) In fact, the first time in a few weeks that I was up all night crying, yearning for him, had somehow stemmed from happiness. It feels to me that the grief came out because any relatively more intense emotion that I feel would bring out my grief too. I wish that I could just have happiness, instead of having it lead to more sadness and grief (feels like punishment sometimes!), but that’s the way it is now. Even at this moment, I can feel the tears wanting to come without knowing why -just tears lurking inexplicably all the time. I do find it all quite strange approaching the 3rd anniversary of his death — how elusive and illogical grief is. How especially now that I have a bit of distance, I’m noticing that I have no control over my feelings at all. In the earlier days, I could point to the cause and effect of my feelings: I feel this because of that. But now it feels like my grief has a life of its own in spite of me. Obviously often I can still point to the reason why I’m sad or what it is about him that I miss. What it is that I miss and yearn for in my life now that he’s gone. But like this week, I’ve been in the best mood — so happy and light — yet the grief fights and fights to get out and insists on its presence to beknown.

Earlier in grief, I wrote incessantly about it. And then came a period when the grief became so heavy, I had become so depressed, that I had zero interest and energy to even talk or think about it. Then came a renewed interest and joy in being with the living again, and I needed to just enjoy the much-needed relief. When that first crying bout in a while hit a few nights ago, I was so taken by surprise that it even happened to begin with, I was even more shocked at how that feeling of being so alone was completely unchanged even when I had been feeling so much more in tune with the world and people.

I think I’ve begun to accept that this is my life now, but the part of me that likes to take the easy way still wishes that I didn’t have to deal with this anymore. Damn it, there should be a timeline, there should be a point where we should be spared from the pain anymore. People sometimes pressure grievers to “move on” after a reasonable period of time, little do they know how much we wish that were true. If only. I’d love it if my grief could magically go away after X number of years, when I could finally “move on” and think of my dead love with a smile on my face, while having gained all this strength and wisdom from having been put on my mettle. But as it is, there’s no putting this “behind” me. Three steps forward to live my own life without him, to find my way in this world is often pulled two steps back by this thing that happened — the loss and trauma and grief, and how it all intersects with everything that came before, and everything that will come to be. There’s no “behind”. Grief has erased time and chronology in my life.

In grief, I’m learning what it means to have to cultivate the kind of patience I’d never needed to deal with myself and the world. Whenever grief decides to surface, there’s nothing I can do but to wait for the wave to pass. I understand that there is indeed much wisdom to learn from this patience, from learning how to cultivate it. That it is in fact probably how life is supposed to be, and that those of us who mourn catastrophic losses are just forced to have to confront it in perhaps a more magnified way. But, but, but, “I just don’t wanna!!!” I even believe that the loss and all its aftermath is a gift-I wouldn’t be the same person now if I hadn’t been through this loss. And if one believes in the idea of past lives and such, perhaps I was the one who voluntarily signed up for this as a gift of a lesson for this lifetime? But living it, when the pain hits, it feels so unbearable that it’s hard to believe I would have been dumb enough to ask for this. Every time it happens again, the pain is just as bad. That’s why it feels so invalidating for me when people say “time heals” or “it gets better”. They take away from you the same pain that you still feel time and time again with no diminishment. What does get better is that the grief waves don’t come as often, but this feels permanent: it’s like you will never not need that reserve of energy to always be ready to cope with this on top of whatever else life brings too. How even the most amazing happiness, especially the most amazing happiness, could trigger it to scream and compete for your attention. How much control you need to give up on your emotional life, physical life, to always make room for it. How stalled and stuck it can make you feel, how you’re at its beck and call, because there is simply no turning away from it. I don’t think the weight of all this will ever go away (though I’m hoping the intensity will lessen), and I even appreciate that this is part of the unique beauty that comes with this pain, but it is difficult to bear. Relief comes though. When a wave subsides, you feel an equanimity so quiet inside you, internal space so vast as you’d never felt before, that you know it could have onl ycome from having been through the turmoil before. And you are grateful, inspired. That is until the next wave hits… And so it goes again.

(2020)