Grief Changes: aka I'm pissed off that I still live in this crappy country called complicated grief from suicide loss but maybe things do change.
First, things are fine. Everyone is healthy and alive, and mid-pandemic, that is not something to take for granted.
Second, grief is an unfolding thing-- like a comically long devil's contract unspooling across the carpet-- you never signed it but are stuck with anyway, smeary black ink and a bloody handprint sealing the deal.
And I'm mulling that over and want to chew on my thoughts, here, longform, in bloggerspace.
It's a cliche that there are stages of grief. It's a given, a known, almost a punchline. In graphics describing the stages, they are as neat and orderly as a flow chart. First Denial that morphs into Anger, as you shake your fist at God. Then you beg and Bargain. But nothing changes-- God's face is impassive. You sink into the miserable, neverending reality of it in stage Depression, and then eventually you wash your face, and emerge bigger and better, sadder maybe, but wiser into the stage of Acceptance.
I mean, it's not wrong. Those are certainly all things that happen with death, with loss in general. Losing a marriage, a friendship, a religion, a self-identity-- you get on that same rollercoaster.
But living in that tsunami of overwhelm, the way that these feelings are heavy ugly lightning strikes, the way your heart is blasted and singed, your nervous system all razors and urchin spines and your body a cracked vessel-- seeing it so tidy is galling.
Complicated grief from Suicide is super fucking awful. Demonstrably it's a different beast from other grief. "One study suggests that 3 to 5 years is the time point at which grief after a suicide loss begins to integrate, raising the question of how the time frame used in discussions of normal and integrated grief applies to grief after suicide, and therefore what is the “normal” timeline for grief after suicide."
Can I confess that I hate this? I hate that I feel yoked with an extra-special extra-damaging extra-awful kind of grief. I hate it for myself because I want to be happy, and have a career, and have new relationships. But I feel like I am getting my liver gnawed out every day. Four years-- it's been four years and I am still just. Crushed. Every day.
And for my kids-- I am INDIGNANT. I am blazingly furious that they are saddled with the Extra Nasty Turbo Hell grief.
Like losing a parent isn't awful enough. Like losing your home, getting uprooted, changing schools every year isn't bad enough. Like having a single mom for a parent doesn't already set them up to fail, to break, to sink and slip through the cracks, to be perennially limping behind their peers with two (or more!) living parents.
It's crushingly, brutally unfair. And I have no ability to fix it. I am utterly swept up in the same turbulent water, and I can't be much of a safe harbor when I'm my own shipwreck.
Maybe I'm being melodramatic. It wouldn't be the first time, my inner voice eye-rolls.
I'm fine, the kids are fine. We have a roof over our heads, plenty of food, access to the outdoors, two cats, 6 chickens and a functioning car. I am determined to travel with them, to get them into good public schools, not actively hinder their progress, to hang out with them in nature and share good times with them.
But all my faillings as a single mom are yawning before me this morning. My 5 year old is begging me to play legos with her more (and I will, once my "writing" timer goes off. I will sit on the floor and prod at the pile of blocks and search for the flowers and wings amid the blocks and let her chatter and storytelling wash around me until her "play with mom" timer goes off again) and my ten year old wants to show me her writing project, and my 13 year old briefly emerged to make his oatmeal, and ignored me. But he sent me a text of a fantastic Supernatural fanvid, and grinned over my shoulder as I watched it. Last night's pizza delivery boxes from the sacrosanct tradition of Friday Pizza and Show Night are still on the breakfast table and I have reheated my coffee three times.
"The way you do one thing is the way you do everything." The disarray in the kitchen feels like disarray across the universe. The imperfect connection with the kids this morning feels like broken connection everywhere.
And I'm raw.
This week I had a weird grief experience. It was something NEW.
And I tell you what, to be this many years into it and to experience a NEW kind of grief? It's exhausting.
Lately my escapism has been tooth-crackingly sweet WanXian fanfiction based on the gloriously melodramatic Chinese TV show, "The Untamed."
I was happily reading a particularly adorable fic as the main characters came to trust each other, love each other and commit their lives to each other. The sweetness was just so delicious. This young new love, this trust, the baby steps towards building a life together-- and I realized something. I know how that felt.
This little realization sprouted, bloomed, and cracked me open. I know that feeling. I've done that. My god, I DID that. I was young and I fell in love with someone, with Matt, and I adored him utterly. I promised my whole life to him, and entrusted my heart to him.
I suddenly remembered how that felt-- to be 22, utterly in love, and completely sure that we will be able to face the future and all of its challenges because we will be together. I remembered how much I liked and adored him, how content we were with each other. I remembered the unshadowed sweetness of our first Christmas morning together in our house in Japan, huddled giggling at the heated kotatsu table, with a tiny rosemary bush from the corner hardware store as our Christmas tree, and a stack of waxy Japanese chocolate bars like miniature presents under the tree. We didn't have other presents, so we just put our favorite things around the wee bush. Matt's old binoculars in the brown leather case. My stack of Lymond books. My earrings like tiny ornaments on the rosemary branches. It was ridiculous and delightful, and perfect. We were entirely content with what we had, even with only $200 in yen to our name, and living in a semi-habitable old tatami-and-paper house in a rural Japanese village.
My god, it took my breath away to be there again.
I suddenly was that young wife again, as though she was transported through time and allowed to look out of my eyes. And the horror, the shock. "My husband killed himself." It was all new to her.
How could this have happened? How could this be real? How could we have gone from there, from that complete and sweet tenderness, to his violent and lonely death? And our lonely pain and struggle every since?
A few years after we married, we decided, blithely, to have kids. We were living on the Big Island, far from family but again-- content and self-contained in our love for each other. We went everywhere together, and he walked home from work for lunch every day. It will be wonderful to be parents, because we will be in it together! Of course we don't know what we're in for, but with love, we'll figure it out. That was the deal. That's what I was trusting, with my heart but also my body, and with this new life. We were promising to be our best selves for this new life. Together.
There is a picture of me that catches this moment of complete open trust, about 6 months pregnant with my oldest, in a pink polo shirt stretched taught over my earth-goddess belly. I'm leaning against a coconut tree at a little park on the Kohala coast-- a favorite spot where we'd go to watch whales and talk to ghosts. My cheeks are ruddy and my eyes bright with a sappy grin, and Matt is leaning next to me, hands gentle on my stomach, eyes soft.
That young woman briefly traveled forward in time, looked out of my eyes, and howled. No, no, no, no, no. The sheer disbelief, the audacity that this could be real.
We promised each other, we loved each other! I gave myself over, entirely, to his love and care. I held nothing back. Even when he scared me or worried me, even when he hurt me deeply and confused me, I always knew that he was Home. That we, together, were Home.
A gagging overwhelming wave of grief. Of sadness, and loss.
I've been in anger and hurt for years. I've been in slueth mode, trying to puzzle out why and how this happened. Why did he die? And I've been blazing along with hurt and anger as my engine, blasting and combusting me forward in time, getting me through moment after moment of survival. And now, with that fire dampened by time, and our continued survival a little more sure, suddenly the sadness hit.
My god, I loved him.
I loved him, and he died.
I loved him, and he killed himself.
This is hitting me like new information. I am stunned. My younger selves, that new wife, that new mother, are superimposed over me and I feel their raw shock and loss for the first time.
This is the cruelty of this complicated grief. Only now, YEARS later, did it finally hit me. My god, my husband is dead. How can this be real? How can this be real?
Maile is now reading a comic book in the living room as RJ tends his plants. Liko is dabbing at her tangled hair with a boar-bristle brush and watching Molly of Denali on my phone. I am sitting still, scowling at my laptop.
And a part of me, that young woman, invisible in my ribcage, is rocking back and forth, eyes blasted.
So. Yes.
Grief changes.
This is new.
I hate it.
But.
It's right. It feels like it was time. Like this is a part of the process I need to go through.
This is fanciful and more in line with my "aspiring someday fantasy author" side but I wonder if there is some time traveling that goes both ways with trauma.
I often time travel-- find my body hijacked into the past, reliving and reexperiencing the most devastating and scary moments.
But I wonder if this present me-- this haunted lonely 40 year old time travels too. If my younger selves caught glimpses of the future, and knew to cling hard, to take notes, to snap photos with a prescient dread.
Because I did. With a sense of fear, I aimed my camera at Matt constantly, and I wrote down the sweetest moments. He didn't keep a journal, but I wanted to keep every moment-- every quiet story time with the kids or cheerful check-in over coffee. Maybe losing my mom as a kid had taught me that good things can disappear, that the people you love can leave you forever, and that's why I watched and memorized him as thought I knew there would be a drought. I didn't know this would happen, but I was afraid it would. And maybe there was a whisper in the space time continuum. This won't last. This is the good old days.
I clung to him, while he was alive. No matter how he pushed me away, I always returned to him, because he was home. Because I had given myself to him, and kept nothing in reserve.
The last words I said to him were, "I love you."
I feel wrung out from grief. From the old angry blazing grief, that's been burning too hot all these years. And washed out by this new grief, this white-water river of sadness.
I want to somehow tie these thoughts together with a bow-- some silver lining. Some lesson learned. Some integration.
But I don't have one. Not today.
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