Forgive me

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

There are so many pitfalls and landmines and unexpected jolts in random and seemingly safe places. With grief, I mean. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know I often (only?) write about grief lately. As a griever, I have to remember that grief is always with me, so pretty much all of my day-to-day activities will bump into it in some way. It takes a lot of energy to manage life in grief so you’ll forgive me if I don’t move at the pace I used to.

There are days when it feels like I’m moving in slow motion, but there are other times when the slow-motion acts as a steady hand on my shoulder when something tiny threatens to become something big. Like when I was working at my desk and my hands felt a little dry, so I grabbed the small tube of hand lotion I keep nearby. As I picked it up, I noticed the scent—rose--and time slowed for a second as a hint of a memory flickered at the edge of my brain. An image of the small round tin of Rose Salve Annie used occasionally appeared and time nearly ground to a halt as the memory drifted out as ethereally as it drifted in. Time slowed down and gave me a space in case it turned into something bigger that I needed to attend to.

You’ll forgive me if I seem distracted or sad.

Social media and email can be a real menace. Taking a break and scrolling through platforms meant to connect and share can bring jolts in their own way. Suddenly, I’ll see that Annie is following this account or liked a post. Still. Every groundbreaking new study or groundbreaking new treatment or groundbreaking new something is delivered to my feed on the regular—thanks, loads, algorithm. I’m so grateful that this is all available to people suffering from terrible disease and pain. It’s wonderful and overdue--let’s cure this thing already.

But, forgive me, sometimes it’s just too hard to see other people surviving.

Emails are also little pops of emotion. I remember one that showed up in my inbox and I could only see the first line of text—it said, “Dear cancer,”. . . Nope. I couldn’t go there, no matter how much I liked the writer’s other emails. The one that elicited a more visceral response from me was the one delivered to Annie’s inbox, which I still check. This particular email’s subject line said, “Are you still alive?” I sat stunned for what felt like five minutes before I opened it to see where it was from. And it was from no one, a bulk email sent to customers who hadn’t responded in a while. But what the hell kind of subject is that? So, I responded. I replied and said, “No, as a matter of fact she’s not. Signed, her mother.” It’s not everybody’s responsibility in the whole world to know everyone’s vital status but have a little sense. Even for bulk emails.

So, you’ll forgive me if my patience wears a little thin.

But I’m writing Annie’s book and I want to preserve her words and her dreams for Luca, so I go through everything—her emails, her notebooks, her papers. When I open the crates that protect the ephemera of her life, I know it’s coming. I’m walking into it. But I’m not always prepared, as when I found the page of her journal that detailed what she’d be when she was 50 years old. The page was blank—just washed out marks where her words once were. There was a reason it looked like that, of course—years earlier the journal had been in a box in the basement when it flooded during a spring storm. But, to me, looking at a page that should have been covered in ideas and plans and hopes, just felt like a mean joke.

So forgive me if I’m a little stuck.

A now-blank page from one of Annie’s journals.

However, it does feel incumbent on me to be aware of the conversations around grief. I believe we should talk about it—definitely. The irony is that even with so many resources out there in the form of podcasts and websites and experts that support living our grief, there are just as many messages that still sound like we should wrap that shit up and move on with our lives. Take, for example, the language in a recent famous newspaper’s article about a woman who had just broken a Guinness World Record even though her beloved husband had died less than two years earlier. Disturbingly titled “Dead Hang*,” the writer wrote: “but [she] isn’t a person to lose herself in grief” and thus was able to accomplish this goal quite literally in record time. As if losing herself in grief would have prevented this major accomplishment?

Why not lose yourself in grief? For some of us, it’s actually how we make it through the day—immersing and integrating our experience of grief into our daily living. And maybe we don’t feel lost at all, but in touch with deep and powerful energies that connect us to our losses. I’m not saying it’s not hard, but we either accept loss and grief as one of the ways of the world or we don’t.

Forgive me, but I’m just so tired of other people’s—and sometimes the world’s—hypocrisy.

*What kind of name is that for an exercise? Couldn’t they have called it the “gravity hang”?