Grief Is Like A Missing Couch
April 2nd, 2020:
I’m getting that sinking feeling. The one where you can see the big decision rising up to meet you like the sun on the horizon or an exit on the highway. I feel trapped now. I’m trying hard not to be doom and gloom but I hate my work environment, my pay, so much. No one is hiring right now. Any application I might put in is likely to get washed right down the gutter. And it feels like there’s no time. I’m coming up on 1 year at my job with no real hope of a pay increase and more realistically I could be let go at any time. In the midst of it all, I’m trying really hard to be grateful. I read an interview by Scott Berinato with author David Kessler from the Harvard Business Review titled: “That Discomfort Your Feeling Is Grief”. It of course hadn’t occurred to me that my feelings and reactions to this pandemic could be characterized as grief. It sounded like an overreaction but when I thought back on my experiences with grief, grieving relationships, people, experiences, things; it really seemed to make sense. When my grandfather was dying from cancer I distinctly remember feeling not unlike how I feel now, like the road is rising up to meet me, like something is coming up behind me, tipping me off the edge of the earth. Right before things started Getting Serious I did honestly feel like shit was coming together in my life. I had more morning time, I was refocusing (again) on my happiness and feeling my best rather than how others saw me. I was actually speaking honestly and more in-depth with my therapist. Mediating? check. Journaling? check. Taking long warm baths? check. Being vulnerable? CHECK. This is nostalgia talking but I feel like I was crushing it. Or at least on my way to crushing it. And now things are at a screeching halt. The grief I feel now feels eerily familiar to how I felt When my grandfather went to the hospital for the last time. He had been sick for two years, with a brief period of being cancer-free and recovering in the middle. It came back when I was in college and when my mom told me that May, I had to make peace with the idea that the strongest person I knew was dying. Right before his passing, I was gone and out of the house all the time to escape my suffocating home-life in an apartment that would be big if it wasn’t crammed full of people with their own excuses for being there, mostly related to my dying grandfather, there wasn’t room for me. Then he was ‘in the hospital’ and I was left behind– floating. I was probably only there a couple of days but time began to loop and I was stuck there in our apartment, taking care of kids (a collection of cousins and my two siblings), sitting on the couch, cooking, staying distracted. The record needle gets set back, and the bridge plays over and over. And time never moved. Someone, I couldn’t tell you who, finally came after a while to collect the kids for some excursion and the house was empty. I was supposed to wait for them to come back but I took the opportunity to run to my boyfriend's house because I just couldn’t stand sitting around waiting anymore and I resented being relegated to being the babysitter. I got a call that next morning around almost 6 am. My mom called my phone which I ignored, thinking I was going to be reprimanded for not being around to babysit. She called me twice and then called my boyfriend. I could hear her voice as he answered and he handed me the phone. She said she wasn’t mad or anything but that I needed to come home right then. My mom isn’t the type to lie about being mad, so I knew my Grandpa was gone. My boyfriend drove me home mostly in silence. I remember staring ahead at the road thinking it was too soon to cry, feeling like I needed to save my tears. Time hadn’t moved yet. Maybe I subconsciously thought that If I froze then what was happening would stop. The sky was pale periwinkle blue and there was something jade green whizzing past the windows. Maybe a house or the wet spring grass. I don’t remember anything after staring out the front window, not walking up to the door, or the first thing I did or said once inside. I know I cried. Harder than I had in a while. It wasn’t that time so much moved as that it shattered. My grandpa’s death is the most immediate loss I have suffered to date but it allowed me to imagine too well how it would feel for my mom, my sister, my little brother to be gone and what exactly I would lose. It gave me a new thing to be anxious about, especially with all the school shootings and both my siblings being school-aged. It also gave me a new capacity for thankfulness. For waking up and doing what David Kessler describes as “coming into the present”. I’m thankful for time that moves at all. Now gives me that same anxiety, of being simultaneously in and out of control because it seems the only thing you can control is how much you worry and that maybe if you worry enough the universe will know to protect what’s precious to you, specifically. But there’s a hole in that logic because of all the people that have died thus far, have their families not worried? So this anxiety sits on my shoulder, day in and day out. And I hear how we are learning how fewer and fewer groups of people are “safe” from this. I’m 23 so I’ve never been in a pandemic. This is one of, if not the most serious and immediately impactful event I have ever lived through. My adult coping mechanisms for grounding and being realistic are somewhat limited. In the HBR article, the author outlines the five stages that most are familiar with: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Sadness, and Acceptance. That morning in May I felt numb. It was numbness I can now recognize as my brain trying to protect me from pain. Right now I keep numb. Mostly to escape the suffocating feeling that pervades every single social media platform. The thing I used to use to numb is doing the un-numbing. Places that I didn’t think would be bad or would be at least predictable are equally gut-wrenching.
July 22nd, 2020:
It feels weird to grow up and learn very concretely that perhaps there is no such thing as always safe or well, or protected. That there is always something that can get to us. Not to diminish the plight of the vulnerable, I recognize that is who is really at risk here, those without basic health insurance, jobs, income, homes, etc. It’s more indicative of the bargaining step that people often do in circumstances involving death and survival; that “If I can just get to the next rung of the ladder I might be safe, I might be okay.” Right now it feels like I have to process grief on top of grief. Some of it feels like not Real Grief but petty grief for my old way of life. Grief for the comfort of eating at my favorite places and breathing public air without the fear of inhaling something deadly and invisible and latent. The thing that is misleading about grief is that like many mental-emotional processes, you can’t just go through once. You roll through your own order of stages, skipping some, repeating others. Kessler mentions this non-linear process as ‘scaffolding’ for understanding your grief and dealing with it. Trying to deal with grief for me is usually jarring at first. Someone is there and then just not. It’s like walking into your house and your couch is gone. Sure, you can live without your couch but it’s hard because the couch is what helps it be a home. And you were expecting to have a couch. Maybe even after sitting on folding chairs for so long, you forget what it feels like to have a couch and that might be easier except you probably won’t actually forget. Not being able to forget something seems like a sure way to becoming callous. I don’t know how to keep grief from making me callous. It feels right to lash out in anger to say the things you know are gonna hurt and to believe them about yourself and everyone around you. It’s much harder to believe that things will improve because there seems to be no proof. I don’t see the proof that the universe will see it fit to grant me and my loved ones specifically infinite grace and infinite mercy. That’s just not how any of this works. It feels stupid to mourn my loved ones when there are so many others mourning and losing massively every day. It feels stupid to gripe about anything not immediately life-threatening when there is plenty that threatens other people every day. How do you grieve someone within that? I lost my Grandmother to COVID-19 and she was almost 80 and she had a pre-existing condition so I don’t know how to grieve her in a way that feels unselfish. It feels selfish that I ever conceived that she would be spared, to begin with. I don’t even know how to grieve her with my family. I just find myself angry with them for being who they’ve always been. And I forget that they just lost somebody too. I feel angry with myself for hoping and it feels like it’s all I can do to berate myself after everything. To atone for my arrogance. To make up for that fact that it feels like I’ve gotten far more grace than I deserved. Some people never meet their grandparents and almost all of mine made it to old age. So many never even taste old age. My Grandma and I were not especially close but she was one of the first people I ever laid eyes on in the world and maybe that’s just another dumb symbol, like a missing couch. I missed her last birthday and I can’t help but feel ashamed because I assumed I’d have another chance. I can’t help but feel the hole, horrified and fascinated by its emptiness. Something I learned about death a long time ago is that you often don’t know how much someone meant to you until they are gone. It’s hard to appreciate what it is like to live without them. I keep replaying her voice in my head and imagining her face in my mind because I don’t want it to fade. When they had to remove my grandfather's voice box, we could still hear his old voice on his answering machine. The arrogant part of me doesn’t feel like I should have to live without her. I don’t want to forget because I don’t know who I will be if I do. It’s different from how my Grandpa’s passing which felt like being robbed. This just feels empty. And I feel bad because I got so much more time than I was ever owed.
In the HBR interview, David Kessler talks about anticipatory grief and how we imagine what it is like to lose something or someone before they are gone. He says that the unhealthy version of this is really anxiety where we imagine loved ones or ourselves getting sick or when we think about all vestiges of our old life wiped away to never return. Losing my Grandparents feels just like that, like another part of life that I was too naive to foresee. It was probably always going to happen but I didn’t think about it or prepare myself until it was happening. Kessler says that the best way to combat this feeling of being ill-prepared is to come into the present. In the present moment, I’m still very sad. I feel like I’ve lost something much more important than a couch. I’m hoping though that at the end of my rope is the ground where I can dust off and start climbing again. I am hoping again that there is ground somewhere beyond my feet. I’m hoping there’s another chance to not take things for granted. But hoping is suspense and dangling in suspense makes my chest feel like it’s caving in. I work on grounding as Kessler suggests, a technique I am very familiar with. I look around and I see all the people who are still alive and well. My mother. My sister. Brother. Uncle. Aunt. Cousin. Cousin. Cousin. I look at all the things I still have the means to do. My bills are paid. My car runs. I can write. I can cry. I can sleep. I can read. I can dream. I can sit on my bathroom floor and be as numb as I need to be. I can sit on the bathroom floor and be as miserable as I need to be. There’s still a lot I need to not take for granted. I can answer my little brother when he calls. Today, I can plan for tomorrow — instead of the big, wide, future. I can do my best.
Natalia is a writer aspiring to write professionally, and currently blogging @ theproblemwithlemons.wordpress.com. Click Here for more of her work.
