Loathsome Re-Imaginings

Surviving grief is hard.
Looking forward, living forward, without any vision of who or what you might become - also hard.

The truth is, we all need a mentor.
Especially inside this wholly disorienting grief,
inside a culture that cannot and does not understand. We each need a guiding star, an example to live into.

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I am not ready to re-imagine myself. I am not ready to say goodbye to the woman I was on March 8, 2016. I reject the person that I could live into. I do not want to live a life inside grief. 

I know I do not want to be the woman who is seven years out from her husband’s suicide, with two attempts herself, three hospitalizations, and a vacant stare in her eyes. Neither do I want to be the wise and lonely daughter with a rose quartz around her neck and Buddhist prayers under her breath. I do not want to be the quiet widow with the old dog and the book club. I do not want to be the mother who organizes walks and wears t-shirts about suicide prevention, or the woman who people talk about “before” and “after” the “incident.”

This is unfair. I know. These women are surviving with incredible grace. I just didn’t want to join their club.

But, this is why we write through our grief here, because as I write these words, I feel the light that I push down, rising up. I do have guides. They are the writers of the heart. Mary Oliver, Joan Didion, Rumi, Rilke, Woolf and more. These writers have brought beauty and wisdom to their pain. Their work connects to their readers' sorrows and together they can share the burden of grief.  

Perhaps, I have a hope of what I want. A piece of the old girl carried into the new woman.

Some things about who I had become before March 9, 2016:

I serve.

In Ecuadorian jungles, I tried to understand the relationship between poverty and childbirth. In hospital rooms, I held the hands of pregnant teens in foster care. I’ve counseled women making the impossible choice between placing a child for adoption or raising the child they could not keep safe. In my personal life, I have always tried to be the 3 AM friend and have loved too many men with wells of darkness to which I hoped to bring light with my love.

I feel.

Deeply and acutely. I feel the pain and joy of others so much it sometimes hurts. And, I think about things. I watch the sunset over the foothills, and I think about the way a broken heart sounds in a lonely bed. I feel the pain of those I love, and I feel the pain of those I’ve never met but who I’m bonded to by a shared loss. I feel the joy of my niece running her toddler run through the grass to see about a bird and the feel of dew weighing down my eyelashes.

I write.

Words have been my constant companion. I find them fascinating. I enjoy the exercise of finding the right word to make intangible the tangible. I love the metaphors and myth making. They can be playful and pretty or ugly and hard. A sentence can dance in the breeze. A sentence can cut. Writing has wound me out through the knots of my youth.

I share.

I have felt alone with my thoughts so often. I drive around them in maddening circles until I have to reach out to make sure someone has felt the same. When I do, I have usually found someone who has felt just as alone. Each potential overshare has validated for me that living authentically and vulnerably is imperative.

While lofty guiding lights, I’d like to think that I may share some of these qualities with those visionary writers whom I admire so deeply. The serving, feeling, writing and sharing that is at the crux of the most moving of works. This is why I return to them over and over. I admire them deeply, aspiring to connect with the magic that exists between sharing sad stories with pretty words. If I could write this grief to make someone feel as if I could carry some of theirs and her some of mine, then I could maybe find some beauty living inside this grief.

But. Ugh.  

My skin positively crawls at these thoughts. It is hard to see the good left in me. It is harder to imagine the creation that could come from this destruction. I feel selfish. I resent myself for writing about myself when I was supposed to be writing about someone else. I am noticing how many sentences begin with “I,” so I just rewrote two lines. Maybe that will make me seem more likable, conceal this selfishness. Gross. I hate imagining another side where this is another story about me. My despair clings to me. She snarls, "I define you." Even more maddening is Sean's echo saying, "You'll be better without me." I can't let him be right. I know to prove him wrong may destroy me, but I am stubborn and like to win arguments. 

I don’t know what these things mean, but I know I’m loath to share them. That’s probably why I should. 

Found Word Poetry

Let the available words dictate what is written. 

...With phrases from ~20 children's books 

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What shape is the window? 

Wakes up from his nap

He saw a medusa 

Foolish foxes

Silly cats 

Poor Peter was lost

I gather colors

Hideout in the stones

He can have whatever he wants for breakfast

Count the leaves 

We'll see if she succeeds 

And sure enough

Oil and sand are mixed together 

All the hippos go berserk 

He sounded scared

The barn was abandoned

"Stop thief"

but nobody heard (or nobody cared)

The big green toad 

a thing like that

Alone once more

Right now, water is flowing 

Where do you suppose they have gone?

Is he riding in the locomotive? 

It is painted differently 

"I'm too hungry to look"

Think of a year with one less

A mouse packing down snow

Buy some fresh corn

Tidy up 

I hear a lion roaring in my ear

I think I would rather have a carrotcar 

Forest of sea weeds 

A patch of clover 

Two by two
After you

"Love Sorrow"

"Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind."

- Peter Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel

" Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth."

-excerpt from "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye

How do you, or how would you, "be to my sad self hereafter kind"?

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"Love Sorrow"

"...For she is yours now and you must take care of what has been given."

Mary Oliver wrote these words, personifying sorrow as a sweet, lost little girl. I can see her there with her hair hanging in her face, too defeated by life already to reach up for your hand before entering a crowd. She is just so goddamn sad. Her sadness is heavy enough to be felt. This image works. How do you not want to speak softly, with kind eyes and no sudden moves to a sorrowful child? Waiting for the moment when she will trust you enough to let you cradle her in your lap and tell her it's not her fault so many others have let her down?

But. It's hard. I can see her as separate from me and feel this kind, gentle love pouring from my heart. When my eyes unfocus and I see that that little girl is me, I tremble. Because she ages and distorts till she becomes a weak mess. A 30-something almost woman with dull eyes and bruises from her last blackout. Children can be held. Women must remain upright. I get dizzy when I try to stand.

Kindness had lived in my heart. I had warmed my hands by it and lit dark hallways. Now, it hurts. It hurts to feel kindness open my heart. Cracking even the smallest attic window lets a barrage of sorrow come tumbling in, and I can only take so much.

Today, for example, my kindness snuck out through that window like a teenager in a short skirt with a cigarette on her lips. I turned on the news to the tragedy in Orlando and knew too well the horror of those families pleading for any information on their missing loved ones. And my kindness reached for them. I have spent the rest of the day crying in front of my niece, who I'm watching, and pretending like I'm laughing. She thinks I'm snorting and snorts back at me. I try not to think it's too sweet or I won't be able to stop crying.

I am harder now. I'm funny, I'm told. That I-can't-believe-you-said-that funny. Because my kindness is shrouded in dark, musty grief.

I know this post was supposed to be about being kind to myself.

I go to the gym
I make myself be around children
I ride my bike to work now
I let myself make a friend at work
I hug my friends hard
I told a woman at the park because she had kind eyes and a great sense of humor
I eat Brie and chocolate for dinner sometimes
I called the suicide hotline on a bad day
I go to support group though I never want to but am always glad I did
I keep seeing my therapist even when I resent her for how much it still hurts

I am trying to be kind to myself. Even after I've been very unkind to myself with late nights and ex boyfriends and whiskey tears. I try to remember that today is another opportunity to be kind to myself. Though it hurts. Being kind means seeing your own pain. It is looking in the mirror after a horrific accident to find your face forever altered, scarred. To see yourself as you are, so broken, is to see sorrow, to see that you and the little girl are the same, and it may be a very long time before you can reach for that offered hand.

A Spider Speaks

If your grief is a character who can come forward and speak, what kind of voice does s/he have? 

"Who are you?" or "Tell me who you are..."

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Last night, my grief visited me. I was lying in bed, trying not to notice the drowsy falling over me so as not to startle it away. I was thinking of the last time we made love. Or something like it. It was the “the fight isn’t over but this will help sex.” My right arm was thrown lazily across his pillow and my mouth beginning to fall open. When upon that arm I felt a tickle and then a trickle of alarm. Aroused from half sleep, my left arm reached across my body to wipe off what was hopefully an errant hair. I was immediately made aware that it was not. A sharp bite, a throb, a panic. Throwing off sheets, I leaped out of bed, running to the light switch to find the intruder—a spider that looked too small to have created such a large pain.

First, I called Sean an asshole. I assumed the spider was Sean. In my fear/pain mixed with resentment, attacking me in disapproval. I angry cried as I prepared an ice bag and tried to open the baking soda with one hand. I said, “I’m doing the best I can,” to our empty apartment.

I calmed myself and sat on the couch. Too wound up to do more than half recline. I sat, eyes unfocused and looked for spider in my heart.

And in a half dream I found her.

                                          --------------------------------------------                                                                                                                                                                                                    

She sat upon a vast web, regarding me with neutral though not unkind eyes. I felt intimidated nonetheless. She filled me with revulsion yet curiosity. She was beautiful yet lethal.

After some time, I asked her, “Why are you here? Why am I here?”

She spoke, a voice that filled my head rather than my ears, “You need me.”

“But you frighten me.”

Annoyance flashed in a half roll of her eyes. “All the more reason for me to be here.”

“You bit me,” I accused.

“You didn’t let me be.”

“Be on me? Crawling at my skin, threatening me, frightening me?”

“Of course. That is where I need to be. I am your grief. I am on you. You wear me. Thousands of me climb all over you. We crawl, and we threaten. But the fright is yours. That is your “me” that you’re trying to protect.” She remained so still. “You cannot protect yourself from me no more than the earth can protect itself from the rain. Like the rain, we come, and you cannot stop us. If you do, we will bite. And ignite the pain into a throbbing suffering.”

“Surrender to you?” I asked, incredulous. “You will swallow me!”

She almost laughed. “Aye, yes. Swallow you we may. But what is the harm in that?”

My eyes widened, “I will be gone. I will lose everything.”

Her first movement in some time, a head tilt, a thoughtful pause, “Perhaps. But, I repeat. What is the harm in that?”

I resisted the urge to rapid fire another defense. I did know. I knew from my yogic practice, from each previous loss, from each previous gift, from each time I was shattered and reborn before, that she was right. But. I was annoyed still.

I put my curled fists on my hips like a pouting teenager. “You are asking too much of me this time.” And as I’d spoken to Sean earlier, I told her, “I’m doing the best I can.”

Spider said almost but not quite gently, “I know you are doing your best, but this “too much” is not what I’ve asked of you. I am your symptom not your cause. This is what you’ve asked of yourself. This is your own spider self asking these things of you. You, like me, are creator and destroyer of destiny. We are both of us weavers. We build homes, we build traps, we build bridges and break bonds. We cling to ephemeral objects by moonlight only to lose them to the stochastic daylight. We are patient and plodding. We work diligently and dutifully. Building beautiful things that can bring ugly things upon this world. Sometimes thoughtfully and artfully, sometimes craftily and resourcefully. We build for many reasons and can build infinitely. Each strand,” and here she began spinning another silver line and continued speaking as she worked, “is your choice to build your web.”

I waited for her to continue. But, she did not. She worked as if I was no longer there. I observed her. Wishing she would say more and realized she could say no more. What I wanted of her was to do something. Something to allay the crawling against my skin that would occasionally erupt into sharp and then throbbing pain, but she could not. She could just be. Spinning her web against my bones—inevitable and fragile, yet hers and ours. All I could do was build mine with her. It was inevitable. It would be fragile. It was never more than these things anyways.

One Grey, Vintage Soft T-Shirt

People always say that it hurts at night
and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am is the romantic equivalent of being
heartbroken.

But sometimes
it’s 9am on a Tuesday morning
and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up

And the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much
you don’t know what to do with your hands.

― On Missing Them, Rosie Scanlan
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I have one shirt. One grey, vintage soft t-shirt of his that still has his smell. My well-intentioned sister offered to do our laundry before I would fly, sobbing in security lines, to New Jersey to be with his and almost-but-so-tragically-never-to-be-my family. I was absent as I began to pack, behind an aged, puffy face that I didn’t even recognize as my own. I registered only the kindness in the gesture, not its implications. I said, “yes” and “thank you” and could not muster a grateful smile. So, a wash cycle, a rinse cycle, a dryer sheeted tumble dry with my sister’s high-end, hypoallergenic laundry products almost erased the scent of his embrace. How simple it is to disappear after you disappear.

I hiccup sobbed that night when I put on his green shirt with the polar bear on it and realized what I’d consented to—an irreversible smell-icide. I thought back to the laundry I saw her collecting from doorknobs, towels from hooks, socks from corners, and realized I’d lost the smell of my nose buried in his chest as he danced me round the living room, his I-couldn’t-wait-to-get-home-to-you-even-though-I-was-only-gone-an-hour hug, the irresistible shape of his back that made me sidle up behind him and slide my hands up the inside of his shirt and wrap around his abs as I laid my chest against his spine, feeling him smile in his sigh into me.

I went to New Jersey. I wandered his parents’ house in his natal town in slippers they insisted on buying for me, wearing his wrong smelling pajama pants and moving pasta around lovely white plates.

When I returned, I took my wedding dress from its hiding place at my sister’s house and brought it back to our apartment. I took all the flower bouquets and their invasive fragrance out to the porch to die in the late spring snows (shhhh…don’t tell). Then, I let my family leave town without me and lost myself in my grief. Tearing through corners of the house—furiously looking under the bed, behind the desk, on top of the fridge for some piece of him—a difficult task in your tulle’d wedding dress. When finally, I found something.

Behind my shoe rack in the closet, there lay a crumpled grey ball, wrinkled enough to suggest it had already been worn. And I pulled it to my nose, greedy and ravenous, and buried my face in his 8-pack Ivory soap and deodorant with the bro-tastic name we’d made fun of. I consumed the way his skin smelled in the sun, his bike ride home from work and the chicken burritos he ate for lunch. I closed my eyes and melted into him.

Upon realizing that my tears might taint him. I pulled myself away reluctantly, and, with great reverence, took him to the bed, to his pillow and placed him there in a strategic ball to trap all the scents in the folds. In front of the pillow, I placed the box of his ashes. On top of that box, I placed a heart-shaped rock from our sacred grove.

They sit there still, where I curl my body around them every night, as close as possible but not close enough to let my shampoo’d hair or eye cream touch his pillow. I won’t dare use the lavender hemp soap that his aunt sent me for Christmas, or the lotion that he used to say made me smell edible. Those are too strong to be near this treasure. I bury my nose in his shirt once before I sleep every night, refraining from doing it too much otherwise. I don’t know if a dirty shirt has a smell quota, but I am careful nonetheless.

How can this smell bring me so close, so irrefutably close? Close enough that I feel the vise that has cinched my chest for the last 91 days, loosen the tiniest bit. I can draw a breath, never deep enough, but deeper still. And then, within moments, it returns, tighter than before and almost too tight to draw breath for the sobs that wrack my body. It is him and not him. It is close but never close enough. 

Our Sacred Forest. Scorched.

"I was living in a rainforest. I knew the trees and the frogs, the lush green life. With no warning, I got shoved into the desert. I know this is the desert. So take back your plastic palm trees and your cups of water; quit telling me it's the same. I know better. I know where I live."
- Megan Devine, from my collected journals.

I was living in the forest....

I know where I live...
Here's how I live in the desert...

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I was living in the forest. I danced with the tall evergreens in the gusts. I waved back at the aspen trees who eagerly said hello with the breeze. I clothed myself in dynamic, dappled sunlight that filtered through the branches. This was lovely, but lovelier for having not been alone. This forest was inhabited by two souls who lazed under the stars and told stories round the fire. Their cheeks were rosied from love, lust, and light—by day their sun, by night their campfire. Their eyes they sparkled from their lives—yesterday, today and tomorrow. In that forest, beer stayed cold in the stream and bacon tasted best with some burnt coals. In that forest, the dirt under their fingernails smelled clean, and their love-tousled hair became their magnificent manes. That forest was the dream for which they had not dared to dream, at least not too loudly.

But this dream came. With force. With gravity. Living in a forest like that takes guts. It takes showing up every day with nothing to show but you. It means being little in something big. Being nothing in something. This is not for the faint of heart.

And his heart. It came with a darkness. How much before? How much after? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew. He knew it was there but could not find the beginning or the end of the dark rainbow, his pot of gold that would release him from its hold. Release him into love.

So the forest began to darken. Blight invaded the trees and the sunlight was shadowed by thunderous clouds. I called to him, but the storm stirred the bare branches into a tremendous roar, and he could not find me. Could not find him. And I wept and wept running between trees searching for him, scared of where I might find him. Because I knew when his heart filled with dark, it would pass, but feared the day he forgot that it would.

I knew if that day came, he would find himself in the most sacred place of our forest. It was an aspen grove, ancient and sprawling. Where the ground was soft enough to sleep, wearing only each other, and the snow never too deep for a fire and a proposal. It was a place where people unconsciously whispered and absently touched trees. It was love made live with each organic detail. He said he’d never been happier than he was with me in the aspen grove, and the shine in his eyes and catch in his voice told me this was as true a thing as a person could say.

So. He went there. And let the darkness take his heart.

And when he did. I can’t say what happened to his heart. Though the wind in those trees sounds a lot like his laugh. But I know what happened to the darkness. It ran like molten lava out from the body that was no longer his and took what was left of our forest. It swallowed streams and leveled fox dens. It blackened each tree and scattered the birds. And I climbed up into the tree where he carved:

SW

SS

And watched in horror as I bore witness to our bravely and still barely dared dream destroyed.

Now, the lava has passed and left an alien landscape of gnarled trees and scorched earth. And I walk like a ghost through this graveyard of a forest. Lost and uncaring. Whispering his name. Pressing my face against the earth to see if I can hear any life beneath. There is nothing. The birds do not intend to return, and I cannot blame them. The sun barely seeps through the ash, but I’m okay with that. It makes a blanket over me, letting me lie with his darkness. My skin sallows and the soot gets in my eyes, but I am near him here. Not near enough but as near as I can be. If I cannot have him. I will have his darkness, and I will love his darkness as he could not. 

I am not doing well

“I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.”
 
And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt,  The Goldfinch

What you don't know...
What you don't see...
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What you don’t know is that when you say, “you’re doing so well,” I want to pounce on you, wet your cheeks with fat, hot tears; I want to beat my pain against your chest with clenched fists and scream, “I am not doing well!”

But, I’m not allowed to do that. Or anything close to that. There is no space here in our lives for me to lie in bed with the whiskey bottle for days or take to the dark tent with the other widows and wail our sorrows for the whole town to hear. There is no space for me to walk with lips quivering and legs shaking through cubicled aisles or weep loud and incessantly enough for your children to hear. It frightens you. It will destroy my livelihood and what few people can bear to be around me. And then, I will truly have nothing. But this? This false self that lives atop this hardening mask and the gritted teeth behind it, I’m not sure that’s better than nothing.

Because this mask is starting to stick and to rot, to seep into my soul. I am hard. I am angry. I am so very alone. You don’t see that I am dying behind here. What you see is strength and resilience. I fear you may even see flippancy. But, I am too tired of having my heart laid bare before you and all my darkness invaded by your light. So strength and resilience is not what you see. You see survival. Someone who is trying against all odds and her very will to survive. I am not doing a very good job. But, you don’t know that, and it feels like that’s your fault. I don’t know if it is.

What you don’t see is this:

Though the plane crashed, and you watched me escape the wreckage, singed but standing, you didn’t know that the plane crashed in the desert, and I am still in that desert. When you had to put out the fires and put salve on my burns, there was something for you to do, an immediate crisis to attend, a tidy problem to fix. Now, I am wandering through the desert, and it feels infinite. The sun is scorching my scalp. I’m thirsty and exhausted. The air is almost too hot to breathe, it makes me thirstier. Yet, you just see me walking and don’t know that I’m dying slowly on this hardpan earth. You think walking means I walk towards a healing that will make me a “better person” for having survived this. I do not. I do not walk to enlightenment. I walk for you. I walk because I cannot do to you what he did to me. So, I resent you for that too. For making me walk when I am so, so, so tired. You don’t see that.

What you don’t know is that I am not doing well. You want to talk about how to ask for a raise. You want me to have dinner with your in-laws. You want me to organize an audit and soothe stakeholders. You want me to laugh at your jokes and smile appropriately. You want me to sit in meetings where we talk about suicide prevention and not scream. You want these things because they allay your anxieties that at least I’m walking, that I am strong, that I am resilient, that I am doing well. I am not doing well.

You think I’m doing well because you need to think I’m doing well. You are pityingly uncomfortable with my not-well-ness, and I prefer not to be around your pretend she’s doing well-ness. Please stop telling me I’m doing well. You can’t see. You can’t know. Really though, I am not doing well.