Do I live in grief, or does it live in me? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with over the last few days. Admittedly, it may be a false dichotomy to draw–in all likelihood the response is “both-and” rather than “either-or”–but I feel it’s worth exploring the distinction.
Because some times it feels like the former, sometimes the latter. Some days (some moments) it feels like it is just a part of who I am, and I work around it. But at other times I feel like it has completely consumed me, that I sit in it’s dank belly, providing sustenance to its morbid glee, waiting for it to discard me on to its dung heap once it’s had its way.
Either way, grief is a beast. It’s wild. And I’m wild with(in) it. And both of us, it seems, need taming. For this to work, we’re going to have to find a way to co-operate. Which is why I think I need to think about it from both perspectives.
Grief in me.
From the very outset, I’ve perceived grief as being in me, a part of me. And I’ve tried to tame it through that lens. When Suse collapsed, my identity collapsed with her. The intimacy of our bond has meant very few (if any) parts of my being have been left unaffected. Every fibre of “who I am” has been torn from its counterpart, left exposed, isolated. Every fibre is experiencing its own loneliness.
Initially, my system really did enter a catastrophic state. This is no exaggeration. Internally alarms were going off everywhere; smoke was rising in this corner; panic building in that one; some corners experienced complete shut down. All this was raging on the inside. Externally, though, I was just a blank screen with a small blinking cursor. And no matter how hard people bashed the keyboard, no matter how much input they tried to pour in to re-configure me, there was just no response.
Since then, the system has slowly been coming back online. But the circuitry’s damaged. The fibres are sheared. And that can show up in any number of ways. Physically, it’s left me feeling nervy. Twitchy. I feel it in the tips of my fingers, and in my chest. Not always. But often. The open circuits in this new existence means life has lost its flow. The system needs to find work-arounds. Nothing’s efficient. I walk a mile to go a metre. Weariness kicks in.
This in turn means, that at times, I have little to no confidence in my abilities. It means I have little to no trust in my capacity. It means I have little to no patience for petty squabbles or trivial decisions. But it also mean I have little to no energy for important ones either. I can lose my cool quickly. I can melt into a puddle quickly. I can switch from ambivalent, to numb, to angry, to sad, to desperately alone all within the space of a few sentences.
This is the grief within me. And at times I feel the only way to tame it is by trying to force it back in its box. To ignore it, deny it, forget it for a while. Just so it won’t affect me, so it will stop controlling me. And that hasn’t always been a bad tactic. It’s given me some small precious space to reconfigure. Redefine.
But confining it can make it angrier. And when released, the beast can suddenly become overwhelmingly larger than me. And, it’s those time when I feel most consumed by it.
Me in grief.
And perhaps I need to spend time experiencing and considering life within it. Spend time letting it teach me. Taming myself within it, while I try to tame it within me.
Certainly the space I’m occupying within grief’s belly is not the place I want to be forever. It stinks in here. But this notion of living within grief forces me to acknowledge my vulnerabilities; living within grief helps me realize I have a new landscape to navigate. I need to learn what works and what doesn’t work in this environment. I’ve also got to be open to meeting (or at least observing) other people in this space, people who are here for different reasons, and who travel in a different direction maybe, but people who provide some sort of solidarity purely because they too are travelling in this space with a limp.
Grief, here’s my proposition: let’s co-operate. We’re co-existing at the moment, but maybe it’s time we worked together to tame each other. What do you say?
