On Grief

 I had an interesting experience with grief last autumn.  

Since January, I had been deep in anticipatory grieving.  We knew my father's cancer was a terminal one.  We knew that the statistics on small cell lung carcinoma are grim. Last year before he died I cried most days.  Sometimes I'd be washing dishes and burst into tears.  Sometimes I'd be driving somewhere and start crying.  It was a constant companion: the anticipatory grief.  Knowing this was the end of something.  Knowing goodbye was so close.  

After my father's death, my primary emotion for weeks was relief.  The suffering near the end of his life was real.  I had envisioned that as a cancer patient, he would drift off in a morphine-induced haze and die peacefully.  That was absolutely not true. I was so relieved his suffering was done, so relieved that we never had to replay it again, that I did not cry.  I was exhausted, I was sad, but I was relieved.

Somewhere about six weeks after his death something else began.  It was like the time I toured the infamous underground bunker at The Greenbriar Resort when I was a teenager.  We walked into the tunnel that leads down into the bunker, and the 20-something ton door shut behind us.  That sound was so final.

Sometime in November I felt it.  The door was irreversibly closed.  The relief had faded and the reality set in: I will never talk to my father, face-to-face, in this lifetime, again.  Our morning cups of coffee, where we'd talk for hours from before dawn until the rest of the household woke up, are over.  Our long phone calls of laughter and teasing and nonstop talking are over.  Our hugs, when I'd rest my head on his chest, are over.  The door felt like it slammed shut on me every time I thought about this reality.  My lifelong Gibraltar was--is--irrevocably gone.

And so a different, deeper grief began.  It was like an underground river, flowing somewhere deep within my spirit.  It was a quiet grief that felt omnipresent, that felt below that place Wordsworth described as "too deep for tears."  

Yes, I have faith in God. The last solid food my father ate was the communion wafer his Anglican priest brought to the house three days before he died.  Was my father reconciled with God?  I believe so.  Will we meet again? I have no idea how heaven works.  I'd like to think so. I am confident of (and unendingly grateful for) my salvation and I'm confident that God has a much bigger plan than I can envision.  That faith does not negate the reality of the pain that I will never make my Dad's morning coffee again, just the way he likes it: black, with two small cubes of ice. 

Every year my Dad and stepmom threw a large Christmas party between Christmas and New Year's. Our initial thought was not to have the party this year, but sometime in the fall my stepmom said she was considering it. I am fully on board with whatever she wants, so I agreed.  We kept it simple, she had it mostly catered, and it was good.  All the neighbors she invited except one were able to come.  There were great stories told, multiple conversations for hours, loads of food, happy conviviality.  Our neighbors in Charleston are good people--it's a sweet, close-knit community.  My Dad, who loved to have his house full of people enjoying themselves, would have loved it. 

Getting past the party was an emotional triumph for me, one more step in the right direction of healing and recovering.  So the grief has shifted, from that reverberatingly heavy closed door and that deep  underground river, to something different yet again.  I suppose the closest thing I can describe it as is "acceptance," although that's not quite right.  But it's close. 

If you're grieving, just lean into it and know it comes and goes in phases, it ebbs and flows, and it shows up when you least expect it.  The best thing to do is acknowledge that it is real, and be kind and gentle with yourself and others while you heal.