Life and Death
The new year holds a special alure…the promise of starting fresh. We humans are captivated by the promise of a blank slate. While it never really exists, the idea that we can make our mark in the sand after the tide has washed away all of the previous days transgressions is unavoidably romantic. It gets me every time. But what is truer to reality is that each new beginning comes from an ending (a la Seneca or Semisonic…choose your flavor). Perhaps this beginning and ending process doesn’t even happen in such a linear way. Perhaps we are always in this continuous state of living and dying. New and old. Death and birth.
At the beginning of 2024, as you know because I made it public, I had ambitions for this blog. I still do, although I’m about 1 blog post behind. The year did not start out as smoothly as I would have liked. If contending with the challenging sleep cycle I’m in with my infant weren’t enough, the universe all too acutely reminded me that we cannot take this life for granted. My dear grandmother, who had chronic health issues but was otherwise choogling along without much suspicion for an acute decline, got Covid, then the flu, then pneumonia. After 3 trips back and forth from the hospital to the nursing home for rehab and then back again, her body gave out and she passed.
I live thousands of miles away and the grief didn’t hit me with too much intensity immediately. This grief has been a slow burn, like the meme of the dog in a burning room saying ‘this is fine’ when it’s clearly not. I have had to keep my composure and one foot in front of the other because at this stage in my life, I am in survival mode. But as the days pass, and as I allow myself to have moments of reflection, the bright orange flames of grief catch my gaze and the Co2 around me commands my attention. Everything is fine, it’s true. My grandmother has passed and there is nothing to be done about this. The show must go on, and other tropes. But also, how can the show just go on. How can someone etch their impact on your life and then just get their visitation and funeral penciled in between other agenda items? You do the thing, make the trip, write and deliver the eulogy, and yet…yet, it all feels so removed. Distant. Not fully grieving. Not fully acknowledging the impact of a life lost.
My paternal grandfather passed about a decade ago and (while he was on the other side of my family with different relational dynamics and customs) when he did, time stopped. I remember the leadup to his death. We all knew it was coming and had some time to prepare mentally. Like my grandmother, he was on hospice. But somehow it hit differently. Maybe it was my stage in life? I could allow more space to tune into the emotion of grieving. The night of his passing, thousands of miles away, I knew. There was a rare Alaskan thunderstorm and I remember knowing…this is Dad. He is leaving this Earth. I was tuned in on that level. But with my grandmother, who arguably made an even greater impact on my life, I remember just being there for my Mother but not really letting in the impact of the situation, even after she passed, even now. I work with many people who get destroyed by grief…they collapse and struggle to function. While that kind of pain can be devastating and halt ‘productivity’, by contrast grieving on this superficial level has its own issues. I’m not a surface kind of gal, and the mark she made on my life was not a surface kind of impact.
I try to let this grief in, in a measured way. I try to let it in, in my words or calls to my Grandfather or in how I attempt to channel her energy in how I show up in my day to day.
Perhaps what this experience is showing me is there really is not a right way to grieve. I’m typically a fall to my knees kind of feeler but this time I have been able to lean into my feels to access what my grandmother meant (means?) to me, while also staying firmly in the reality of what the present demands of me. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that is grief in your 30s? Maybe that is grief after years of therapy and being a therapist yourself? Maybe that is grief when you are raising an infant and have limited resources? Maybe that is grief when you are barely holding your own life together? You can’t go too deep into the loss because you’re just trying to survive yourself. Maybe this is how you move through death while surviving a full life.
Or maybe this is the kind of grief my grandmother needed? Is it possible that we grieve in the ways those we are grieving would have wanted. Keeping it light and focus on fun and family really was my grandmother’s style.
A friend and successful blogger advised my when starting this blog: make it helpful to people. This is more of a rambling and process kind of blog and perhaps it won’t be that helpful for folks, at least not in a straightforward and traditional sense. But perhaps it will resonate for someone navigating the vicissitudes of grief in middle age. If so, I am grateful.
