One Year of Grief

It’s been 350 days. Two weeks short of a year. It seems like I should have more to show for it – 350 days of pain, of grief, of hoping, of loving, of dying every day and then still having to wake up the next morning and do it again – a year of that should count for something more than I feel it has.

You’d think coming up to the full-year mark I’d have gleaned some great spiritual insight, some new awakening in my soul, some voice that reaches out to all the pain and sorrow in the world and says:

“I haven’t tasted everything. But I’ve tasted a bit. I know what its like to taste your own tears, and the blood from your tongue when you have to bite it to keep from screaming. I know what it’s like to try to keep it in and then fall to pieces. I know what it’s like to be so tired, you can’t even fall to pieces anymore and you wish you could. I’ve been through a year – one, really long, painful year. That I almost didn’t want to live through. But I did. And so now I can promise you, who are still there – still here – it gets better.”

350 days of focusing on anything should achieve miracles. If I wrote for 350 days in a row, I would become a better writer. If I played music for 350 days in a row I would play better songs. If I painted for 350 days in a row I would be a better artist.

But I have grieved for 350 days in a row. And I am not a better griever.

I haven’t felt new wisdom leaking out from beneath the tears. I haven’t felt closure, or resolution, or the reverberation of fresh strength and joy coming through the sunrise after the storm.

I feel like I’ve come full circle. Like I’m almost back at the beginning without ever having reached the end.

First, I missed the first five months of this year. I remember them…but only as a dark, gut-wrenching blur. I remember, two months in, that I had cried more before Isaiah’s passing than I had since then. It just didn’t feel real. The reality of my little brother’s death felt more real when we were waiting for it in the hospital at his side, than it did when it actually happened – in some ways, even then it does now.

Life felt numb and vaguely wrong, with a tinge of nausea. I kept waiting. Waiting for a notification on my phone with another update on how he was doing. Waiting for him to come out of his room at night when he was supposed to be sleeping. Waiting breathlessly…a series of successive and vapid suspense, for him, when I kept telling myself he wasn’t coming back.

And I remember hearing people talk about recovering. But what they didn’t know was that the moments of tears and agony are so much more painfully sweet than the vague feeling of wrongness. And I remember worrying that this was what recovery was like. Less “mad midnight moments” – as a grieving Lewis called them – and just more of this…the empty wrongness, the invisible blanket over everything, the nothingness with nausea.

And the worst thing of all about “recovering” – if one could ever feel like you had – is that Isaiah would still be missing. No future version of life would ever hold him in it. He was missing from every picture, from the present pain, to every future promise this world could offer.

The amputee may say what he will about recovering from his amputation – that the intense anguish has subsided, that the phantom pain has all but gone, that sometimes he goes hours or even days and barely thinks about it – he may even one day be happy, but he will still be missing his arm.

I remember in the early days, seeing a story that rose from the world of internet comments, seeing a story that rose from a heartfelt plea.

“My friend just died,” the posting read, “and I don’t know what to do.”

I don’t know what to do. I know that feeling. Because you can’t escape this. Everything is not okay. And you can’t get away from the fact that it is all so utterly, horribly, exhaustingly wrong.

I read the answer.

It said:

“…I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not.

…I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes.

My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it… Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more… For a while, all you can do float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath….

You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somwhere down the line, and its different for everybody, you can find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

Throughout the year there has been this grief, always there, under the surface. Waves.

350 days, and I’ve come full circle. As the anniversary nears – smack on the holiday – I’ve gone numb again. The moments when I can cry are a blessed relief because it means I can feel. And all I want to do is feel. I want to feel that this is bad and painful. And then I want to feel something that’s good.

Something good that life offers, even before Heaven. Something that should make every person want to stay here, and live, and live, and live, until death brings that sequence of living to the highest level possible and it never ends.

But not yet. Right now, just make me cry again.

___________

In my life, I’ve tasted two kinds of happiness – the happiness you have, and the happiness you chase.

This past year has given me a third: the happiness you notice.

It sneaks up on you, and you catch yourself mid-laugh, mid-sip, mid-run, mid-smile, mid-song, mid-page, mid-word, mid-hug, mid-coffee date with a friend, and you think I’m happy right now. And then the happiness changes and it isn’t the same. The moment you notice it, it hides again. Sometimes you almost feel guilty that you felt it. But the fact remains that it was there. It snuck up on you when you weren’t looking for it. When you had forgotten what it tasted like and had forgotten you could taste it and had forgotten that you wanted to. And then it was there…and you noticed.

And I know in my mind that there will most likely be a time when I start noticing more of this kind of happiness. And maybe one day, the noticing will come more and more often until the noticing becomes having again.

That time is not yet. I don’t even know if that’s at all true. I think God likes to remind us that this isn’t our home…again, and again, and again, and that reminder is as full of pain as it is of mercy.

But one day, I know it will come upon me – not a noticing, but a realization – not mid-breath, but between two breaths – when I breathe out in this world and breathe in, in the next, and then I will realize that the only time 365 days has no change, no meaning, no end, is there, in Heaven, when I will stop counting days, counting tears, counting moments. I’ll stop counting.

Soli Deo Gloria,