Notes on Grief
A month after the crash, my mother flew to Gilbert to see her family. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped in a steel machine thousands of feet in the air, the way you’d been. I couldn’t look down at the ground without imagining myself hurtling into it. I stayed home, and for five days, sat on the couch with my cat watching old episodes of Dance Moms. The mothers would squabble, and the children would pirouette, and I would think, Where are the fathers? Where are the fathers?
Three months after the crash, I turned to men. Men took me to the library. Men took me to my favorite ramen spot and treated me to a bite of mochi. I talked their ears off, I talked senselessly. None of it meant anything at all. There were no men, only ghosts. Sometimes I would walk down the sidewalk next to one of these ghosts and, overhead, hear the familiar whirling of helicopter blades. I would lose my mind.
A year after the crash, I got mono from one of these ghosts. I sat in a bed in Acute Emergency with an abscess pinching my neck, an IV sticking mercilessly out of my arm and pumping me with Dilaudid, and I thought to myself, Where the fuck are you? What would you have said? Would you be mad that I’ve been left alone? I shudder to imagine how you’d see me.
This summer, when I went back to West Virginia, I must have driven right over the spot without knowing. When I got to my grandmother’s, she told me that they’d decided it wasn’t your fault. I cried while my little cousin played Dress To Impress next to me at the kitchen table. You stain me. It was not your fault, the courts decided, and yet you stain me. I sit in my grandmother’s big recliner and text my friends as fervently and frequently as a true addict. I fill my mind with anything that’s not you.
Two-and-a-half years after the crash, and I have bangs now. I’m gamified and I do productive things for the dopamine rush. On Thanksgiving I drink rosé and play Disney Dreamlight Valley in a darkened room. On Halloween I have a Canada Dry in my friend’s backyard, the fairy lights as dazzling as the ones you used to keep at your second wife’s insistence. On sizzlingly hot Texas autumn days, I stay in and curl up and entertain myself with an endless parade of FaceTime calls and bullet journal projects and Gus Halper movies. I search every crevice of my life for evidence that you’re still here.
Did you ever see how I was treated? Did God ever let you look? Did you peer down from your throne of clouds and see that I’d been left behind all alone? A kid on the couch, numb as Kelly Hyland and Christi Lukasiak fight on and on and on. A girl with her newfound freedom, winking and giggling at jokes that weren’t funny. A woman wondering why the hell she’d ever let her lips near that guy’s, wondering how so much pain could come from just a little clump of cells in the neck. A wounded creature in the plush of the West Virginian mountains, a piece of her heart stuck out and bleeding on the Mingo County sign. Where was your wife? Where were your sons?
I was the only thing you ever created that mattered. Rest well. I am tired of letting you eat me.
//
I wrote the above passage not long ago. I wrote it while grieving.
When we speak of grief, what comes to mind? We see swimming stained gravestones in our heads and particles of dust. We see support group circles and unoccupied beds and fear.
When we feel grief, however, it can ease its way in, poking its head through the door. Grief does not mean to hurt you. When you are all alone, grief is right beside you, feeling as you do. Grief will draw a blanket over your shoulders and stretch its hand across your back and say that it, too, is sorry.
Grief will scream at you. Grief will scream with you. Grief will take your Dance Moms marathons and your random kisses and your emergency room nurses and spin them into something you can’t understand, but love anyway. Grief is a child with thorns. Grief will look around at all of the things, the beautiful things that remain, and smile and say, “Isn’t it wonderful?” And you will say, “Yes, grief, it is.”
I remain grieving, and I will until the time comes for someone else to grieve me. Grief is the sacred process, grief is a hand-me-down, grief is an heirloom passed from one heart to another to another. It is no easy burden to carry, but it is a human one, and grief knows this. Grief wishes it wasn’t so. Grief wants only to pull you into its arms and let you rest, to tell you that its existence is the proof that you loved to begin with.
I wrote the passage you see above, a tale of anger and bitterness, in a time where I’d forgotten these lessons. I had shirked my grief and cursed it and tried desperately to repel it, and it would not go. No matter how hard I tried, it would not leave me alone, and sometimes it is better to let it stay.
I write this to feel comfortable in my grief. I write this to beseech you to stop ignoring the grief lingering over your shoulder, watching you. Turn to it, speak to it, thank it for never leaving you. Trust in your grief, and it will tell you what a beautiful, human thing it is to grieve. It will tell you to find the flowers and the sunshine and the breaths of fresh air that make us alive. It will tell you that though you’ll never separate, grief will never hurt you.
