The Twin Faces of Grief (Part 1): Immutability
It is seared into my memory–that last night at home with Lizzy–that blue and broken morning when we went to the ER, and those terrible, endless days that followed. I can tell you every detail, down to the smell of the hospital, the expressions on the faces of the doctors, the cadence of their voices as they asked me question after question. I can recall exactly what the floor felt like as I lay sobbing into my little sister’s lap, tears and mucus coating my face and mouth, asking in a dead, stranger’s voice, “Can someone please go out there and tell me if she’s dead?”
I could tell you every detail as though it happened yesterday. It doesn’t fade or grow dimmer with time. It doesn’t get any easier. It is part of the past, and therefore its horror cannot be undone, or remediated, or softened. It is there, vivid and stark, as soon as I close my eyes.
Day in and day out, I contemplate the nature of grief. I meditate on its many aspects. I approach it from every direction and then reconsider my direction. This process is both a part of and separate from the constant thoughts about Lizzy that, more than ten months later, still consume nearly all my waking hours.
I started this blog for three purposes:
- To try and find someone else who lost a two-year old.
- As a dumping ground for the endless mental turmoil I was experiencing.
- In the hopes that someday, my words could help someone else who would lose a child.
In light of this, I want to tell you the two things that I have learned about grief in almost a year of drowning in it:
- Grief is immutable.
- Grief evolves.
If you are thinking that I am saying two totally contradicting things, you are correct. I have spent many, many hours meditating upon this paradox. If you want an explanation of this, I am afraid that I have none. What I have is nothing more than my musings and conclusions given a limited frame of experience, but I give these to you freely and without reservation.
To be immutable means to be utterly incapable of change. When we speak of God’s immutability, we mean that He is beyond change; He totally eclipses natural law which manifests change, passing, transience, death, and rebirth. He is forever outside, forever beyond, forever more than everything that we can see and prove with our senses. Still, there is an inscrutable link between God’s unchanging nature and the nature of human death, and it is on this point that I wish to dwell.
Death is, I suppose, our exit ticket from the natural world and therefore from the world of change. Death is the moment that marks the de-animation of the body. With our senses, we concretely understand that what was inside of the body is no longer in-dwelling upon the moment of death. Thus, we refer to the body as a “shell” or “vehicle” which the soul has vacated. We are capable of seeing, touching, tasting, hearing, and feeling this all-too-tangible before and after. What was totally mastered by the world of change has now passed beyond this mastery. Thus, we associate words and phrases such as to be “released” or “freed” from this “mortal coil.”
I use these words and I think these thoughts, and all I can see is Lizzy’s little body, purpled and pumped full of the liquids and medications they used to try and maintain the fragile hold she had on life in those final days. I can see her in her coffin, slack and cold, face and lips hard, blue, and coated with the thin layer of makeup that did a pitiful job of covering up the damage that had been done to her. I can see her in her coffin as soon as I close my eyes, and all the philosophy in the world cannot save me from this.
I can tell you that Lizzy was in her body, and then she wasn’t. There was a material shift in which change and change and change had been occurring and then . . . an absolute horizon of nothing. No more change. I had reached the end of change. I had approached the unscalable wall and could only sit, staring dumbly, at its staggering height.
There is no going back.
Ten months later, there is still no going back. No hope of resolution or understanding. There is still the heavy, inescapable, suffocating, and plummeting reality of what happened. This is what has not changed.
This is what will never change.
Death, I realize, is the human being’s encounter with immutability. Death is where everything that has been known and understood and fathomed reaches a breaking point that ends in an absolute shattering of perceived reality. Death is that unmovable wall. Death is that galactic horizon. Death is the utter end of Lao Tsu’s 10,000 Things.
And death is also, for all we know, the beginning of everything. No wonder so many people are Christian.
What this all boils down to is the gradual realization that grief is the only experience of the human animal which indelibly transforms us into a supernatural creature. There is no longer the clear, defining self-awareness that you are a creature of change within a changing world. Rather, you have become some ethereal hybrid, capable of living forever within an unchanging reality while your body, your life, your family, and your community goes on living and changing around you. And you change, too—just no longer in the same way.
I feel I walk the thinnest edge of a cliff in which falling into total despair over the loss of Lizzy is only a matter of consenting to it. The pain has not changed. It is just as total, just as consuming, just as suicide-inducing as it was the day I lost her. And it’s there to fall into at a moment’s notice. It is a chasm that I carry within me. If you see me walking or talking or laughing, the chasm is still there, and I am still teetering. I am, at this point, a tightrope performer of extraordinary skill.
I used to speak of how grief had turned me into a ghost, and many months later, I still feel this is an apt metaphor. I died to who I was when Lizzy was alive. I am not the same, and the self that walks with me through my changing life is not a creature I would refer to as human; for I have been touched by and have touched something from which there is no return.
At one of my first Compassionate Friends meetings, the facilitator opened by stating that it has been 20 years since the death of her son, and yet, when she recently visited his grave, the grief hit her as strong as it had the day she buried him.
I don’t come to bring you hope. I come to bring you honesty. If you are reading this because you have lost a child, there are very many, very concrete, and very inescapable ways in which it never gets better. There are ways in which people will ask you why you’re crying or sobbing or want to give up and you don’t have the energy or the patience to answer that no, there was no trigger, nothing new happened, nobody said something wrong; it’s only the same ghastly, all-too-familiar grief. And, because we as humans are so fundamentally uncomfortable with the terror of the unknown realm of death and a total end to change, most people who talk to you are only concerned with making themselves feel as though they have helped you stop crying and “feel better.” They are totally incapable of sitting quietly with the catastrophic and galling reality of human helplessness. And you can’t even blame them for this. They, unlike you, have the luxury of not dwelling in the unescapable place. But you—you freak of nature—you, the dead and alive—you, the mother of the dead and of the living—you are no longer human, and there is no bringing you back.
