The Twin Faces of Grief (Part 2): Evolution
If you have come here seeking some faint shreds of hope, I will give you what I can: my honesty and my experience. It is true that you will never recover from the loss of your child. It will never get any easier. It will never be fixed or undone or remedied. You can never go back and the version of yourself that you once knew very likely died when your child died.
What does get better is your ability to carry your grief. The grief itself is a boulder, immeasurably heavy and crippling to bear. Without the proper muscle mass, you cannot hope to carry it. And so, day by day and hour by hour, you build endurance. This is not a choice that you make; rather, it is just what happens as you continue to breathe and the world continues to spin around you. You are swept up in the inexorable current of life and of living, and in the process, your stamina grows.
It is a laborious learning curve, but gradually, you begin to learn that at the end of that fifth box of tissues or that third night in a row of sob-screaming into your pillow, you still have to wake up, put food in your body, and, if you’re me, care for a helpless infant. The demands of your biological self are still there when you jolt yourself out from staring sightlessly at the wall. You still have to breathe and swallow and urinate and defecate and shower. You still have to do all of those bodily functions which your child’s body can no longer perform. You have to do them as though there is a point to doing them. And you have to do them while the ghosts of your memories dog your footsteps.
The grief never lessens, but you find it becomes easier to make the transition from beating your steering wheel in sterile despair to blowing your nose, opening the car door, and unloading your groceries. You find that the memories that used to incapacitate you for days will leave you bruised but still able to walk. You learn how to listen to, accept, and be with others in their grief without succumbing to your own. You even find a way to laugh and cry about the same memory, at the same time, and realize not only that the joy has caused the grief but that the grief has made you more deeply aware of the meaning of joy.
I think for a while, I felt that to say such things were a betrayal to Lizzy. But as they continued to happen, I gradually realized that the pain had not decreased in intensity. Instead, it was like I now lived in a cottage on the beach, with the ocean of my pain only footsteps away. I could hear its waves while I slept, ate, spoke, and moved. Sometimes, I chose to swim in that ocean. Sometimes, I almost drowned in it. And other times, a storm seized and capsized my little cottage with me inside.
What really matters is that you cannot walk away from this ocean. You carry it with you wherever you go. It is where you live now, heart and soul. And the more you try to avoid this reality, the more likely you are to be engulfed by it. The simple truth is that your child’s death is a reality that is bigger than you are. Your child is in a place that is beyond your comprehension. Beyond even your conception. I think if you can find a way to float in this mystery without being consumed by it; I think that maybe this is the way to manage grief. To lie suspended without drowning. To be that hybrid creature composed of both earth and water, life and death, time and eternity. If you can learn how to do this; perhaps, one day, you may even become a mermaid.
Your grief is immortal and immutable. It will not get better. You, however, will get stronger. You will start to actualize those parts of yourself you hoped you would never need. You will learn how to be superhuman—to bear unimaginable pain with a smile on your face. And you’ll do it because you have other children or a spouse or parents or siblings or a friend that is worth living for. You’ll do it because the one thing that the child you lost taught you more than anything else was exactly how valuable her life was. Is.
And ever shall be.
