Grokking Grief

I will be 75 years old this year and I have, only within the last few years, experienced grief. Most of the people I have ever loved enough that I would grieve their loss are alive.

I had never gotten to know my father’s parents because they lived in Cuba. I’d visited there twice, once as an infant and then again in about second grade, but my father’s father had died by then and, while I met his mother, I did not like her even a little. She was cold and she was pompous.

I actually cheered the death of my mother’s father who had trafficked my closest sister and I because we didn’t look like his side of the family. Her mother, who had lent a hand in the aforementioned operation, I also managed to slough off when she died without so much as a tear shed.

My father’s death, in 1992, while it affected me profoundly, initiated a return for me of more repressed memories than I could ever have imagined that I’d had. There were memories about him that were not-so-good, about my mother and her parents, and things I had witnessed as a child that no one should ever be exposed to. It was like having a waking nightmare. So… it was not so much grief that I experienced at my father’s death as it was an extended state of shock. I had loved my father when I was a child because he had expressed love for me, even though the ways he chose to do so were far from good. I’d entertained fondness for him as he aged. The return of memories, though, was a game-changer. It challenged everything I had thought I’d known about my life; it also explained a lot of mysteries about me and my far less than desirable behavior. The event marked the beginning of a therapeutic journey that has only, this past year, felt as if it might be nearing completion.

My mother’s death just pissed me off. Once my younger siblings knew that she was in the final stages of her life, most of her brood came to pay their last respects, as did I. I was one of the last to show and I went only because I knew I should. She had aided and abetted far more of what had happened to me in my early life than one would hope for. I gave her a hug; she referred to me as her “buddy” and that was the last I saw of her.

I cried for about five minutes when I learned that she had finally passed on… the tears were automatic and had been more about me never having been able to feel as if I’d ever had a real mother than it was about her leaving.

It had taken me until I was 29 to experience love. I had not carried any kind of useful or normal template for love. Natural childbirth, though, had flipped a switch in me that I hadn’t known existed. Sadly, for my husband and my firstborn — and ultimately, for me as well — the change in me didn’t affect my already existing relationships with them. We hadn’t bonded, and we never really did. Knowing what I now know about the subtlety of energy, I am sure they both — albeit unconsciously — felt that difference.

That one beautiful thing, though — that bonding that happened with my second child — was not enough to change the deeply broken psychological creature that I was. I managed to distance myself from that joy — and both my children — by making a choice, presented to me by their father, to leave the children with him if I wanted the divorce that I ended up asking him for.

If it’s true that there are no mistakes, that, as my mother always used to say, “Surely the Universe is unfolding as it should,” then I guess that making the decision to leave my children and break my own heart was what I needed to do to grow. It sure didn’t feel like it at the time. I died a little inside.

And yet… I did not grieve the loss of my children. I could not allow myself to. Grief was there, to be accessed, but I knew that my grieving would have ruined the relationship I was entering into. I had left my children behind for a relationship, as it turned out, with a controlling narcissist with whom I would stay with for over 20 years… yet another lesson I apparently had to learn… and part of that learning was that my body, in the wake of my dubious decision to abandon my children and the only true love I’d ever known, manifest a disease that was deemed to be both fatal and incurable. Slowly but steadily, I became hard all over, inside and out, my body turning into collagen.

That I not only survived a “rapidly advancing case of diffuse progressive systemic sclerosis” but that there is no trace of the disease left in me has seemed miraculous to everyone — physicians included — who saw me through it. In retrospect, it sometimes seems as if my whole body had been expressing, in her own way, what seems to have been the hardness of my heart.

I believe I may have been literally embodying the term, “slow learner.”

Two years ago, I got the first lesson in grief that I was actually able to embrace, when my closest sister — the one I mentioned above — died from a wound that she refused to have treated. It was a suicide, essentially. It was a small quiet grief that I felt — more like a poignant acceptance of the inevitable — because her life had been a living hell that managed to touch everyone in it in one way or another. It had been challenging for everyone, including her. She had been diagnosed as a delusional paranoid schizophrenic while still in her teens. What had happened to us as children, at the hands of our grandparents, haunted her every day, as though rapists awaited her around every corner. Her death was one of those that seemed more a mercy than a tragedy… but I still tear up when I think of her and the brief time we got to spent together before she died.

This year, I got another lesson in grief via a misunderstanding about the health of someone else I love, someone who is having a very good life indeed. Just thinking back, now, on how I felt when I imagined that life ending brings tears to my eyes… and I had shed so many tears. I did not know if I would ever be able to stop crying. But because of that I have a sense, now, of what it may be like when a loss of that magnitude actually manifests for me and because I know what I have now come to understand, I will never again shut the grieving process down or even attempt to downplay it. I have accepted that loving wholeheartedly brings with it, at some point, the pain of loss.

I can tell now that grief serves a purpose. It’s a release of feelings that allows emotional processing to occur and, based on my previous experience with not allowing emotional processing to occur, even though this most recent time what I experienced was “a false alarm,” I think that I now understand the need for grieving and I hope to handle myself with compassion when the need for it comes and allow whatever else comes along with it.