The heart, I've been told, is the size of a fist. This is apparently a fact. I know very little about anatomy, and I care to know even less. But if my heart is the size of my fist, how can the chunks missing from my heart be so big?
How can a fist-sized heart miss so many people at once? Loss after loss, chunk after chunk - it pounds on. Steady, mostly.
Grief doesn't get easier, I was told once. It doesn't get easier, you just get stronger.
It took me four months after my grandfather died (cancer, fluid in the lungs, the works) to stop waiting on his car to pull into the yard. He hadn't even been strong enough to drive it for months, before. The car hadn't been driven in almost a year. But I couldn't shake the denial, I couldn't accept his death for four whole months. People looked at me like a lit fuse, waiting for the explosion. When it came, it came hard. I was angry at myself, at him, at everybody, at God. I wanted answers that nobody could give. I wanted time. I wanted peace. I couldn't get any of that. I couldn't fill the grandfather-sized hole in my heart. I couldn't patch up the cracks. It still hurts.
When my cousin's mother died, I cried twice. Once the first night I saw my cousin, and the afternoon of the funeral. Someone said to me in passing at the funeral that you get to a certain age and everyone around you seems to be dying.
What age is that? At what age does it become ordinary to lose the people you love? ...she has a point though. It's just that, isn't it? The longer you're alive, the more people you watch die. And there's only one way to escape this labrinth of suffering. Death.
So it's die or watch people die.
So you live, for now, and you deal with the grief in whatever way works for you. You accept and come to terms with the anger, the sadness, the emptiness, the denial, the pain. You know it's possible to live with pain and with grief. So you fall down, you sob, you grieve, you mourn. And then you get up, brush the fuck off and go back to your life. Wear the black, then hang up the black. Stages. Go through the motions. Catharsis, somehow, finally. Then peace, if you ever get there. (I've never gotten there... not quite.)
Death is a thief. Death comes in the night, takes the light from your love and takes something you can never replace, of value you cannot quantify.
Grief isn't rational, either. You can never fathom just how it will come, who it will come for. It just comes and you just cope.
Today, I am coping with the loss of a mother. The mother of a close friend. May her soul rest in peace and may her children find comfort in her memory. And may we all heal.
