"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief..." Grief Lessons: a Book of Questions....
I sat in the tiny, sunlit office, for the second-to-the-last-time, and the moment I sat down, I couldn't speak. I could feel an angry wire grind its way through my throat, tightening until it reached both sides of my neck: my grief, garroting me.
My counselor watched for several minutes.
The pain kept getting worse and worse. I clapped my hands to the sides of my head. Even my inner ears were part of the garrotte, now. I held my head, tightly. Eyes squeezed closed, doubled over to ease my stomach.
"I don't know how to do this," I said. "I don't say good-bye. I just leave." The words cut themselves open on the wire cutting my throat.
"Let's just breathe together," she said. She managed to synchronize with me and after maybe five minutes, I began to feel the tension ease.
We talked.
...
It's much easier to part when I'm angry. By the time I get finished processing all the stuff that I didn't process in real time, by the time I've heard once too often that I "bring things up too late" or "I'm always bringing up the past" (my sense of time doesn't align easily, and I steel myself for confrontation), I'm ready to call it quits.
There's never time to talk when I need to, and I can't always talk when it's best to, and then it all turns to a Giant Flaming Hairball I can't cough up or pass or ignore. Meltdown. Not always a spectacular show; sometimes I just quietly freeze and fog out of whatever the situation is.
Yes, I know it's not the most helpful response. It is all I can do during the cognitive logjam. No one gets this. I can't expect them to. Easier for them to judge my motivation, get it wrong, and add it to the heap of things that the engine transforms from useless grief through helpless frustration to motivating anger.
Unexpressed grief is the mother of rage, the raw stuff of which rage is made, the rising sea that spills from the center and engulfs all my pretensions to intellect and leaves them splintered on an unforgiving shore under the stare of an indifferent sun: the gaze of people who watch me cry. So I don't cry, much. It's so much easier to let grief give birth instead.
Back in the sunlit room, there's something different going on: this is what it is to sit with grief, to feel the losses happening all at once: job, counselor, illusions of security. I hate this. I hate even more how it feels to be reeling down the sidewalk afterwards, utterly failing to correctly navigate streets I've driven and walked through for months, eventually recognizing a familiar object as familiar over a mile away from where I needed to be (which wasn't my car).
It takes me another two days to remember this:
View attachment 17039
What process is it that creates hope from grief? And yet I do feel hope within pain, a kind of patience that isn't in season. A living seed.
I sat in the tiny, sunlit office, for the second-to-the-last-time, and the moment I sat down, I couldn't speak. I could feel an angry wire grind its way through my throat, tightening until it reached both sides of my neck: my grief, garroting me.
My counselor watched for several minutes.
The pain kept getting worse and worse. I clapped my hands to the sides of my head. Even my inner ears were part of the garrotte, now. I held my head, tightly. Eyes squeezed closed, doubled over to ease my stomach.
"I don't know how to do this," I said. "I don't say good-bye. I just leave." The words cut themselves open on the wire cutting my throat.
"Let's just breathe together," she said. She managed to synchronize with me and after maybe five minutes, I began to feel the tension ease.
We talked.
...
It's much easier to part when I'm angry. By the time I get finished processing all the stuff that I didn't process in real time, by the time I've heard once too often that I "bring things up too late" or "I'm always bringing up the past" (my sense of time doesn't align easily, and I steel myself for confrontation), I'm ready to call it quits.
There's never time to talk when I need to, and I can't always talk when it's best to, and then it all turns to a Giant Flaming Hairball I can't cough up or pass or ignore. Meltdown. Not always a spectacular show; sometimes I just quietly freeze and fog out of whatever the situation is.
Yes, I know it's not the most helpful response. It is all I can do during the cognitive logjam. No one gets this. I can't expect them to. Easier for them to judge my motivation, get it wrong, and add it to the heap of things that the engine transforms from useless grief through helpless frustration to motivating anger.
Unexpressed grief is the mother of rage, the raw stuff of which rage is made, the rising sea that spills from the center and engulfs all my pretensions to intellect and leaves them splintered on an unforgiving shore under the stare of an indifferent sun: the gaze of people who watch me cry. So I don't cry, much. It's so much easier to let grief give birth instead.
Back in the sunlit room, there's something different going on: this is what it is to sit with grief, to feel the losses happening all at once: job, counselor, illusions of security. I hate this. I hate even more how it feels to be reeling down the sidewalk afterwards, utterly failing to correctly navigate streets I've driven and walked through for months, eventually recognizing a familiar object as familiar over a mile away from where I needed to be (which wasn't my car).
It takes me another two days to remember this:
View attachment 17039
What process is it that creates hope from grief? And yet I do feel hope within pain, a kind of patience that isn't in season. A living seed.
