to start this blog for several days. I've been trying to write thank you cards. I've been trying to make myself shower, brush my teeth, look people in the eye, leave my house. Some days I manage to do all those things, and some days I sit and stare. Grief is a hell of a cage.
People who know me know that my 21 year old niece, Delaney, died January 30, 2020. She has a son who was six weeks old at the time. Everything was in front of her, and then she was gone. To say it's a profound and devastating loss is an understatement. I ache for what she's missing. I ache for everyone who loves her.
Because we do still love her. That love doesn't go anywhere. In some ways it intensifies. It has nothing to bounce off of. Delaney isn't here to receive our love, so it pools up and spills over and multiplies. Love is made to be given and received, so when you can no longer give it to someone and receive it in return, it sits waiting and it can overwhelm you.
Grief is the absence of many things, and right now, at the beginning, there's nothing to fill those absences, or rather the things that fill those spaces are heavy and heartbreaking.
The absence of breath is always startling to me. Of course, they do not look like they are sleeping. They look gone. But somehow I stood there holding my breath waiting for hers. I remember watching her little chest rise and fall while she slept as a baby. Somehow my heart hoped that magically her chest would rise and fall and she'd look at us and roll her eyes at our tears and complain about her makeup and her outfit and her lack of cleavage. She'd throw her head back and do her "you people are so ridiculous" laugh. I hoped she'd just come back. Just breathe, Dee.
Of course she didn't. She couldn't. She's gone.
There's the every day absences too. The lack of text messages and phone calls. The loss of the sound of their voice, their smell, how their hands feel. Not being able to tell them, show them, give them something you know they'd like. Not being able to make them laugh.
There is also the fear. Will I ever feel happy again? Will I ever not feel guilty when I do feel happy? Will I ever wake up and not think about it immediately? Or fall asleep to it? What's normal going to look like?
Will this grief ever stop feeling like a cage? I feel panicked by it. I can't get away from it. It will come on me with hurricane force, and I just want to run away from it. I want an evacuate myself from my own heart. In those moments, I feel desperate and trapped and terrified.
I just want her to stop being dead now.
Grief is also the absence of time, yet the acute awareness of it. It's been 2 days since she left... two weeks... soon two months. Yet in the middle of all the time marking, it seems to just disappear. It's just day after day after day of not being able to see the end of it. It's also knowing there is no real end of it, because she won't ever stop being dead.
Grief is always feeling concerned that you are burdening others with it. That they are tired of you being sad, of you talking about it, blogging about it, posting about it. It's feeling that because they aren't in the middle of it, they don't know how freaking heavy it still is. Grief is worrying that people don't think you are handling it well. That people don't understand that perhaps they are hearing you talk about it, because you have to say something or you'll break. It's being afraid that the people who love you most can't love you through this.
Grief happens on your timeline. Even losing Delaney is personal to each of us. None of us will ever truly heal; we'll just adjust and live with it. It will come up. The waves will continue to roll in and out and sometimes they'll make us feel as if we're drowning. Yet we'll not want to speak about it, because we're certain you're tired of hearing it. We believe that you believe we should be completely okay; and if we're not, we should just push that down inside and smile through it. We believe that you are judging us as weak or dramatic or pathetic.
And you'll be afraid to bring it up. You'll be afraid that we're having a "good day" and not want to rattle us. You'll see the look of fear on our faces in the grocery and know we just can't handle a conversation that starts with "how are you?" and really means "how ARE you?". You'll be afraid of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Grief scares us. It paralyzes us. Grief doesn't fight fair.
The truth is, if it's not your loss, you do move on. You'll sincerely check in and make sure we're doing okay. You aren't being cruel; you simply aren't in the cage with us. Until you are.
Because we all end up in there. Grief swirling around you, fear, desperation, hopelessness with it.
We're all alone in it. The swirling, the hurricane, the cage. Grief is internal and private and personal. Oh my, it's so hard. Fortunately, in the midst of it, through the wind and the water and between the cage bars, we see our help. We see you sometimes crying with us, encouraging us, and we see you walking towards us, into the middle of our hell offering to steady us until we can plant our feet and stop just trying to survive and start living with the grief.
Thank you to all my people, whose faces I see guiding me home. Eternal gratitude to my family, friends, Big D, my SBJs, the Julies, The Haggards, and neighbors, who have encouraged and listened and supported us. Most especially, to my Shannon who from the moment I got the phone call reached for me and held me tight. BCL.
