Notes on grief

I spent a few days last week with some cousins in Madrid. I had last seen one of them this time last year at her husband’s funeral. Ken was 48 when he died from cancer and they had only been married for seven years. Just getting started, really. No matter how many times I say it, the math feels offensive. She describes her grief as numbness, like the volume on life had been turned down several notches and left there. For her, grief has manifested as a kind of persistent anesthesia. 

For some, grief registers as velocity to disappearance. It looks like leaving without explanation, canceling plans, going dark or lying on the floor for what feels like forever in the dark because the sensory input of the world feels like too much. It expresses as nonexpression and aloofness, but in reality the nervous system is working overtime trying to survive a rupture, and feels alarming if you believe that grief can be governed by some future date circled on the Gregorian calendar.

Or maybe your grief looks like mine, intensely compartmentalized, because life forces us to continue walking forward. At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself. 

Grieving my grandmother’s passing arrived differently. This is fresh, so bear with me. She lived to be 105, and grief had years to linger before it officially came knocking. We grieved the slow loss of her memory while we celebrated the miracle that was her spirit and will to continue living among us. We grieved having to place her in a full care nursing home — she had stayed in my parents’ care for years until they physically could not lift her anymore. Intergenerational living until the end is what families like ours do, shaped by some mix of our immigration story, obligation, love and necessity all at once. When she passed, our grief wasn’t shock so much as relief that her spirit was finally able to reunite with my grandfather’s who passed on three decades ago.

Whatever it is, we need to be OK with it, because judging how grief shows up doesn’t make it go away any faster. This is the part people don’t talk about enough, how grief is forced to live inside routine rather than outside it. Kids still need to get to school. Meals still need to be made. Emails still get answered. Sometimes routine is the only thing holding someone upright, and other times that same routine feels unbearable, like the world is mandating normalcy when nothing feels normal at all. So sneaky. 

And our systems don’t really know what to do with any of this. Most benefits plans in the United States offer a few days of bereavement leave, which I say not as an indictment so much as an observation. Three days is barely enough time to notify people and plan a service, let alone process the fact that someone you loved is now permanently absent from your life. Artifacts of systems designed to be efficient and legible, but miles from humane. In the meantime, we’ve duct taped together all of these systems built in different eras with different assumptions about how long people live and who has support at home, and we absorb the mounting friction privately, every day.

What we actually owe one another in grief is not solutions or timelines or silver linings but patience and the freedom to express and process. We owe one another the ability to let grief look different in different bodies, to let it arrive as numbness or motion or silence or tears without rushing to interpret or fix it. As with all of life’s emotions, the schedule we attempt to impose on grief typically does little to change its trajectory. It moves through us on its own terms and manifests itself when it wants to, alongside lives that remain complicated and tightly orchestrated and already stretched thin. 

And maybe we just have to admit that none of this fits cleanly, that we need to relinquish control and accept that grief is a part of who we are whether we want it there or not, from the day we are born until the day we die. This is not as Instagrammable as some would like — but maybe, talk about it a little more. I’ll try too.