I’ll take two of what you’re having

And I’ll take all of what you’ve got

To kill this goddamn lonely, goddamn lonely love

I don’t know what to do with my pain. It still feels unbearable at times. I don’t know how to manage emotional pain this vast and this deep. It sometimes seems all the coping mechanisms in the world (meditation, exercise, deep breathing, social connections, therapy) cannot stand up to grief this intense. I have no idea how to reconnect with myself in the midst of sadness that feels as though it has swallowed me whole.

I feel very alone in my grief even though I know I’m not the only person who misses my husband. My pain still feels so acute at times, but meanwhile it seems the rest of the world has moved on.

My grief is not just a longing for people who aren’t here (although there’s plenty of that). It’s a redefining of my identity, a realignment of my support system / family ties / social connections, a reorienting to reality itself. I often feel I’m going through it all on my own. And in many ways, I am.

I’m aware that my pain is my own and that no one else can fully understand it, just as I can’t fully understand another’s struggle either. I’m also aware that when it comes to issues of identity and ways of interacting with the world, no one else can resolve those complexities. No one can deal with those things for me.

And yet, at the same time, I just don’t think I can get through this alone (despite my best efforts). I don’t think even the most resilient among us should cope with profound loss entirely on their own. People need other people. We need each other. We need community. And yet I struggle with what is mine to bear alone and what can be shared with others.

Is it an impossible thing to have company inside my grief? Is it an unattainable fantasy to share the weight of it with someone, a weight so crushing I often feel like its suffocating me? How do I open up and engage with the world while also tending to my outsize pain and overwhelming emotional needs?

I do have moments of joy, and I do my best to savor these moments. But the moments of joy are punctuated by waves of intense grief, trauma-induced anxiety and utter confusion about the way forward and who I am now under these new circumstances. I often feel frozen and dumbfounded in the wake of such overwhelming tragedy and the feelings that accompany acute grief: hopelessness, powerlessness, confusion, despair, rage, guilt, even shame.

I keep thinking I’m supposed to move through the pain, that I’m supposed to get past it somehow. But I’m not sure that’s a helpful way of looking at things. Getting past or getting through is an elusive, maybe even impossible, goal. I have to remind myself that it’s about finding peace, and even joy, in the midst of pain and sorrow. It seems simple and straightforward, but it’s actually very difficult to allow the pain to be there–to not run from it or try to change it or apologize for it–and then at the same time seek out those moments of peace and joy. My mind keeps trying to fix the pain, to solve it, to figure out a way to get past these feelings. It’s a hamster wheel that’s hard to step off of.

We live in a culture that encourages us to cover up our pain. At times we’re even outright shamed for feeling anything other than happiness. Sadness is sometimes seen as a choice, but when it comes to losing a loved one, pain is involuntary. We feel pain and we grieve because we love so deeply. Suffering is a choice (for example, making things harder on ourselves through self criticism). But grief is not a choice.

I sometimes feel judged for my ongoing grief. I often feel like I’ve failed myself and everyone else for not being “better” at this, for not knowing the way forward, for not being able to immediately pick up the pieces after my entire life came crashing down in an instant. But no matter what people think or what advice I’m given, I’m the one that lives with this palpable grief every day. And I’m doing the best that I can.

The only way out is through. We have to feel our feelings fully before they will release their hold on us. We have to be willing to let ourselves be torn down, to feel everything that wants to be felt, before we can pick ourselves back up.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-excerpt from “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

Life keeps getting smaller and smaller.

It feels as though I just keep losing huge, integral swaths of my life. I lost my husband and my dad — losses that demolished my emotional foundation and rearranged all my familial relationships and friendships. I left the apartment and the city where I lived with my husband for our entire married life. I lost my sense of safety and security in the world. I’ve even lost parts of myself.

Now, along with everyone else, I’m grappling with pandemic-imposed isolation and uncertainty.

Sometimes it seems we lose one thing and then we just keep losing things. We lose bigger, more important things. We lose things at an accelerated rate. We lose things before we’re ready to part with them. We lose another thing when we’re in the midst of trying to recover from the last thing we lost.

I’ve been struggling with how to rebuild my life, how to recover the basic pillars that make life worth living: love, connection, community, meaningful work, creative inspiration. I was already struggling emotionally when I lost my husband (the sudden loss of my dad was an incredibly destabilizing experience). And I was already traumatized and grief-stricken when the pandemic hit less than a year and a half after losing my husband.

It occurs to me that life does not always give us the breathing room we need after a horrifying and painful event. Life does not always space out tragedies so that we’re on solid ground when another catastrophe strikes. Life respects no one. That last one is a phrase I’ve heard repeated over the years. When I was younger it used to strike me as cold, harsh and unfeeling. Now, I find the phrase to be uncannily accurate.

There is so much grief in the world right now, both individual and collective. There are so many people who were suffering very deeply before the pandemic, who were hanging on by a thread before unforeseen circumstances piled on more pain. And virtually all of us have endured added suffering as a result of all that’s going on in the world — COVID-19, police brutality, sociopolitical unrest, economic uncertainty.

For me, it feels as though the chaos and terror of my internal world has spilled over into the external world. There is chaos within and without.

What strikes me about my personal losses, and also the losses we’re collectively experiencing, is the lack of a sense of agency. A sense of agency is what seems to distinguish difficult but surmountable losses from intolerable, catastrophic losses that strip a person to their core (such as loss of a loved one).

Losing keys, a watch, whole cities and former lovers — these losses run the gamut from simply frustrating to utterly heartbreaking. But the person doing the moving or the breaking up usually has some say in the matter. As painful as it may be, making big changes and leaving things behind involves personal agency, and, perhaps, just a tiny bit of satisfaction when all is said and done.

But losing a loved one is different. Having the two most important people in my life ripped away from me suddenly, without warning, has left me with such an abject sense of helplessness that I struggle to put it into words. There is such a strong, intense need to DO SOMETHING about my circumstances, but there is nothing I can do to change what happened. My losses are permanent. All I can do is try and find a way to survive this pain, try and figure out how to harness some semblance of meaning and purpose in life again. I’m grasping at straws.

When everything has been turned upside down, when any illusion of control has been shattered, I find that I have to take things day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute. I can’t worry about next month or next year. All I can do is get through today. I meditate every day. I go for a walk every day. I write in my journal every day. It may not seem like much, and my natural inclination is to gloss over these daily rituals and direct my attention to the elephant in the room: that is, how to piece back together the wreckage of my life. But the reality is that I can’t fix that overnight. There is no magic bullet that will take me from my current broken-hearted and shattered existence back to some semblance of the life I had before all the tragedy. It’s baby steps. It’s one tiny step and then another and another. I keep trying to make one giant leap into some unknown but less painful future.

Although it was against my will, I’ve practiced losing farther and losing faster. Now I’m just trying to find moments of peace, day-by-day, minute-by-minute.

books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down

-Mary Oliver

I came across the following quote from a grief professional, and it strikes me as pretty significant: “We need to remember that grief is an experience, not a process.”

In Western culture, there’s a lot of talk about the grieving “process,” a word that suggests there’s an ultimate end to grief after moving through a series of stages or steps. Our Western understanding of grief tends to teach that there’s a mourning period, perhaps lasting up to a year, and after that, the griever returns to “normal” life.

I find that paradigm to be both unrealistic and unhelpful. And as someone who has spoken with many widowed people and survivors of other tragic losses, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Grief, like love, doesn’t end after one year, two years or even ten years. The sheer weight of grief, the intensity of it, the way it seems to consume a person—all these things will shift over time. But I don’t think there is ever a point when grief ends. It’s not as if we spend a few months feeling some intense feelings and then, magically, it’s over and we’re back to our former selves. There is no end date to grief because there is no end date to the loss. We will continue to experience the loss of a loved one as time goes on, and thus we continue to experience our grief as well.

When a person loses a spouse, they don’t just lose them in the present moment. They lose all the shared memories of the past as well as the plans, hopes, dreams and goals they had for the future. They lose that person throughout time.

Since losing my husband, memories come up for me—inside jokes, trips we’d taken, intimate conversations we’d had, things that only the two of us had experienced—and I crave his physical presence so he can share in the remembering of such events. I want these experiences mirrored back to me, and in doing so, the intimate details of our shared universe are reinforced.

But that whole universe has shattered, and no one is left to reflect it back to me. I find that I’m not only missing my partner, but I’m missing a piece of my own soul. The loss of our shared universe, and the loss of a part of my self, is so deeply painful. Something profound has been taken away, and yet I’m in touch with the hopeless understanding that what was can never be again. Although I know our shared past was real, I sometimes have moments where it seems as though it was a dream.

I also lost out on all the plans my husband and I had for our future: the decisions we were going to make as a couple, the challenges we were going to face together, the travels we were meant to take, the joint creative projects we had discussed, the family gatherings, the intellectual discussions, the cultural endeavors, the secret looks only the two of us understood, the adventures both monumental and quotidian, the on-going love and support he would have given me as I pushed myself artistically and professionally, and the love and support I so desperately wanted to continue to give to him as he strove to reach his own goals. I lost my partner throughout time and not just in a single moment.

With a loss of this magnitude, it’s impossible to return to life as it was before. There is no “normal” to return to. Even if your routines are the same, everything is different. How to laugh at a friend’s joke, how to let in laughter or lightness of any kind, when the world has gone dark for you because your person is no longer here? How to complete a project at work, or apply for a new job, when nonsensical tragedy has rendered everything seemingly meaningless? How to enjoy a concert, an art exhibit, a film, even just a walk in nature, when your person isn’t there to experience it with you, and when your person will never be able to experience anything ever again? How to hold both the menial logistics of everyday life—grocery lists, household tasks, work or childcare schedules—in the same brain that is processing a horrific, tragic loss that defies logical understanding?

Instead of attempting to return to what was normal before the loss after a prescribed “mourning period,” perhaps the goal has to be to find a new normal, a new stasis, a new foundation on which to rebuild one’s life, and to incorporate the grief into this new normal. For me, this search for the new normal is still very much a work in progress. But I’ve found that, not only are the above questions perfectly reasonable in context, but working through these questions is actually part of the new normal. Figuring out how to make space for both the debilitating sadness over the sudden loss of my husband as well as the small victories of maintaining connections with others and discovering who I am now, post-traumatic loss, is part of the work of grief. A grieving person can absolutely experience joy again. It’s just that joy doesn’t cancel out grief.

My love for the people I’ve lost remains intact, and will always be intact, and my grief is an extension of that love. It takes courage for a person to own their pain, especially when the rest of the world seems to insist they “let go” and “move on.” The pain of my losses will be with me for the rest of my life–and I cannot, and would not, put it down.