I have been quiet. I have been thinking. I have been grieving. Still. And trying to determine myself to some course of action that will render me once more purposeful and productive. And content.

The tenacity of this grief is an exhausting thing. It is a burden and a blessing. But more than anything, at least of late, it has been a preoccupation. I am treading water. Again. And my life is, month by month, week by week, day by day, passing me by.

I am fifty. Half way (more than half way, if I am honest with myself) between life and death. Do the first twenty years even count? I was a child. I was learning life, not living it. Not really. Not making decisions for my own about how I live and what I do and what my name should and would mean in the mouths of others. I’m fifty, and the losses that have seemingly paralyzed me over the last nine years are not the last I’ll experience. So why does my struggle seem so extraordinary? Is it? Or are we all walking around with these burdens and pretending we are fine? Is being an adult simply the day-to-day play acting as if we are too strong to feel or show or admit that our inner worlds are filled with lonesome suffering?

I recently read Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. It’s premise is that the way to overcome many of our obstacles is not to try to avoid them, but to lean into them. By finding ways to take pleasure in the things we think we hate, we can overcome fears and roadblocks to our own progress. There are things in this life we can’t avoid: rejection, disappointment, fear, and shame. But leaning into those things teaches us precious lessons about ourselves. She spends a long time on shame, how shame warps our sense of self and actually makes the things we feel shameful about all the more tempting and exciting. Shame represses our secret desires and warps them into something that nags and pesters us in the moments we least expect.

There is a shame to grief, I’ve found. Having just passed the four year mark of my sister’s death, I feel an obligation to have “gotten over it” and to have moved on. I think about it less, certainly. But there is a resentment I feel toward that ever increasing distance between myself and her existence. In many ways I don’t want time to pass. In some respects I miss the newness of it, the feeling that she was just right there a minute ago. The acceptance that she is not coming back has well and truly set in. It is my reality now. I have moments when, after a long time of not having thought about it, the horror of it comes back to me. I have to work to put myself back in that place: waking up to missed phone (several of them) from the medical examiner’s office; the photos posted almost immediately by the news; the video posted to YouTube of flashing lights and broken glass, a dead dog, an overturned car … a body under a white sheet. Ambulances, and gurneys used and unused. How the driver, her husband, simply walked away. The witnesses, the lies, the pieces of conflicting information that don’t and never will add up. The answers we’ll never have. These are old news now, the shock of them worn dull and smooth, but heavy nonetheless.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis talks about the embarrassment his desire to speak of his wife caused in those who also loved her. In the introduction to that book, his stepson, Douglas H. Gresham clarifies that embarrassment as shame inherent in the emotion he would undoubtedly show in the course of such conversations. Boys don’t cry. People of a certain class, of a certain education (and certainly of a certain gender) are meant to keep it together, to maintain composure, to preserve that “stiff upper lip.” But he also speaks of the opportunities missed to speak of his mother, to share that grief, and in grieving, hold her close again, even if only in memory.

Karla McLaren in her book The Language of Emotion refers to grief as “the deep river of the soul” (which I ironically discovered in my sister’s library and which is a beloved and well-worn book in my own library now). In her section on grief she talks about the human tendency to avoid grief, but in that avoidance, “we make the tragic mistake, and each death and each loss, because we don’t feel it honestly, just stacks itself on top of the last death or loss…” She speaks of the importance of leaning into grief, of moving down into it. “The movement required in grief is downward,” she reminds us. “When you move through grief in an intentional and ritual-supported way, you’ll feel pain, but it won’t crush you; your heart will break open, but it won’t break apart. … If you let the river flow through you, your heart will not be emptied; it will be expanded, and you’ll have more capacity to love, and more room to breathe.” She speaks of the importance of rituals that can be relived (think Dia de los Muertos rather than funerals that are done and over and never revisited) because grief doesn’t simply stopped. I sometimes say I luxuriate in emotion when allowed to do so, but Ms. McLaren almost encourages such things when it comes to grief. To move through it, one must feel it. Like an Existential Kink, grief is not something to necessarily be enjoyed, but there is an exquisiteness to it that brings us back into communion, if only for a short time, with those we have lost.

But the desire to avoid this downward dive into the emotional deep is strong. As I have recently been reminded.

In April I lost a friend to suicide. I always thought that those who took their own lives must be insane. What does it take, after all, bypass the innate and primitive need to preserve one’s own life? But I never knew anyone more sane than her. She had planned it for some time. She was deliberate and detailed, even going so far as to plan her own funeral. It has been a devastatingly sad experience, coming at a time when I feel a keen scarcity of close friendships. She was quickly becoming my new best friend. But I arrived too late. She had warned me, in a joking manner (of course) that she was could relate very well to the Barbie who experienced “irrepressible thoughts of death”. Her exit strategy was already on her mind. She prepared her clients, she made sure all was in order at work and at home, and she made her exit, like someone walking into another room and closing the door behind her. Only the door disappeared when she did. Is it that easy just to leave? I have been devastated by the loss of her, and yet there is a sort of strange comfort in the notion that this was what she wanted. I see her, her arms spread out wide in frustration: “Guys! This is what I wanted!”

And what do I want? I want to live. I want to experience life, its ups and its downs, its lows and its highs. But boy am I ready for some highs. I want to fall in love. I want to travel. I want to have a book published traditionally and see it for sale, stacked high on a table at Barnes and Noble. I want to be old and to look back on my life and think, I’m so glad I did not fear living!

But I think … I think my fear of living is, as Carolyn Elliott suggests, nothing more than the heads side of a coin that is my fear of pain and loss on the other. I’m not going to get over my sorrow by avoiding grief, by avoiding all the experiences that might cause me disappointment or heartache. I’m going to have to lean into it. For me that means writing. And I am keenly aware that if I do not make a real effort to save my writing career, I’m going to lose it. So I will be harnessing my grief, harnessing my anger, and finally, at long last, moving ahead with some of my writing goals (more on that soon). Suffice it to say, I have several things I’m working on, and hopefully … hopefully, some publishing news soon.

Until then, thank you for sticking around and following me on this journey, even when (especially when) I need to delve into the deeps and feel a little sad.

Blessings!

(and more soon)