Twenty-One months have passed now since Daniel died, and I was
thinking about how grief and loss are framed by language. A few of
the attempts, and reasonable ones at that, are:
And all have their adherents. I had this idea that it was like
Terminator 2; specifically
the part where the seemingly indestructible T-1000, played with
wonderful malevolent nonchalance by Robert Patrick, has been thwarted
briefly by Arnie’s older and suddenly obsolete-looking
T-800. The shapeshifting T-1000 has been frozen, literally, by the
spillage of a chemical truck’s contents. The T-1000’s liquid
metal then shatters into countless pieces which are smashed all over
the place. Shards of itself are suddenly unrecognisable as humanoid;
it has been vanquished into thousands of utterly broken jigsaw pieces
that nobody could ever fit together again.
So far, so lyrical. The problem
comes with this one, though, when the pieces warm up in the
California sun and begin to coalesce together; eventually they
re-form the perfect T-1000 which continues the chase of Arnie, John
Connor et al as if nothing has really happened.
There the metaphor breaks down:
grief is not like that. There is no return to the form you were
before the dramatic event that sends your pieces all over the place.
The template has been lost. You cannot chase what you were chasing
before.
I think the only way to describe the
feeling when someone very close to you dies, is that you die too.
Nothing is yours anymore. Time has no sense: hours can pass as days.
Weeks can pass as hours. Basic tasks become either impossibly
confusing or completely consuming. Making a cup of tea can be a
triumph ahead of all other achievements in your life (not that you
can remember them, at least not in any meaningful sense). You are
both in a soft-focus and hazy bubble that barely touches the world,
and somehow also viewing yourself with utter perplexment.
In some very real ways, you
are no longer a person at all: your self is entirely subsumed by the
completeness of the loss and sadness, and the tears are the only
anchor to your body at all. It is completely possible to go out for a
pint and to have a chat about football as if nothing has happened. It
is completely possible to watch yourself doing so, from an eerie
place neither in this world or outside it.
You can feel the world spinning as
you float above it. You are not part of it. You are no longer bound
by it. This liminal sense, this nothingness, this concurrent
brutality and bemusement – it is all happening at once. Minutes do
not tick by, because somewhere you are outside of time too.
Everything you knew, every plan and dream, every single thing that
seemed so solid and reliable – that has all died. All of it has
gone.
You are dead.
But you do not stay
dead.
You do not, because sometimes your
feet touch the ground again and the asphalt under your shoes suddenly
solidifies again and gravity turns back on. The weight of those tons
and tons of force presses on your shoulders and in a split-second you
are bent double with the pain of the burden of the realisation of the
loss. That comes over, and over, and over again. The worst is waking
up and for that glorious moment everything is fine; the sun is
shining; a new day is there. Grief is insidious in allowing that
horrendous iota of normality, because that realisation cackles its
way back in and scratches your brain to pieces again, and because
you’ve just woken up there is no more sleep-oblivion to be had.
You’re left with receding echoes of those wonderful dreams of the
lost, til they too fade and are forgotten.
But those who are lost are not
forgotten, and everything brings their image and their self to you –
yet not quite. Someone walking like them. A tin of sild in the
supermarket. A chance of a pun on social media that’s no longer
made. Their echoes are everywhere, their imprint on the world
bringing you back in some ways to a world that is no longer entirely
without them. You want to tell them this. You post on their Facebook
page. They won’t see it. But you will, because you are no longer
dead. And because you are no longer dead, you are sharing their life
with everybody who also loves and misses them.
You are sharing your own life with
the part of you which still does not accept they are gone. That part
of you, too, in time, begins to somehow reconfigure itself, but it
does not and will not ever entirely disappear.
But as time goes by that ache, that
impossible-to-reconcile and illogical part of you that still believes
that somehow, miraculously, they have survived and are lost
but still in this world – that
part of you will no longer be something that you want to kill and be
rid of.
It will be the part of you that you
cherish the very most, because it is the part of you that is the most
human of all.
It is hope.
Whilst hope exists then you are
never truly alone; you are never without love; and those who have
gone will never truly depart from your universe. But
loss, grief, the whole kaboodle is always, always, always
going to be fucking unfair and awful. It hurts more than any other
pain imaginable, because it exists beyond imagination; it is
impossible to prepare for, because it is outside of any other
experience you have ever had. It just is.
Does it get better?
Do you get better?
Can you ever be happy again?
These questions have no answers, of
course. It is more apt, perhaps, to note that they change in meaning
as you begin to cope with the weight of the gravity of the loss. Not
because you want to. Not because you have to. Just because you are
not dead, and the burden of the guilt of life is the only thing that
you can begin to address.
Note this: it is not your
fault.
Try and believe that as fully and as
quickly as possible. Try and absolve yourself, and try and listen to
the parts of you that are telling you that you have fucked everything
up, or that you could have prevented this, or that in some way you
should be the one that died instead. Listen to those parts, let them
rant and rave, and let them go again. They need to shout their
nonsense. Do not push them away. Watch them with compassion, let them
have their say, and watch them recede into the distance. They are
your thoughts, but they are not you.
You have other thoughts, many other thoughts. They are not you
either. And none of this, none of this, can control you forever.
Neither can you control time. Grief has no endpoint, no levels of
achievement, no awards ceremony, no medals for reaching any single
place along the way. It is not linear, and it bites you when you are
least expecting it. What grows, what changes, is perhaps the
knowledge that you have been through the worst possible day of your
life – and nothing, nothing can ever be as bad as that again.
It is
scant consolation, but scant consolation is better than no
consolation isn’t it.
Hope abides, always.
x
