Notes on Grief

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language

For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.

How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.

It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.

I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have.

A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.

Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief?

Never' has come to say. 'Never' feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

We don't know how we will grieve until we grieve.

Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.

Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.

It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.

I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart – my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here – is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength.

A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

I am afraid of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after...

There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.

I wish.. I wish.. the guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could've happened, and all the ways the world could've been reshaped to prevent what happened on that day...

My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?

Part of grief's tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.

It is instinctive my recoiling. I imagine the confusion of some relatives, their disapproval even, when faced with my withdrawal; the calls I leave unanswered, the messages unread..

The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.

But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever?

Never’ has come to stay. ‘Never’ feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer here.

It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise..

Is it possible to be possessive of one's pain?