Tending to Endings (forty-six)
I read articles on grief about the importance of naming losses and I think how hard it is to do that for 2020. Not all of course. Some are utterly clear. Just yesterday I talked with a friends who lost their father at age 57 to COVID. He lived in Guadalajara and they are in Maui. They could not travel to see him when he was in the hospital, nor could they or their children (his grandchildren) make the trip to attend the services.
I have lost two friends to heart attacks and a childhood neighbor to Alzheimer’s since the pandemic began. We did not gather. I have to keep reminding myself that these people are gone. Which is heart wrenching and wrong. There is the loss of the person, and then the loss of the ways we have had to walk through that loss. We don’t get to fall apart together and it his hard to know how to comfort each other.
And celebrations are lost too. We missed a long awaited reunion with my extended family and the annual trip to San Diego with John’s. His niece’s wedding was postponed, and graduations were skipped. The retreat I attend each October was canceled for the first time in 21 years.
First we postponed everything until we could do it right. And then as COVID lingered or surged, we found work arounds—zoom funerals and birthday parades. But we haven’t grown into our new ways yet, nor have we been able to return to the old, and so much is lost in the cracks between. Grief has always been awkward in our culture, and now it feels almost impossible, COVID one more reason to avoid facing what is already hard.
And then there are the everyday losses that seem small, but strung together change the way I live and I suspect change my body chemistry as well. Hugs. The ability to know what we do for the holidays. Pulling friends’ kids onto my lap to read stories. Walking side by side close enough to bump shoulders. The freedom of deciding to do anything without having to weigh COVID risks. Seeing strangers smile.
I’m low on laughter this year. I think back to lunches in restaurants with friends, and it is not the food I long for— it is being with smart, funny people who I can count on to make me laugh. I am not nearly funny enough on my own, and the comedy channel is not the same. It is communal laughter I miss most. All of us in the same room with tears streaming down our cheeks.
It’s so easy to shift here to the I’m actually very lucky. Shelter in place came at time in my life where we have the finances to withstand it. No one in my immediate family has gotten sick yet. In my extended family, all have recovered well. I like having time alone to write. I live in a place where I can walk outside on trails daily. John and I have a loving marriage and we are good friends. I get to see friends from far away now because we all learned zoom. There is a vaccine on the horizon!
All of this is true, and it is also a trap, this slight-of-hand, this socially acceptable attempt to outmaneuver grief. To call sadness by another name—to call it whining, or not being grateful—as if grief and gratitude are not intertwined.
Grief held at bay does not wait patiently behind the gate. It comes out sideways when I speak sharply to the pharmacist and then feel terrible because isn’t her job hard enough? It emerges as me scrolling on my phone instead of going for a walk. Grief settles in my chest and I swear if I wait long enough, in my bones. It aches at night. Slips through in nightmares and then insomnia or stomach aches. I don’t avoid grief. I avoid acknowledging it and letting it have its well earned place.
As the nights grow longer, I think of my friends who used to gather for winter solstice each December. We would drink hot mulled cider and eat beignets and toss sticks of wood into the fire with words written on them. Things we wanted to release.
I enjoyed the evening, but held some skepticism for letting go ceremonies. Surrendering old hurts or old loves has always seemed an act of grace that happens when I’m not trying, rather than something I do. It never happens for me when I drive to the top of a mountain to outstretch my hands to the sky or toss crumpled paper into the flames.
But I would join in and laugh with friends, watch their golden skin flicker in the light, see their smiles from across the ring. Some years winter came early and we would lean against each other to keep warm and stand so close to the fire my jeans would feel hot against my shins. I would dutifully write my word or phrase and when it came my turn, toss it into the fire like a prayer.
And now I see I may have had it wrong. It is in the naming that I acknowledge the empty spaces that have shaped me, those things that matter most, those things I love. To deny loss is to deny love.
And so in 2020 it is good to begin early, a full month before the longest night. I write the losses on wood or on paper. Paint them on stone. Type them here.
For I suspect it is not the tossing that transmutes great loss into something else. Rather, it is in the loving hold and the walk up to the fire: I see you—loss—I see you. You were here and now you are not. Much love.
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