As I sat down to write my blog post committee-sanctioned blog post, I found myself feeling particularly uninspired.
What could I write about? Many things come to mind, many questions to ask. What’s going on with the economy? What’s happening to the state of the world? How exactly does the stock market work? Is God real? Why does blue cheese taste the way that it does? These are questions we may never know the answers to.
After my dad passed away, I stopped writing for a long time. And I stopped reading for a long time. The book I was reading when It Happened was The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. I had only gotten a chapter or two in when It Happened. Afterward, I tried to pick it up again to distract myself, but I threw up instead. Grief is funny that way. To this day I don’t know how that book ends and frankly, I don’t care. My dad read a lot. Toward the end, a lot of mysteries: Lee Child, David Baldacci, those kinds of books. I tried to read those too. No dice.
There are a lot of things I couldn’t do after my dad died. Read, for example. Listen to the song “Homeward Bound” by Simon and Garfunkel. Listen to “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by The Mamas and The Papas. Listen to any song by Cat Stevens. Play Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata on the piano. Play piano. Grieve.
There are things I still can’t do, like smell white lilies or wear thick polyester fabric or drive past my childhood home where It Happened.
The dress I wore to his funeral was made from thick, heavyweight polyester. It had long bishop sleeves and a small diamond cutout where my collarbones met. I had originally bought it three months prior in preparation for a Model UN trip with my high school where I would be presenting on the economic hardships of the small African nation of Burundi.
But anyway, after It Happened I tried the dress on again for some event. Disaster! Skin crawling, stomach churning, the works. I donated that dress to the Owensboro, Kentucky Goodwill on Parish Avenue.
White Oriental lilies have a similar effect. Three years ago, I worked as a clerk in a local flower shop, and delivered a beautiful arrangement of white lilies to a receptionist at a Lexus dealership. The whole way there, the smell filled my car and nose and lungs, producing the same effect as a series of random words and phrases would to a sleeper agent. My pupils were red and white spirals like a cartoon character. In a trance, I carried the arrangement inside. “Special delivery!” I probably looked like I had rabies. The car salesmen and the receptionist gushed over the beautiful flowers, but I, on the other hand, wanted to smash the vase and tear out the flowers’ long, delicate stamens and call the receptionist something the FCC would never allow anyone to say on the radio and start screaming until one of the car salesmen said to another car salesman that perhaps I should be escorted from the premises by Lexus security and then I would call the car salesman a snivelling, rat bastard and bite the Lexus security guard. But that would all be rather impolite and so instead I drove home in total silence with all my windows down.
Such is life!
The worst part after It Happened was when the casseroles stopped coming.
For about a week or so after It Happened, it was potluck central at my house. Neighbors and casseroles out the wazoo. But then it just stopped. No more casseroles, no more pot roast, no more lasagna. Enough time has passed, I imagine they were thinking, they’re probably fine now. That sucked! And some of these southern women made a hell of a casserole!
Nolia, you may be asking, what the hell is the moral of this story? I don’t know! The simple truth of it all is that grief is really weird! Grief is a weird, awful, beautiful, guilt-ridden, painful process that never gets easier. Unlike blue cheese, it does not allegedly get better with age.
It is not uniquely human to grieve. Elephants mourn, and so do dolphins and camels and even dogs and cats. But it is uniquely human to search for meaning in the midst of it all, to seek gratitude, to feel and know and choose gratitude in the face of grief. Wow, you may think, this is all coming from the individual who once felt compelled to bite a Lexus security guard? Yes!
It does not make the loss any less profound. It forces you to look grief in the eye. If you look closely, it is something that holds the potential for warmth and light and connection, for savoring the present and understanding others more deeply. Deep gratitude for the years we had the privilege to spend together and the person I am today because of it. But you have to enter into that swampland of the soul. You can’t hide from it. You can’t flee from it like the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven”: down the nights and down the days, down the arches of the years, down the labyrinthine ways of your own mind, and in the midst of tears hide under running laughter, etc, etc. If you don’t go willingly, you’ll just get dragged there anyway.
There’s no step-by-step guide, unfortunately. You’ll go through a lot of stages. The avoidance, the denial. Psychoanalyzing and intellectualizing and telling yourself you are perfectly in tune with your emotions, thank you very much, but in reality you don’t allow yourself to ever feel anything, ever (this one is hard to escape, but possible).
On my 20th birthday, my mom told me about a dream my dad had a few months before I was born. He woke her up and said, “I saw Nolia. She was a young woman standing at the edge of my dream.” I felt like I knew the exact moment he was referring to. He was wearing a green, long-sleeve polo shirt in his dream. And I often see him at the edge of my dreams, also. Maybe they are the same dreams. After all, we are the same age and he is older than me and I am older than him, too. We are something that transcends all aspects of time. Love transcends all time and space and everything in between.
Grief is just the price we pay for deep, profound love, for the privilege of being alive on this planet and enduring the human experience.
Throughout the years, I have begun to see trees in a different light, and cats. And grass, and leaves, and wind, and little babies, and bus drivers, and those big rock formations on the sides of the Western Kentucky Parkway. The handprint you leave on the world has to go somewhere. So it goes everywhere! And I feel such immense gratitude for it. The way I pet cats is different now. And the way I look at trees. And the way I read Whitman and Longfellow. And the way I order my breakfast sandwiches.
I doubt I will ever be able to fully articulate all this in a way that actually makes sense. Cruelly ironic for someone studying journalism, I know. And that’s okay! Grief is weird! It sucks! It’s beautiful! It allows you to feel things! Terrible things! But also wonderful things! It teaches us to be alive, to really live, to appreciate the present, to cultivate deep relationships, to find gratitude, to love others, to find purpose. It shows you the depth of your inner resilience and vulnerability and compassion.
I don’t feel triumphant or particularly wise. I still haven’t reached the stage of acceptance and I doubt I ever will. I am quietly devastated most days, actually. But my heart is overflowing with love.
We will all enter our share of swamplands throughout our lifetime. Such is the natural ebb and flow of life. There is no moral contract we can strike with the universe, or God, or whatever it is that might be out there. It’s inevitable, so we must let it propel us toward meaning and gratitude and love. There are things more important than what we fear. If we can acknowledge it directly, we make a great leap toward liberation.