What we cannot reclaim from grief

Here is one thing about Grief. It will stamp its presence all over your favourite experiences and they will cease to be your own. They will still be yours in part, but they will also belong to the many-faced-god that is Grief. Grief is the one who left, the war that goes on, the future that didn’t come to pass, the past that tricked you into believing a questionable version of reality, the rage you feel looking out at the world.

Here is a second thing about Grief. Overlapping Griefs will not make space for each other as they filter into you. They will crowd you and each take their fair share of the space, unwelcome houseguests, persistent and demanding. You’re going to have to get smaller around them.

I am a mosaic of mind-body-spaces that Grief forced me into sharing. Maybe you are, too. How do we acknowledge that we have been squeezed out by Grief into the margins of our past, present, future? How do we summon the agency to move through the world as ourselves, with this Grief as passenger? I think we can keep moving and let ourselves go slowly and laboriously. I’m going very slowly lately.

I think we can only keep moving if we vulnerably name the Grief-passengers first, even if only to ourselves.

Here are some of the things my Grief passengers took from me. I resent sharing these things. I resent how my experience of them, and my memory of them, transformed under Grief’s presence. I want to re-claim them as mine, re-member them as whole, re-render them in the original, but I cannot, and I will make peace with that.

(What have you been forced to share with your Grief companions?)

The long loop of the trail. But not the whole loop, just the winter-friendly version of the hike where you keep going until the bend and then turn back home and have tea.

The pines lined up at the start of that trail, which should remind me of home, but remind me of civilian mass graves near home instead.

Driving 80 in the summer dark, high beams on, with all the windows rolled all the way down, and feeling anywhere between content and elated.

Dipping in and out of a good party. It took my autistic body so long to figure out how to be in public and not burn out; I finally got the balance right; but the lonely grief of pandemic calculus wins now, and I do not go.

Having houseplants die sometimes and feeling neutral about this inevitable event. Instead, I have meaningfully inherited a dozen ficus trees, and I am watching myself fail to keep them alive all at once, and this is not about me, and it is not about the ficus trees, but about yet another way in which I am so different from my father.

Wearing my winter hat over my growing hair, which should feel like gender euphoria, but instead feels like a memory.

A slightly sore throat, which used to mean my voice was dropping during those early days on hormones, but now means my nebulous set of undiagnosed chronic symptoms will be taunting me for yet another day, or week, or month, or more.

Nights on my own, which I used to enjoy immensely, but are now spent with the palpable absence of my ghosts, who refuse to haunt me.