So, here’s the thing about grief. It turns out that it’s not the kind of thing that flips on, like a switch, and runs its course until you’re done with it. You don’t hunker down in a dark room with a box of Kleenex until you can cry no more, then emerge when you’re ready to move on. It turns out that grief becomes a part of you, that you wear it – though grief is not like a coat you can shed.
My mom died last June. Strangely, and though neither she nor I wanted it to end up this way, this has become one of the most important things about me. She would be so mad to know that I’m still so focused on this, but there it is.
Her health was my full-time job for nearly a year – it consumed me. I read everything I could find about pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy, biological therapies, clinical trials. I cooked, in vain, trying to find things she could eat, trying to give her strength. I called daily to tell her jokes and bash Bush, knowing that even though I couldn’t fix the cancer, I could at least put a smile on her face. For eight months I went through the motions in my own life while my mind and my heart were with my mom.
It was a lot. More than a person should have to deal with, but people do it, all the time. I thought about joining a support group, getting therapy, getting medicated. The medication helped a little, the therapy not so much.
What helped the most was getting outside. I found a place near my mom’s home on Whidbey Island called Earth Sanctuary. How can I describe this place? It is part nature preserve, part spiritual sculpture garden. It has hiking trails and prayer wheels, ponds and stone circles. Sometimes I took my mom there to just sit and meditate. Once I took my brother – I knew he needed to cry, and the Earth Sanctuary is a good place to release whatever is stuck inside. But mostly I just went there alone. I got in the habit of stopping there on my way to or from my mom’s house, to quell the fear and anxiety. An hour in those woods quieted my mind like nothing else could. I would leave with a feeling of strength, knowing that I could keep going.
And then she died. We knew she was going to die. It wasn’t a surprise, since she’d chosen to end treatment. She wasn’t scared. She was at her home, which was overflowing with friends and family. Her garden was, as she would say, “a riot of color.” She ate peas that she had planted in the spring. She nibbled chocolate from the insanely good candy store in Langley. She watched the birds – hundreds of them- that visited her garden daily, as if to see her off. And she slept, more and more, until she didn’t wake up at all. It was, people tell me, a “good” death.
It’s been nearly a year. To say that I miss my mom doesn’t even begin to touch what I’m feeling. I am bereft. I carry my grief with me, and it’s so strong sometimes that I wonder why people can’t smell it on me.
At other times, I forget, and it lurks beneath the surface, only to seep out, as if through my pores, at unexpected moments. I will be driving my son to school or washing the dishes when it starts to rise up inside me, tears leaking from my eyes. I’ll be suddenly short of breath, unable to speak. Sometimes it is so heavy that I am amazed that I can stand upright. Now I know what people mean when they say they’re paralyzed with some emotion.
I don’t really know how to do this grieving thing. There’s no instruction manual – no preparation, like Lamaze classes, though a death changes your life as much as a birth does. I am doing the only thing I know how to do: I’m living each day, as I promised my mom I would, with joy where I can find it. When the sadness rises up, I give myself to it. And when it’s more than I can bear, I go outside. Not to escape the grief, but to be in it, in peace.
At my mom’s memorial service, I gave out a poem by Wendell Berry called “The Peace of Wild Things.”
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
That’s what I’m trying to do. When I’m overcome, I try to remember to rest in the grace of the world. I go to the Earth Sanctuary and I walk the labyrinth and I sit in the dolmen. I try to share my grief with the earth (as hokey and new-agey as that sounds), because it’s really too much for one person. I suppose religious people might “let go and let God,” or Allah or whoever. But for me a walk in the woods is as close to God as I’ve gotten.
I don’t know if I will always feel this way. I know that this experience has changed me, shaped me. I hope that at some point it won’t be so raw, that the tears won’t be so quick. But when the tears do come, at least I’ll know where to go.
