Do Not Rush Your Grief

your grief, fully expressed, can be its own wild muse.

Photo by Tiago Bandeira on Unsplash

Let me tell you a story about grief.

Once upon a time, I tumbled into a love I called a knowing and understood as a return to faith.

She had ocean eyes and a voice like sandpaper, rough and heavy. We met when we both spied a lucky penny abandoned on the gay bar dance floor and reached for it at the exact same moment.

Inside those few tender months, all things felt possible again. And then it was done, in a rough gash delivered without kindness or explanation.

Oh yes. I had known grief before, for losses far bigger than this.

But this? This was loss without distance. The culmination of all of the losses that preceded. In many ways, all the ones my bones knew were yet to come.

It was as if all of my grief, delayed for held for a lifetime, came to land in my body all in a single day.

This was me reduced to fault line after fault line. All the walls and defenses I had spent decades building tumbled at once, and the wreckage was in me and over me, and all around.

The body of me became a land quaking and capsizing into an ocean hell-bent on collapsing in on itself.

The levees of me were irrevocably breached and the relentless wall of the sea rushed toward everything in a giant wall of water.

No doubt, she took me out.

Underneath the tide of her I was rough and ragged and wholly undone. Lungs full of salt, tears that folded me inward on myself. Grasping at the sheets, or my own bare skin, desperate for a hold on something solid in the center of it all.

I don’t want to tell you any of this.

My god, how I judge my grief.

How we all do.

To the rest of the world, you see, some grief doesn’t make sense, has no context, no reason for being what it was.

The love that left? She hadn't been around that long. Only a select few even knew she existed. It was quiet and private and it had rekindled a hope I thought long since dead.

I had lived through coming out. Withstood the loss of my marriage and the breakdown of my family. Loved people who are gone from this earth. Unpacked myself from the confines of the religion of my childhood, for fucks sake. I knew how to hold the whole of me tall through far worse than this.

But this one took me to my knees and then down to the ground itself. Set me spinning into a freefall that lasted for months and brought me to some of the most terrifying places of my life.

Grief that attaches to something specific or to a loss that the world deems significant? We can work with that, for a time.

Long-term relationship ended suddenly? Check.
Death of a loved one? Clearly.
Capital-T trauma? Of course.
Depression? If you must.

Didn’t get the job—fight with your kid—loneliness—missing a long-ago lover—ending of a brand new love affair—collective sadness—don’t know why but feeling some crazy existential sorrow/dread just the same?

Eh. Okay, but let’s just call it sadness, not grief.
And just for a bit, and don’t get too crazy with it.
Keep it neat and tidy, and get over it quickly, please.
My god, don’t be so dramatic about it.

But that’s not how it works. It’s not just the losses the world deems worthy that have the power to take us out.

Grief doesn't answer to the rules of good sense.

She doesn’t answer to any rules at all.

Grief is a willful mother fucker who takes what she wants and spits us out where she will.