On Loss

Is it just me, or has it been a rough go in the last while? So many people that I love are going through loss and grief right now. That's the thing when you have large families and tightly-knit communities - you lose people. 

For some reason, the last couple of books I've randomly picked off of the shelf have both been about loss, as well. Richard Wagamese's Medicine Walk, and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. You might find either of those books a comfort, in the way that a song that makes you cry is somehow a comfort. 

Many of you who are close to me will know that my grandmother, Lucy Smith, passed away nearly seven years ago. Even in all that time, I am never very far from being caught short of breath at suddenly remembering that she is gone. Today I read this passage:

... through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.

And I recognized so much of myself, my need to keep believing that somehow a mistake was made. Somehow my grandmother will come back to me. So, this evening I spent a lot of time focusing on how to really, really let her go, and the thought came to me that I have been scared to let her go because a part of me felt like it would invalidate her love for me, and mine for her, if I really let her go. And that's just not true. 

Nothing will ever, ever take away the sound of her voice as she told hour after hour of stories, laughing her head off at the good parts and chain smoking filterless exports. The smell of her kitchen after a day of baking bread together. The feeling of her hand in mind, as she got older and I got in the habit of holding her hand during visits to somehow imprint the physical memory of her in my bones. And yet it is so hard to think about her without agonizing over the last few moments of her life. The first few moments of her death. The furious fact of her departure. 

As I thought about this, these words were spoken in my mind: Think about the living, and the loving, not the leaving. Think about the living, and the loving, not the leaving. There are too many fantastic memories to only focus on the impossible ones, the sad ones. It has taken a long, long time to even get to that reality, and who know how many more years before there is at least an ease with the thought of her absence. 

This is a pretty personal ramble, but it feels really good to write this stuff out. It's important to talk about death and not just the easy, happy stuff all of the time. That goes for real life too - so if you are not experiencing a loss yourself, but someone close to you is, please don't be afraid to visit with them. Maybe the hard stuff is going to come up, maybe it won't. Maybe it needs to. 

Whatever happens, much love to you.

xo

- J

“prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.” 
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking