"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." That's the first line of the C.S. Lewis book I read a few weeks back, A Grief Observed. That line comes back to me again and again, and particularly now because my heart is pounding too fast at the moment. Panic? Fear? (Thyroid going out of whack again?) Whatever it is, it's happening. I move through this house, I go through the motions of everyday life, I shower, I eat, I do errands, I sleep (some), I look at the job listings on Craig's List, I watch things on the 13-year-old TV (halfway through an episode of Judge John Deed at the moment, and to go off on a tangent for a moment, if you don't know Martin Shaw, I recommend getting acquainted with him - Jerry and I really liked his incarnation of Dalgliesh, and George Gently as well), and I'm never, ever not thinking about Jerry, about the fact that he's not here, about his illness and death - but when the fact that this is all true, that he really has died and is not coming back, not ever, and that I'm going to have to learn how to live with that truth, when all that comes crashing through every so often and seems for a moment or two to be Real - then my heart starts its faster beating, then it feels like panic, then it feels like fear, even as Lewis put it. Then it feels like something I can't do. I just can't. I can't live without him. It feels like I can't, anyway. Monday will be a week away from three months since he died, and I'm still breathing, I'm still writing, I'm still existing, so "I can't live without him" so far isn't actually true.
But it feels true. And it still feels like I don't want to, anyway. It's still hard to believe that life will ever be something that isn't just too painful to want to hang onto.
"And it still feels like I don't want to, anyway." I think that awareness is great.
ReplyDeleteWhat else? I can tell you that for me, it's my "receptacle" that needs cleaning when I find myself reacting to things with fear, etc. -- in other words, the external factors may not change or be changeable, but if I work on myself generally, what I bring to the party can change and my reaction will become different as a result. The work on myself involves a lot of internal listening and stepping outside myself to witness my emotions and trace them back to their roots. And I throw myself on the mercy of the universe a lot, kind of like when you begin a backfloat in the ocean.