Grief is like an awful sofa
Twenty-two years ago this week my grandfather died. We were really close and his death (due to cancer. Fuck cancer) hit me really hard. I grieved a lot, learned how to grieve, and then grieved some more.
The thing I learned over the years is that grief is a weird thing — it hits you at strange times and is often triggered by unexpected things. I’ll be fine for weeks or months, and then I’ll see something that reminds me of him, or something that I would have loved to share with him, and I’m grieving once again. Notable dates can be particularly hard, be it a holiday, his birthday, deathday, wedding anniversary, etc. At first I assumed that the grief would just go away eventually
But it didn’t.
After a few years I started to become angry and frustrated with myself that this would still pop up. Shouldn’t I have been over it by now? Shouldn’t I have moved on?
The answer is no, absolutely not. And that’s where the Grief Sofa comes in.
I’ve been on a mailing list composed mostly of friends and acquaintances of a friend of mine for something like fifteen years. Ten years ago, someone started a thread talking about grief and I was stunned at the incredibly thoughtful and vulnerable conversation that followed, but Jenn Frank crystallized how grief works in a way that has stuck with me year after year. I’ve found it incredibly valuable and I’d like to share what she wrote with you (with her permission, of course):
When you lose a person — it doesn’t have to be a death, OK, it can just be someone who drops out of your life, it can be a bad breakup — you grieve. But, say, ten years go by, and then twenty have passed, and you still grieve. That’s normal. But now you aren’t grieving the loss that you experienced at the moment the missing person passed anymore. You aren’t grieving the person anymore. Now, instead, you grieve what that person ought to have meant to you, and all of the lost moments you ought to have shared. So in that way, it’s a continuing sense of loss, a grief that is fresh and new and different at each holiday, each death’s little anniversary, every birthday. You know and recognize your loss, and the person’s absence, anew, every time you cross any little threshold in life. Maybe it is a small relief to know that you won’t forget the person you’ve lost, or the hurt that you are feeling right now?
Loss is loss, and it is normal to feel the sort of terrible grief over a severed relationship that we think we ought to reserve for deaths and catastrophes and other sacred things. We worry that it isn’t normal, but it is.
The truth is, your sense of grief will never go away. Terrifyingly, grief lasts. But it becomes something that you live with, like an awful sofa you inherit and don’t really want to keep. But eventually you move the sofa out of the living room and into a guest room, and you learn how to walk through the room without looking at it directly. Sometimes, when you are feeling really pitiful, you can go sit in it for a while, and for a while that can be OK.
So if you’re looking for me this weekend, I’ll probably be spending some time on my own grief sofa, and that’s OK.
