Loss comes to us all in the end.
For a long time, the pain of losing Sue was intensely physical. I’d sit down to try and distract myself, picking up a book but finding the pages absurd. Nothing more than a jumbled abstraction. If I stopped this pointless exercise, even for a moment, the waiting sadness would surge back on an incoming tide and drown me. And so I busied myself at school and in life, filling it up with as much as possible so there was no space for the dysphoria to take root. I made the British mistake of acting happy.
But how could I be?
We can’t run away from our unhappiness, try as we do. It is the human way to deny the existence of our woes, but the act of denial locks the thing inside of us that has to get out. Grief has to be fully experienced and the pain has to be felt in all its pieces. There is no way around it. The more we resist it, or try to outrun it, the more it grows inside of us like a cancer. In my case, it became so severe inside of me that I carried with me this feeling of being physically ill.
I missed Sue relentlessly.
It was Gilly and Harold who were insistent in pushing me forward, and through their cajoling, pushed me towards a breakthrough. One morning, Harold took me to see a church minister in the village of Melbourne who could sense the dark truth beneath my stoicism. Amidst all of his kind words, I remember only the following.
“I’m going to tell you now my dear. Be sad,” he said to me.
“Lean on your friends today, and be sure that next year they will lean on you.”
I felt a small glimmer, as though this man who I didn’t know, was giving me license to release this thing. And so I listened and I leaned in. I leaned on Harold and my friends. I allowed the feeling of sadness to boil up on its own accord. Often I wept. I leaned on Gilly. I stopped running away from the things that I was feeling. The interminable ache remained, and remains, but the physical pain of my grief, inch by inch, began to become more manageable as if released to the ether.
This is what the beginning of healing looks like.
On what would have been Sue’s birthday the following year, I was in my kitchen when Harold arrived home from work. His year had been that of a quiet stoic, but he seemed enthused to tell me something.
“At work today I heard bells,” he said. “Just the quiet ringing of bells.”
This was unlike him. He seemed at peace.
He stood facing me in the kitchen and a warm breeze came across my face. For a moment I felt a moment of absolute calm and stillness. I could feel my daughter. Somewhere closer than we could comprehend.
I knew at that moment that we were going to be alright.
Lesson 31: This is where we find peace, Friday, September 22nd.
I'm so glad that this week continued on with how your Gran figured out how to move forward after such a soul crushing loss. I can't wait until next week to hear more.