Most often I find myself praying to forget. Despite them being my fondest memories in life, they are what cause me the most pain. Those treasured moments burn like hot coals in the morning and keep me from sleep. If only I could focus on the troubled times, the hard parts, the things that didn’t bring joy. If only the worse times with her weren’t better than the best times anywhere else. I would gladly have the operation to remove every memory from those years. To go on with a hole in my memory where all my hopes and dreams once lived. Unnoticed. Unaware.
Grief is a sign that you loved deeply. And the deeper the grief the greater you loved. The greater you loved the more painful this unnecessary torture of life’s experience will be. There is no way around it but to feel it. And there is nothing good about what you will feel. It is too big to bottle up and hide in the corner. It is to grande, too much, to deal with in quiet rooms alone. It is evidence you are capable of huge love. And therefore, at risk for greatest loss. When love is in front of you the risk is worth every bit. When it disappears, and you feel the pain of generational loss, the gamble seems unfair.
I grieve because my heart was honest about my love for a person.
What’s a cultural tradition from your country that you love?
Perhaps my least favorite meal, but most favorite tradition: Thanksgiving.
“Black care rarely sits behind a rider who pace is fast enough” Theodore Roosevelt
Though the luminary icon he was, Teddy Roosevelt, suffered great losses, as well as, great sadness. The history books are full of his wisdom, stories of adventures, and themes of perseverance and hard work. But the famous quote about outrunning the profound grief that plagued him was more a reflection of his hope to mitigate the pain than a success story of his escape from its prison. It did plague him his entire life, and it followed him into the mountains, down the rivers, into the plains, and at every turn in his personal and professional life. It led to feelings of insecurity, shame, and defeat superimposed onto his great victories. Depression is not a rider on a journey, it is the weather front we must ride through. We must ride through because there is no going back. The journey on the road of time has no turnarounds, no rest stops, only forks and bends, and ups and downs. What President Roosevelt illuminated in his honesty about his grief and depression, however, was the truth that the only real option is forward.
We lost what we loved the most. We woke up outside our world and watched it burn to the ground full of every hope and dream that we held so dear. The driving force behind every step, the reason for every morning, the joy in every night- gone at once. Depression didn’t show up behind us and jump on the horse, depression is space that exists outside our collapsed universe. It is the black hole behind the galaxy of your hopes and dreams. There is no outrunning the air you breath. It just is. And the depression that comes with grief is the air you will breath, like it or not, and we are assured to not.
In the initial moments of despair there is no way to find your bearings. There exist no compass for grief or this new world in which you find yourself living. Fear is unavoidable. It is scary. The air is heavy. It is dark. Chaos. During these initial moments, we have only a few limited choices in this regrettable life experience. First, we can try to stay put, roll up into a ball, stay in the moment, shelter in place. And we all do for a variable amount of time during the early moments of shock. But we might choose to stay right here hoping to be as near to that old world as possible. We accept our fate, so to speak, and wait for the monster to devour us. But the path of time will keep moving forward and every time you look up that old world, in its remnants of ashes and dust, will appear further and further away. You cannot stay near what was lost no matter how hard you try. Your reality is gone and what you replaced it with is not real- the world you will inhabit is the matrix of proximity to a world that no longer exists.
Second, you can exit this life. People hate talking about this, avoiding it and condemning it, but nearly everyone has found theirselves in a place of pain so great it seems like the most passionate and merciful self actionable option. It is not weakness. It is not a sin greater than any other. It is a moment in time where the human spirit has been so badly beaten that any spark of life has been snuffed out and no hope remains. And it demands compassion. An attempt to deter someone in such great pain that ending their life feels like the only option with the fear of eternal hell as punishment is useless. We are in hell. It feels eternal. And God has already taken what seems like great pleasure in punishing us here on earth. How many have called out to God before pulling the trigger. How many times has God stood in the way of that bullet?
We know that if we can get that rider back on their horse time will move forward and they will find enough hope to realize their belonging here on earth. We know that any persons absence in this world leaves a tear in the fabric of time that is severely underestimated by the suffered. And only love will help move them forward. And only moving forward will give them a perspective outside of the hell they are living in now and hope for a possible future. The person sitting in the ashes of who they were as a person is unrecognizable to themselves. They cannot see their value in this world. All hands on deck. Share your own spark of humanity with them until enough of their own light burns bright enough to see the path ahead. And if you, the reader, are in this place now- I love you. Truly. Do not underestimate what your absence would do to this world and to those that love you AND those who will love you. This option will fix nothing, it will only broaden the scorched earth that has befallen you, and pull others into the hell you will leave here on earth.
The only other option is to be the rider in the storm. That heavy dark cloud of black care is relentless, but the only road available is time, and the only way through is forward. Be the bison, lower your head, and walk head on into that storm. The most difficult thing in this moment is to love yourself. But you need that the most now. And you deserve it. As someone who has had great faith much of his life, and searched and believed in miracles, and still fears God and is certain of his existence- I do not see God in these moments. I don’t say that to suggest seeking God for strength is hopeless. On the contrary, I think it is often our only hope. But I say this because those who find themselves here should know that now is not the time for a dissertation on God’s involvement with mankind. It is survival.
I have no quote or scripture to end this essay today. I only have a heart for anyone hurting the hurt I have felt. The deep despair that is all consuming. The sensation of burning alive. Worse, watching the person you love burn alive and being unable to save them. No matter what, you have value and you belong in this world. You don’t see God? Look inside, there is a spark of creation there. You don’t see hope? You are the hope. You are loved.
Might I suggest that there was one bullet God did take for us- on the cross. And perhaps, though it’s hard to see now, the scene of that crucifixion will appear on the other side of this forsaken storm.
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
The haunting thick fog of depression that settles in through the cracks of our grief and loss and persists well beyond its welcome holds a horrific grasp upon our mourning. If you are looking for a more cheerful and motivating take on the suffering of this Black Care, today is not the day. Perhaps, tomorrow, a more helpful and hopeful essay on the rise from its clutches will evolve. But depression, the most massive stone that falls upon our hearts, mandates that an honest description precedes prescription. And for all its weight and all it’s persistence, there is much to say.
There is a cold and quiet shock after loss, that moment when you sit, somehow still inside yourself, while you shake in terror somewhere far outside your body. Every small background noise, once unnoticed, falls deafening upon your ears. Even your anatomy seems to shift in fluid form, melting: stomach into throat, tongue to roof of mouth, heart toward intestines, heartbeat into your eardrums, and eyes somewhere across the room watching. The amorphous mess you are in the suddenness of loss.
While every other emotional stage of grief seems to come and go, depression settles down upon you and fills your pores like smoke. When does bereavement transition into depression? Who cares- besides your therapist. These early moments, while the mind buzzes and ceases it usefulness, is when depression takes the opportunity to fill in all of the gaps in your shattered reality. While you deny, rage in anger, and bargain for your life back, distracted by the chaos, those blue devils are settling in for a long and lonely stay. Waves of every form of grief come and go from your shore, but this great sadness has anchored itself mercilessly to your soul.
As the shock slowly fades, and the flames calm to embers and ash, the cold empty version of you will be all that remains. How long must we suffer at this great affliction? Taste has abandoned your tongue, swallowing and deep breath become a conscious effort, focus will evade you at every routine task. Depression never brought a single answer, but a thousand questions. How? How can one person have the power to wreck my existence, my entire human experience? Why? Why would a loving God stand-by in our greatest time of need? Who? Who have I become in instant unawareness? When? When will this empty pain become tolerable? What? What will become of this broken heart? Job asked a thousand questions. But we don’t suffer as Job. For in his story, God finally answered, and restoration was paid for his obedience. No, our depression gathers at the corners of our lips as jealous anger toward Job and his loving God. What is depression? It is everything. It is you now. It is the eternal echo of the hammer against anvil reverberating off the canyon walls. It is embedded into your DNA to pass on for generations.
Nobody tells you that the depression that overlies our grief is a hungry beast. We feed it out of desperation, at first. The stage of mistakes- looking for a quick fix in another person, place, or thing. Later we make sacrifices to it- all things that once brought us joy. But hungry still we face it’s gaping fangs to wonder what might satiate this creature. Wise and shifty, depression never speaks, it introduces thoughts and feelings using your own voice. When it bears down upon us in this very moment and we hear those familiar words- “what I, Depression, crave to consume is you”- it is time to resist. With every last bit of self. With every hope you still might have in God. Resist. Depression doesn’t deserve your life. Somewhere you are something more than this beast upon you. Fight. Keep going through hell. One step at a time.
The very real fear is that in our grief we will become our depression. A cancer consuming every healthy cell. “[b]ecause wherever I sat- on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar). It is an ever present air that we breath. It fits like heavy wet clothing. It is holes in your socks on a cold winter night. How do we resist it becoming our identity and following us to a welcomed grave? I don’t know. All I know is that what eventually feels the best is throwing everything back at it- striking that beast in the mouth. We have little control in this new world of grief. Giving up and letting depression define us is one more loss that we, perhaps, cannot afford. Look to the literature, the historical figures who suffered, your family, your God. Look back at that happy person you were before the Black Dog grabbed him by the throat. You owe him something. He has suffered more than he deserved.
I cry a lot these days. Crying even on occasion would be more than I used to cry, but now it comes easy: like a deep breath, a sigh, a yawn. I cried several times during the Odyssey. The journey, the pain, the fight to maintain hope, all resonated with me. I cried during Solo Mio, although who isn’t brought to tears by the voice Andrea Bocelli. Somedays, I might cry at my patient’s stories or perhaps a weight loss commercial. But why does a good cry quiet my soul for even a few minutes?
“Bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?” Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief
The hardest part of mourning my deepest loss, besides the loss of the person themself, is the compulsory crying out to God and quiet waiting for my life to come back together, only to wake up in the morning still crying and broken. Begging for repair, hoping to the point of actual belief it would happen, watching it grow further and further away.
Bargaining is a stage, or part, of grief that feels more reflexive than any other desperate emotion during the process- it flows out of us as an offering or a sacrifice in a plea for deliverance. It is that one piece of the grieving process that is most woven into every single other stage we may progress through, and what, I believe, keeps us the furthest away from acceptance. For what should I concern myself with the embrace of my new reality when I have the hope of a lifeline? Instead, we often find ourselves graveling at the foot of the person we lost, our God or higher power, or both.
“Bargaining is a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” Sabrina Romanoff, PSYD
The hopelessness of bargaining is like pissing into the wind and calling it rain. The problem with bargaining is that the alternative is to accept every single hope and dream that just died an unjust death and changed every inch of your reality will never be known again. To those of us who grieve, that would be a most certain death sentence. So, we tell ourselves we will change, we do change ourselves, we continue to do the little things around the house that our loved ones used to appreciate, we beg those around us, we offer deals to our accusers, and we offer God anything he so chooses and a lifetime of service if he will just do this one miracle. I went so far as to offer God my life for just one more year. Nothing. Then it was one more day. Still nothing. Then it was my life for the pain I was left with- obviously, nothing. Until there is nothing else, acceptance remains a step away.
Our friends and our family encourage us to trust in God’s promises, and rightfully so; they love us and have the same desire for hope and recovery that we do. We are certain those promises must equate to his willingness to give us back what we lost. And there, again, lies the difference between reality and expectations: disappointment. But this disappointment is a loss of what little hope we are able to conjure, a cosmic let down of cosmic scale. Even in this cycle of hope and hope lost, over and over again, I’d rather to have hoped in those moments to something greater than myself than to have lost it all without a fight. The underlying hope that will remain, that must go unseen amidst our pain, is the hope that bargaining leads to self-reflection, change, and a relationship with God. Each time, a little better than the days before. We can hope.
Can God perform a miracle and put what you lost back together? I don’t know. If your grieving death, no. How is a cold heart any different than the dead? A person’s free will is a death to God as a beatless heart is to a person. Can God give you the strength to carry on? I think so. I hope so. In these times, you know the weakness and inabilities of being human more acutely than any other person at any other stage in their life. And for some reason, in these times, we crave God’s strength. And we carry on. We hope there is something to that.
Bargain with hope. But remember we have nothing much to give in this bartering than what we have left inside of us. And eventually, our sight of the scope of the damage around us needs to become bigger and bigger in every effort to accept that nothing taken away will be given back the same. Hope as we know it now may not be the hope as we know it when it is all said and done.
“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is evidence of things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1
That very day I selfishly chose to break her heart beyond her willingness to repair. Or maybe it was the love that was promised wasn’t deep enough to heal with me and the departure was inevitable- and I’d erase the memory of you and the curse of this grief. Oh, but if only there were one mistake to erase I’d erase them all for you.
The calendar holds memories that commemorated joy. Though the earth rotates more slowly now those days still return, year-by-year, only now to cast a shadow across the scorched earth upon which you labor. Sweat across your brow, arms shaking with fatigue, fingers aching to grasp the broken pieces you lift, heavy back and weary legs. Wrapping paper, candles, family, and cake: replaced by dry tongue and pitted stomach, a rising nausea that captures your throat. The laughter and smiles, the palpable excitement, now but apparitions haunting about your day. Nothing gets replaced that God has taken away. No joy repeated that man took for granted. Happy birthdays lose their happy. Merry Christmas never merry. Every memory on a calendar a potential nidus for infection. With only the remnants of pride we chant, “your best days were those loved by me”. But with the whole of your heart, “I wish I was there”.
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.” Rene Daumal
Once, while married, happy, and safe, I lived my entire day for the promise of bedtime. That glorious moment when you gather the bedside waters, vitamins, and books. Fan blowing across the bed, dogs curled up, and your partner in her glasses reading, you feel your day melt away as you crawl beneath the comforter between soft clean sheets. I still remember how my heart rate would slow, her hair in my face, rubbing feet as an early but welcomed sleep would fall in a quiet dark room. A fresh morning would await. Enter the shock of grief: the grim serial killer of restorative rest. It isn’t merely the loneliness of the bed that once was filled with a covenant of love, it is the intrusive and unwelcome memories like ghosts haunting throughout the night. Sleep will allude you now, quiet will haunt, and rest will be a thing of the past like a fading childhood memory that you are unsure if you experienced first hand or simply heard the story so many times it seems like it was at some point real. Those nights of tormented sleep, hungover mornings despite sobriety, are when we notice the violence of the storm the most intensely.
It is not only the early days of our grieving that plague our sleep. This sick disease goes on for months- sometimes years. God’s love is certainly not evident that one person can sleep soundly with their choices while the other one writhes in pain month after month. No more than the question of the ones we love who died whereabouts in the comfort of an afterlife. For that requires a little more blind faith than the miracles we will witness here on earth, or so it seems. None-the-less, we were designed to persist. And we owe the world our persistence. So we move on like the grittiest of endurance athletes. If only grit alone would bear our trials and deliver us to the other side of this horrific storm. What to do when our perseverance lets us down, and it will, and we fall back toward our last camp on Grief Mountain?
Summits and safe descents are made on the planning and timing of the weather windows in our storms. With grief, we sit longer, we think longer and deeper, we find ourselves snowed in and enclosed from the outside elements. Everything we do to prepare for that short break in the weather makes the difference in our progress up and down the mountain. Who can command the storms and quiet the wind? To whom shall we call out when the waves threaten to overturn our boat?
“The disciples went and woke him up, shouting, Lord save us! We are going to drown. Jesus responded, why are you afraid? You have so little faith! Then he got up and rebuked the wind and waves, and suddenly there was a great calm.” Matthew 8:25-26
So often, in our most painful time, it seems that Jesus sleeps while we hold onto the boat for dear life. We scream out for him to awake and rebuke the wind and the waves. The grit we have is there to help us hold on while we await his awakening and take command of our storm. And for every break in the weather, every time God quiets the rain, we move further to the back of the boat where one day, we hope, we might find rest beside him.
We are driven to the summit because we have seen it before. Though it’s beauty evades our eyes, it’s memory lives on in our hearts. We prepare for that window in the weather: we pray, eat, clean up our lives, slowly grow accustomed to the pain of the cold wind, in-by-inch, until the storm ceases and we emerge ready to climb. Knowing with every step the weather will again change, but stronger now because we prepared a little more with each passing storm.
