The slow-moving waves of grief do not follow a pattern, an order, a book, or a psychological road map. There are no stages of grief. Or, well, there are, but they don’t have an order. I’ve found the experience to be a general subconscious flinging of oneself between all of them, determined by forces I cannot anticipate or control. Hence the term waves, not stages. Stage infers an order, a roll call, a progression, a stage manager counting my cue as I check my shoes. No, no. This is the Ocean of Grief. There are no stage managers here.
My reactions to pain and stress have become neon since my mom died. My threshold for violent events is lower. I cover my eyes during everything, most recently Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Marvel show on Disney+). Yesterday I got home from a run, thought about the shooting at King Soopers, and sobbed. Everyone shops at King Soopers. I sat on the couch and cried.
It’s been nine months since the universe banged a gong and stole the life out of my mom, leaving Danny on the phone with a nurse, and me flying out of a Subway at a gas station in Pueblo. Nine months. Enough time to make a whole new person.
The weeks immediately afterwards were the first, low reverberations of a gong; that initial moment when you’ve stubbed your toe but the pain hasn’t traveled to your brain yet, a leap off of the diving board and into the Ocean of Grief. Hold your breath as you fly through the air... A new reality is about to splash up around you.
But before you hit the water, there’s this time warp when everything moves fast and slow: images of the body in the bed, the men from the funeral home, picking out a casket, writing a eulogy, drinking and crying and holding people and being held. It’s a month or more of shock that moves out from the epicenter of the Gong of Death, the wind whistling past before you hit the water in the Ocean of Grief.
Steph, there are way too many metaphors here. Fine. YOU describe death while still living. GO for it. (While we’re here, Gong of Death is an excellent name for a metal band.)
We were lucky. Had my mom died two weeks sooner or two weeks later, we would not have been able to hold our outdoor funeral with all the guests who came, due to pandemic restrictions. But then again, she was a dancer — always had perfect timing.
As the months have gone on, I’ve had periods of stoicism and productivity, baked between stretches of depression and what my mom would call a Wallow. These are my two main forms of grief: one in which it overwhelms (Wallow), and one in which I numb up and tuck it away (stoic productivity, “stoictivity”).
There was a stretch of stoictivity in February, during the Austrian university break. This break collided with the month that my German language school dissolved my cohort. Not enough sign ups for the B2.1 class meant I was truly free, every day, for a month.
Rather than take my vacation, I spent February chomping at the bit to do anything. My grand plans for a relaxing month of reading turned into indulgent mornings of reading (guilt: wasting time) and micro trips to the grocery store (guilt: spending money) and lockdown/restricted visa/highly-specifically skilled unemployment woe (guilt: not being productive). I desperately wanted to visit Hallstatt. You can keep your Munich and Prague; I wanted to see Arendelle... Nope. (Too much guilt: money, and breaking the law in a foreign country by ignoring the ban on leisure travel.)
During this frustrating blur of stoictivity, I didn’t do a lot of crying. I spent most of it scheming about how on earth to sustain this madcap way of life once my Fulbright contract ends in May.
The stupid part about my guilt-ridden February was that I had planned a Wallow. I wanted a break from my ragtag German-teaching-singing life. And I got it. But instead of breaking down and eating ice cream and doing yoga, I woke up dreading the day, spent it feeling anxious that I wasn’t Doing Enough, frittered around with a bunch of Potential Stuff (put three gigs on Fiverr, started an online course in social media, looked up every graduate program in media at Uni Wien, have nothing to show for any of it), and went to bed bleary-eyed and defeated. I didn’t cry. Every day was a repeat of anxiety and failure brought on by my desperate need to Feel Like I Was Doing Something to Move Forward. Stoictivity.
By the beginning of March, I’d landed one gig on Fiverr, rejoined a German cohort, started teaching again, and decided on a new business venture to lean into. Time to fruitfully employ that stoictivity! But I also happened to fall into a Wallow so wide that many of my days this week were spent treading it. So much for maintaining that good timing.
Let me paint you a picture of a Wallow — a metaphor, if you will. A Wallow is essentially a theme park of pain, built in the wake of losing someone essential: the Ferris wheel of good memories, the roller coaster of re-examining medical decisions, and the hall of mirrors, stretching out every future event in my life for which she will not be present. In this mirror I’m walking down the aisle of a church, in this one I’m holding a daughter. Step to one side and she’s there next to me. Move a foot in the other direction, and she disappears. Imagining the possibility makes the absence sharper and more cruel.
When I’m in a Wallow, strawberries can ruin the day. She loved strawberries. I can’t even type about them! I don’t know if I’ll ever eat them again! Humans should come with directions: DO NOT ENGAGE PASSIONATELY WITH TOO MANY EVERYDAY OBJECTS, OR YOU WILL LEAVE A MINEFIELD FOR THOSE YOU LOVE, ONCE YOU ARE DEAD. Fucking strawberries, man.
I cannot anticipate all the things that might trigger me. A coat. A smell. Seeing her funeral card on my desk. A happy flower. It cracks me from the inside out. It’s hard to keep up with everything that will poke the bear when I’m in a Wallow.
I spent a month sitting like a rock on my couch, reading New Adult Fantasy novels and stuffing my face with gummy bunnies, successfully substituting my grief and sadness with anxiety and guilt, desperate to be doing something that would move my life forward. Now, when I’m ready to actually Do Daytime Things, I find myself overwhelmed by mundane occurrences, which didn’t happen when I had the time.
BALONEY!