Nobody Got Tired of My Grief But Me

A few weeks ago I fell apart, in the middle of the night, because I don’t own a tape deck.

That’s the whole thing. I wanted to listen to a cassette my mom made me when I was eight, songs and stories in her voice, and there is no machine in my house that will play it. I sat on my bed holding this tape that has been with me since I was eight, and I ugly cried. You know, the kind of crying that makes it hard to breathe and feels like your heart is flowing out of your eyeballs.

My mom died in 2007. The tape is not nostalgia. It’s her, giving me comfort, and a small obsolete problem standing between us.

I didn’t tell anybody. That’s the part I want to talk about.

The list is longer than it should be

Aunt Martha died in 1992. Thirty-four years ago. I still have days where I want to drive to Winterset and sit in her living room and process something out loud while she listens, and there’s no version of that sentence I can say to a person without hearing how it sounds.

Grandma Becky has been gone since 2005. There are nights I can’t sleep and I find myself sobbing because I want her patting my feet and telling me a story she’s inventing as she goes, the way she did my whole childhood, never the same story twice.

Thunder was a cat. She died about forty years ago. I have been genuinely, physically sad about Thunder in the last year of my life, as a grown woman with a business and a Rhode Island-sized list of responsibilities, and I would rather tell you almost anything else about myself than that.

So there it is. Thirty-four years. Forty years. This is not a person who hasn’t done the work. This is what the work looks like.

It shows up in the body first

Here’s what I notice, and what I hear from almost everyone I sit with.

The tears come up out of nowhere. You’re in the car, you’re washing a dish, you’re fine, and then you’re not. Or it’s the ache under the ribs, the gut-heavy one, the kind that makes you feel like you swallowed cement. It arrives without any warning and without a reason you could even explain to yourself.

Nobody chooses that. You can’t be self-indulgent about a thing that shows up while you’re loading the dishwasher.

But then the mind gets involved. The mind says: it’s been thirty-four years. The mind says: it was a cat. The mind says: you’re a grown woman and people have real problems. And the feeling gets ruled out of order, not by anyone else, by me.

So I go quiet

This is the part I got wrong for a long time.

When you’re grieving, the story you tell yourself is that people got tired of it. That there was a window and it closed, that everyone has moved on and you’re the one still standing in the wreckage being tedious about it. It feels like abandonment. It feels like the people who are supposed to love you aren’t showing up.

What I’ve found, in myself and in years of listening to other people, is that mostly we’re the ones who went quiet first. We felt the guilt, we decided we’d used up our allotment, and we stopped saying anything. The people around us took the silence at face value, because what else would they do with it. And then we looked around at a room full of people who weren’t asking, and concluded we were alone.

I’m a death doula. I do this for a living. I know for a fact that I have people who would sit with me through any of it and not think less of me for a second. And I still go with the isolation, because some part of me, one that doesn’t report to my rational mind, decided I wasn’t allowed these feelings anymore.

Knowing better is not the same as doing better. If it were, none of us would need each other at all.

What I actually wanted

Between 2005 and 2010 I lost Grandma Becky, then my mom, then Gram, and then Grandpa three months after Gram. My whole heart felt beat up. I remember being so tired I couldn’t describe the exhaustion to anybody, and I remember being furious that nobody was giving me what I needed.

It took me years to understand what I was asking for.

I did not want them alive. This is the part that surprises people. I was at peace with every one of those deaths. They were each ready, and I knew it, and I would not have kept a single one of them here for my own sake.

What I wanted was their comfort. Specifically theirs. I wanted to fold into that particular love, the one that knew me before I was anybody, and no other love felt right in its place. That’s an impossible request. There’s no way to say it out loud that doesn’t sound unreasonable, because it is unreasonable.

It was also a need that no one could fulfill for me. Not one living person who would have given me the moon if I asked could become the beings I was missing. But I couldn’t put words to that need. My brain shut it down as irrational so fast that all I could see was that no one present was giving me what I needed. Because I felt alone, and isolated, I got frustrated with the living. I pointed real anger at people who had done nothing except still be here. They weren’t failing me. They were just the only ones in the room.

Where that leaves us

I don’t have a clean answer, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who handed me one.

What I’ve got is this. The wanting isn’t a symptom of grief you haven’t finished. It’s the shape love takes when the person is gone. It’s going to come back periodically, for the rest of your life, and it coming back is not evidence that you’ve failed at something or slid backward. You loved someone, and love doesn’t have an expiration date just because the person does.

And the thing that helps, the only thing I’ve found that reliably helps, is saying the absurd thing out loud to somebody, anybody, even a stranger. Not “I’m sad,” which is a broadcast nobody knows what to do with. The actual absurd specific thing. I want my great-aunt who died in 1992 to sit with me. I want my grandmother to pat my feet. I’m crying about a cat from the eighties.

It’ll still sound absurd when you say it. It just won’t be secret anymore. And most of the time the person across from you doesn’t laugh, they get quiet, and then they tell you about theirs. And you share stories, and while it might not be the exact thing you want, it does help.

I still don’t have a tape deck. I’m working on it.