Living With Grief

Several years ago, the organization I work for brought in a Grief Recovery Specialist to talk with us about what grief is, how it impacts adolescent girls (the target of our work), and how to support/respond to people who are experiencing grief in competent ways that don’t contribute to their pain. The biggest takeaway that I gleaned from her expertise was a more accurate picture of what grief actually is…it’s not “just something that happens for a moment when someone close to us dies and is dominated by sadness.” The general definition she gave, which I am now paraphrasing in my own words and from my memory of what she shared many years later:

Grief is the mixture of different and sometimes conflicting emotions that emerge whenever we experience a significant change in the normal cadence/pattern of our daily lives.

When you read this definition, and especially the 2 key elements I have bolded, then you can probably see that grief is actually more present around us all the time than the common narratives may suggest. It’s both more common and more nuanced an experience than “sometimes people are really sad.”

In saying that grief is all around us all the time, I don’t mean to imply that all situations of grief have the same intensity. (There’s a relevant tangent to be had here on the concept of Comparative Suffering, so let me segue you over to Brene Brown if you’d like to learn more on all of that.) Of course, there are times when our grief is much more immense and dominating than others, and I want to talk just a moment about the biggest period of intensified grief of my life so far.

When I was 17, my grandmother lost the battle with colon cancer that she valiantly fought for many, many months as an 80+ year old. My grandma was My Person in the family and we were extremely close. She was the adult who I felt most seen, understood, and cared for by throughout my childhood. When things at my house were not good, her home was were I could just be 100% a kid and set the weight I was carrying off to the side. She was the one who talked to and with me in a way that was rooted in pure unconditional love and care for what I thought, felt, and needed. She died the day after I started my senior year of high school. Her absence felt like an elephant was sitting on my soul squeezing out all joy. In my family more widely, her passing actually ignited a series of terrible events that felt like continued crushing waves of awful that I couldn’t escape. I didn’t get it back then, but I was pretty thoroughly in survival mode for quite a while. (All while keeping up the outer appearances of a really high achieving, out-going honor student who Had It All Going For Her.)

Looking back on the year or two immediately following her death and reflecting on who I was then, I have so much more understanding about how I was lost, suffering, reeling, damaged, and simply fucked up. I think about what was going on at home during my senior year and it’s a small miracle that I made it through as well off as I did. (Honestly, it’s through a series of good luck, hard work, finding another, different version of My Person, and a strong friend support system that I avoided a lot more harm.)

Time does not heal all wounds, but it did make the elephant that was sitting on my soul much, much smaller and of course, joy did return to my life and I learned to feel that joy while living with the grief, well enough. By my early 20s, the effects of that time were two fold: 1) I had learned a pattern of being a workaholic and 2) I kind of packaged those years away in my brain and I didn’t think back in too much detail about that time in my life for well over a decade because it was so painful.

All throughout my 20s I had this “work yourself tired” “just keep swimming” mentality that was my #1 key to survival. (Half of it was literal survival, thanks capitalism, and the other half was mental survival.) Throughout my undergrad career, grad school, working multiple jobs simultaneously for years, getting married, moving cross country, building a network and career in my new city, getting involved in volunteerism, making new friends…….I was so good at being the busiest person you’d ever meet, partly because I was keeping my brain occupied from the weight of grief across all of those rapid and major life changes and partly because staying busy kept the worst of my anxiety at bay. I now understand that this period of time was an important part of my personal journey, in the sense that I kind of hand to burn the candle at both ends until there was no wax left so that I could figure out who I was when I wasn’t in constant motion. (And I also HAD to get away from toxic forces in Indy so that I could get some space to thrive.)

When I finally started to repair my mental health a couple years ago through personal reflection, reading, and professional counseling and therapy, I had this revelation about what my 17-18 year old self lived through and I came away with so much compassion for her. I wish she didn’t have to go through what she did, how she did, but I have so much loving admiration for the resilience of that young woman. I needed to go through a process of looking back at my life and grief at its all time worst (so far) to start to appreciate and see the person I was…the person I am…and to truly admire her ability to grow and survive and thrive in a way I had yet to ever give myself credit for.

All of this to say that along the way, I have learned more about grief’s true nature in my life…my grandmother’s death and the following family trauma thereafter are things I am actually STILL and will always grieve. The joy crushing elephant on my soul didn’t go away, she became a part of me and experienced the joy with me. And things that were not giant traumas to me, also caused me grief, albeit grief of a different shade and intensity. As just one example, I was excited and ready as hell to make the move from Indianapolis to Austin, but I was also scared and overwhelmed, and unsure and elated…it was a mixture of often conflicting feelings because of a change to my well-known life. (In other words, there’s a lotttt of complexity in grief, as there is with anything that is actually important.)

I think that there is a tendency to want to minimize how much grief is actually present in our everyday lives because it’s scary to think that it can have this power and that it can be all around us. It’s easier to want to compartmentalize grief to 1) only be relevant to someone who has just lost a close loved one and 2) something that you eventually get over instead of something that becomes intertwined into who you are and your story. But grief IS embedded in who all of us are because to have ever felt the intense shine of love or happiness at all means that you will feel grief too. Plus, there are so many “smaller” things that cause us grief beyond death and there’s actually some power in calling this out and talking about it openly.

Which brings me to why I am writing this and why now.

Yesterday afternoon news broke that another place I see as an institution of independent arts/music/entertainment in Austin announced they are permanently closing their doors. The North Door was where Ronald first showed his film work publicly in Austin. It is where more friends than I can count have held arts events, performances, nonprofit fundraisers, presentations, and social gatherings. My heart broke, not only for The North Door specifically, but also for the list of local, indie Austin institutions I’ve watched over the past few months announce the same heartbreaking news. As I posted on Facebook with tears in my eyes:

Vulcan Video. Threadgill’s. Cap City Comedy. The North Door. I Luv Video. Shady Grove. Blue Dahlia. Dart Bowl. Austin Java.

So many places, with so many happy memories I’ve shared with so many of you, who are probably reading this.

The city Ronald and I chose as our home 10 years ago because of its abundance of local, independent, arts-appreciating, welcoming businesses is suffering tremendous losses in so many ways.

I’m just so sad, Austin <3

“Sad” is definitely a fitting word for my feelings, as is “grieving.” Going back to that definition of grief I shared earlier, it is undeniable that the pandemic has presented mass grief on a scale that we cannot truly comprehend. The very nature of this situation means that ALL of us are experiencing significant and always evolving disruptions to our daily lives. The suffering and distress right now is truly immense. And that does not even begin to touch on the loss of life that hangs around the pandemic like a heavy fog of pain, sorrow, and heartbreak even sense in some intuitive way by those of us who have not (yet?) been personally impacted.

Ronald and I sat for a moment with each other last night, crying and talking about how painful it is to be stuck in the position of watching the damage being inflicted on our community, country, and world on this scale and feeling powerless against it. All of the colliding feelings of this heavy grief are a lot. I’ll be honest…since March of 2019, I feel like I’ve been living in another period of concentrated grief in my life, not as strongly disruptive as 17-19, but 2019 and 2020 are undoubtedly years that I’ll never forget. I wouldn’t use the phrase “crushing waves of awful” for now like I did for then, but at the very least, I am aware that I am currently surviving….let’s say…..a uniquely challenging time. There are some facets of the grief that I’m mired in personally that I’m not even ready to bring words to yet, but I am aware of them and treating myself with kindness and care around them the best I can. (Again, being in a place of mindful awareness of this and not defaulting to “just keep swimming” until I’m dead tired is a testament to that work I’m always doing on my mental health and my hopes to always grow. So let me put in another plug here for tending to your mental health however you need—meds, therapy, etc.—when the weight is too much, and honestly, way before then, too.)

I don’t have some big solution to share to wrap things up here. I am not an expert on grief or even mental health generally. I don’t even have any parting words of wisdom and I certainly don’t have a magic bullet for addressing our collective on-going trauma and grief. (Oh how I wish I did.) But as I’ve shared about a million times, I believe in and love the power of language and words and putting my feelings into words, so that’s what I’m doing. I guess I’ll wrap up with a piece that I first read almost 6 months ago when the pandemic had just arrived because it’s just as true now as it was then and I expect it will continue to be relevant for quite a while longer: That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.