Hi everyone! It’s Melinda. Welcome to Melinda’s Grief Corner! MGC comes out twice a month on Sundays. If this is your first time here, be sure to check out past posts to learn more about the inspiration behind this new Article Club feature and read about other grief-y topics I’ve covered with resources I’ve shared!
When my dad died, my mom and I didn’t really get a moment’s breath between his last breath and the avalanche of things to do now that he was gone. I have this visceral memory of walking out of his ICU room after his heart had stopped beating and immediately going to the nurse in charge of the floor and asking “um, well what now?”
Now dear reader, I did mean that metaphorically and almost existentially. I’ve walked into this new and terrifying world where my dad is no longer alive and I legitimately have no idea how to navigate this let alone what that even means. But I also had no idea what to do now that he was gone. And most importantly, I had no idea how much I had to do.
I called it “death bureaucracy” and to me it was the long laundry list of things you needed to do when someone you love dies. You need to call any place they were receiving benefits (pension plans, Social Security) to make sure that they were notified in case checks were being sent to your loved one. You needed to arrange for their body to be picked up and taken to the funeral home. You needed to find a funeral home. You needed to notify loved ones. You needed to pick a date for the service. Life insurance policies, calling the DMV about their drivers’ license,, picking out the casket, an urn, writing the eulogy on top of the regular life stuff of eating, laundry, cleaning the litterbox - I mean it was endless.
So the first year just felt like one massive to-do list the size of an avalanche. And me being me I added A LOT of other stuff to that to-do list - moving out of DC, making sure I could move my job to Virginia, finding a new vet for my cat now that I’ve moved (more on all of these massive changes in a future newsletter). And the to-do list made it feel like maybe once we had checked off everything we needed to do, say in a year, we could finally say “ok we did it, we did the thing, we are done.”
Well dear reader, it didn’t work out that way.
Something that I’ve recently been confronted with and have been trying desperately to find words for is the permanence of grief. I recently had a very wise friend tell me that something about grief that is extremely different from everything else in our Western culture is that this is something we are in forever. When you’re at the gym, or at the dentist, or in line at the grocery store, you’re thinking “well this will be over soon and it will be done.” But grief is not like that. Grief goes on. It stays with you. It may change shape. Its intensity may ebb and flow. But it isn’t going anywhere.
Now in my search to find a way to articulate this so I can process it, and also communicate it to people in my life who are in my support network, I was given the book “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion. A fellow grief-y friend found it really supportive and thought it could help me out.
If you haven’t yet read this book, the wonderful and remarkable Joan Didion wrote it after her husband suddenly died and it is about the first year after his death. Towards the very end of the book, as she closes in on the year mark of his death, she writes about what she learned about grief because in her words “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
A quote that stood out the most to me in this passage is “nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is), the unending absence that follows, the void.” I mean, WOW. It hit me - the unending absence that follows, the void.
Because that is how grief is different from everything else we go through in life. Your 45 minute spin class, your 2 hour long wait for your dentist who is running behind, the 15 people in front of you in line at the grocery store - all of that is temporary. That will be checked off your list eventually. And I think that maybe is why grief is so difficult to comprehend and grapple with sometimes - because it is an unending absence like Joan said.
I know, a heavy newsletter. Thank you for bearing with me if you’ve gotten this far. I do hope you check out The Year of Magical Thinking by the lovely and incomparable Joan Didion (can you tell I’m a fan?). Check it out at your local library if you can! Or purchase a copy from your local indie bookstore and come back to it whenever you need a talented wordsmith to help put to words feelings you are carrying.
Feel free to share your thoughts on the permanence of grief or your thoughts on the book if you’ve read it in the comments below!
Until next time, big hugs.
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