When Grief Strikes

I have been unusually susceptible to grief ever since the landslide that led to the loss of Tatsuda’s.

I didn’t realize that for a long time.

I didn’t recognize the emotions that would suddenly bubble up when certain subjects came up, or why tears would sometimes seep out of my eyes before I even realized I was sad.

I didn’t know that was grief.

I don’t think we really understand grief until we experience it.

We know people die. We know terrible things happen. We know people lose relationships, homes, businesses, dreams and entire versions of their lives.

But knowing loss exists is very different from knowing grief.

And even after we experience it, there seems to be this expectation that grief should have some sort of timeline. That eventually enough time passes and we should be over it.

I’m not sure we ever really get over some things.

We just learn to live with them.

Maybe because the landslide wasn’t one loss for me.

There was Tatsuda’s. My identity. The future I thought I was building. Pieces of my community and the life I had known. And eventually, my best friend and her two little girls, whom I loved like my own.

It was loss layered upon loss.

And I think living through that changed the way I experience other people’s grief.

I don’t just empathize with it anymore.

Sometimes I feel it.

I remember being deeply affected by the sudden and terrible death of my second cousin, someone I barely knew. I had only met his wife and daughters once.

But I understood the shock. The permanence. The trauma of having your life divided into before and after, and somehow having to build a life on the other side of it.

Since then, I have learned grief in other ways too.

I lost my dad after a short and intense battle with cancer.

And I lost the man I loved deeply to lies, manipulation and emotional abuse I didn’t even know was happening while I was living it.

I grieved him.

I grieved the relationship

I believed we had.

I grieved the future I thought we were building.

I grieved his dogs and our weekend trips to the grocery store.

And because so much of what happened reached directly into core wounds I had carried since childhood, I was grieving from places inside me that had been hurting long before I ever met him.

That loss taught me something else about grief.

Sometimes we aren’t only grieving what we just lost.

Sometimes a new loss finds every old wound it knows how to touch.

I know grief intimately now.

On Friday, my mom and her husband had to suddenly put their dog, Maggie, down.

My mom loved Maggie fully and unconditionally. And Maggie loved her right back.

She told me on the phone that she had never experienced pain like this before.

And I knew exactly what she meant.

I knew the pain of loving that fully after a lifetime of self protection and then having to live with the absence of what you loved.

I think her grief affected me more than I realized.

I was sad and weepy much of the weekend.

I was also exhausted after an incredible stretch of adventures in Colorado and facing the reality that my kids are grown and none of us even live in the same city anymore.

My family still exists.

It just exists in an entirely different shape.

And then Maggie died.

I think it cracked something open.

Because grief doesn’t understand chronology.

Someone else’s heartbreak can find your own.

A loss today can touch one from years ago.

One grief reaches into another, and suddenly you’re crying about things you didn’t even know you were crying about.

And when compounded, complex grief starts reaching all the way down into core wounds from childhood?

Holy shit.

That fucking sucks.

So I was gentle with myself this weekend.

I wasn’t nearly as productive as I thought I would be. I rested. I cried. I let myself be tired.

I also finished crocheting the sweater I was making for myself. I decided it didn’t need sleeves, which dramatically improved my completion timeline.

And then I started another one.

I feel a lot better today.

But grief is funny that way.

It recedes. It gives you room.

And then something brushes against it, your eyes fill with tears before you even know why, and there it is again.

Grief strikes.

Here is the "sleeveless" sweater I finished yesterday.

And the new one I started last night.