On the Other Side of Grief

In the aftermath of a traumatic event, I tend to find that I don’t want to do much of anything.  For the past week I’ve slept.  A lot.  And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was lying prone on my bed, staring at the wall, the lamp, my elbow.  It was the closest I’d ever felt to being dumb and mute and blind.  The corners of my world deflated down to the old metal frame of my bed.  

The fact that I was out of food and out of money made it easy not to eat.  When the acidy feeling in my stomach was too bad, I’d drift down to the kitchen and eat a can of corn or a frozen hashbrown.  When I ran out of butter, I stopped eating the hashbrowns.  Always, I would crawl back to bed and lie down, and eventually drift off again.

They say there are stages of grief.  The first one being disbelief, a shell-shock syndrome that protects your brain from emotional overload.  I tried to make myself cry.  But it wasn’t real yet.  There was nothing to cry about because nothing had changed -- yet.  

After a few days the anger finally began to surge through the cracks in the ice.  There were questions unanswered.  There were answers that didn’t add up.  There was a rage that ached to resolve itself in the sting of a slapped face.  There was a violence in me that hadn’t risen up since the days of my parents divorce.  A sense of betrayal that had last been manifest in my parents letting go of each other.

I had anchored on to something.  I had found something stable to rebuild with.  To plan with.  To go forward with.  And once again it was being suddenly and irrevocably ripped away, and I was once again at the mercy of someone else’s plan.  

I started to fail Latin.  I thought about leaving school.  I wanted to leave.  I was three keyboard strokes away from a train ticket to Tucson to stay with my grandmother.  But a few well-timed conversations brought me back from the edge of chaos.  My Latin professor told me just to try to show up for class, and she’d let me retake tests and midterms and assignments later.  Just show up.  

I could do that.  That’s about all I could do, but I could do that.

There’s something empowering about putting on nice clothes.  I shaved my legs and I put on a dress and heels and a bracelet and earrings and I actually blow-dried my hair and spent more than two seconds on my make up.  I am literally walking taller, in these shoes.

I still haven’t cried.  The mourning portion hasn’t even begun.  I’m still angry. I still don’t have the answers I want.  But for the first time since I got sucked into this shitty little black hole, I feel like life can go on.  I don’t have to run away.  I don’t have to start over.

I just have to show up.

And eventually, I’ll be okay again.  Eventually, I’ll be even happier than I was before.