excerpt

I learned about grief during this time.  I learned that no matter the true temperature, grief made the air crisp and cold; that it caused me to drive slowly, carefully; there was very little I could eat.  I learned that I didn’t notice things until they flew out at me and that most stories and movies and books and news articles were unreadable, being accounts not of the story itself, but of me.  Of what I had lost and would never have again, of what I once allowed myself to want, the things I used to love.  Of small consolations no longer available.  I learned that my heart could stop and start a dozen times a day and that my throat felt so sore and tight I often had to swallow air simply in order to breathe.  The world receded; everything took place in slow motion and was viewed as if down a very long telescope.  So much was unfamiliar that if asked my name, I had to think for long moments.  Grief is a visceral process of disengagement, a friend said.  Post-grief, old versions of disembodiment became a cruel joke.  You thought that  was bad?  Not being able to walk into a room of strangers without disassociating or turning remote and distant?  That was nothing.  Try this.  Try heart-stopping, immobilizing grief.

The stages of grief were slippery, I found, the boundaries melded, the order mixed up, confused.  I backed up through denial, depression, blame and acceptance.  I did my bargaining and got angry all at once.  I discovered, somehow, in my grief that routine would be my only salvation—the routine of familiar places, the same aisles in the supermarket, programmed drives and walks.  The same food, food I knew I could tolerate.  The less I had to think about, the fewer decisions, the more I might actually find a way to put one foot in front of another.

I backed my car into a vintage Porsche and crashed in the driver’s side door.  I rented a car while mine was in the shop being repaired from the accident.  As I parked the rental car in the hospital lot, I heard the crunch of metal going bad.  I had somehow smashed the hood under the fender of the high-profile SUV parked next to me.  When I got my own car back I once again backed into a classic car, this time a Mustang.  Grief had made me not safe.

In the midst of this grief I somehow betrayed even myself.  I put my make up on.  I took care of my living children, I went to the hospital.  I did not go back to work.  The doctor who wrote the prescriptions for the pills that held me together told me if I’d had a regular job he would have put me on disability and it was true: I wasn’t functioning.