"This is a vulgar way of putting it, and there are many wonderful things about our culture, but I'm sorry, it is a phobic culture. People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off -- OK, you're OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know," she said, looking sharply at me, "doesn't mean you are in control of it, or that you know what's going on."
-- what a friend said to author Meghan O'Rourke when Meghan lost her mother to colon cancer; from Meghan's book, The Long Goodbye
Not many people have the courage to grieve or to sit with someone in grief. And, actually, who can blame them? Grief is painful, messy, alarming, and most of all, mystifying. You really don't know what's going on. A person can lose a parent and feel nothing. The same person can lose a pet and be crippled with anguish.
Losing Gwendolyn saddened, infuriated and then silenced me.
In yesterday's sass stream, PEACEsista wrote:
Remember, too, what Charlissta told you. Many things are happening, triggered by this grief. It is hard, but good, to sit with it and sort one out from the other. Each of us holds deep sadness inside and grief seems to be a genie which releases it all at once.
Yes, PEACEsista, each of us holds deep sadness inside, but my grief was not a genie. It was The Sirens; the Muses of the lower world . . . three dangerous bird-women -- abandonment, anger and sadness -- who lured me with their enchanting voices and shipwrecked me and a couple of beloveds.
When I learned that Gwendolyn's life had ended, I was saddened. When I put the pieces together and learned that she had decided when to end it, I was furious. When Charlissta gently told me what was really going on, I was silenced.
This is what was really going on: when I lost Gwendolyn, I lost the Ripley from "Aliens" in my life. I lost the mother figure who first said out loud to me her version of "Get away from her, you bitch!" I lost the mother figure who, after hearing my first writing exercise at Ghost Ranch, looked me straight in the face and said: "Your mother really f*cked you up." I lost the mother figure who consistently over 15 years said, "Your mother f*cked you up, and you have to write it out. Write it out. Write it out."
When I lost Gwendolyn (and in the months before anticipating her death), I lost a mother, and I responded in one of two ways: I became a child desperately wanting comfort; or I became my own mother -- an unforgiving, scapegoating, fragile bitch. I never saw it coming. It was Charlissta who said, "Losing Gwendolyn has hooked your core issue of abandonment in a major way. It has taken you to a very young place." I honestly had not recognized that place. Decades later and tens of thousands of dollars in therapy, and I'm still hooked by mother issues? Are you kidding me?
No. That's what The Sirens of grief do. They lure and hook you. They shipwreck you and your beloveds on the shores of your unresolved core issues which many of us spend our entire lives attempting to avoid. Do you expend more energy than is necessary to stay positive and move ahead rather than what you call "wallowing" in pain, disappointment or grief? Do you always pull yourself up by your bootstraps and think, "I gotta be strong. It's strength that matters"? Do you consistently and inordinately transfer your responsibility to mother yourself to someone else because you can't see and/or understand your own responsibility?
That may be grief humming, and trust me, when someone or something you love or count on dies, grief will rear its ugly and all-consuming siren head and sing in your face or in the faces of those you love.
I can't say much more because as Anne Morrow Lindbergh has written, "Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, her own burden, her own way." But about grief, I will say this:
Be alert. Be attentive. Beware.
Death is the perfect knowing.
The image at the beginning of this post is a water color by Ann St. John Hawley, the first of several by her in my art collection. I first saw this painting with Gwendolyn in 1996, who encouraged me to purchase it.
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