16. the more you know

written 4 months and 25 days after

Grief is such a mess.

There are no cardinal directions. North is sitting directly beside South. Gravity doesn’t behave. Time is snapped.

As such, there really is no one, specific way to grieve—every person is different, after all—and there is generally a societal quiet around grief that doesn’t help demystify it, that often leaves people unsure what to say to people who are grieving. People don’t know what to do with their hands, either. They’re terrified of blurting out the wrong thing, of making things worse, of not getting ‘it’ (comforting) right.

Of course, people who are grieving also share the same concerns. They, too, don’t know what to say to others, or where to put their hands, or how to hold their bodies. They, too, are terrified of blurting out the wrong thing, of making things worse, of not getting ‘it’ (grieving) right.

I know, for myself, almost five months ago—when I looked at the blue-eyed ER doctor and said, “My husband is dead,” and she nodded—that was the moment I entered a grief that I do not understand, but feel keenly.

The light that does not know my beloved, January 2021

For my lack of understanding, I thought knowledge might help.

In mid-December, I had my first intake call with a counsellor that specializes in grief work. She asked for my story and I cry-talked for an hour about things like the garbage (he always took it out, I don’t even know the days the truck comes), and the tea cupboard (I don’t know where he bought our special, Japanese tea and I still don’t), and birthday cards (I bought his 33rd birthday card two years ago, and now it will be forever unused).

After I was finished cry-talking, the counsellor emphasized that a large part of her role was grief education. “So few people really understand what grief is and what it does to the brain and body,” she said. I nodded along, snotting into my twelfth tissue. The counsellor shared her screen on Zoom and I read the slides she had put together as she spoke.

She told me how the first five or six months of grief put the body into fight-or-flight.

Cortisol floods the system and the brain moves into a basic, protective stance (in my case, this was particularly heightened when I was hospitalized and experienced a distinct discourse between my reptile brain and my sad brain, which I wrote about here).

During these first five or six months, the frontal lobes of the brain largely quiet down—the frontal lobes being the parts of the brain responsible for important cognitive skills, such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, attention, planning and judgment, as well as communication.

I have noticed that grief has severely restricted my attention reserves, a condition I colloquially refer to as ‘grief brain.’ To cope, I find myself doling out what attention I do have in carefully measured ways—something I did not do in the Before, when my attention span usually could meet my requirements of it.

“That’s to be expected with the frontal lobes ‘offline,’” the counsellor said.

She emphasized that the difficulty sustaining attention is because grief is such a shock to the body’s system; at first, the body is simply trying to survive—attention is paid to food and shelter and safety, not to other things, like how to hold a conversation or a train of thought (still, I often lose track of what I am talking about in conversation).

I nodded along. That made sense. I had experienced that. I began to feel good about seeking out targeted knowledge about grief.

Then, the counsellor asked if I was experiencing anger. “I see a lot of sadness,” she said. “But is there any anger?”

I looked up from the slides I was reading on my laptop screen.

“Anger?”

She nodded.

I struggled to answer. I bumbled through supposing that, yes, I did have anger, but not a lot of it. I told the counsellor I imagined I had pretty standard anger for a young widow—anger at being widowed, a situation in which I had no agency; anger at having to wake up alone when I don’t want to; anger at the dissonance between my life now and what I thought my life would be; anger at having to decide if I want to live without him. I don’t feel full of rage, I explained. Mostly, I just feel achingly sad.

The counsellor told me that, likely, as my fight-or-flight reaction began to ease around six months, and my frontal lobes began to come back “online,” that I would probably start to feel a fuller range of emotions again.

“Usually in months six through nine,” she said, “emotions heighten and diversify, and this can make these months feel worse than others.”

“Worse?” I said, interrupting. “No, I can’t take worse.”

The counsellor also said there was usually an uptick of acute grief around one year, and sometimes around years three through five.

YEAR FIVE, I thought in a near scream (albeit an internalized one).

“So as you can see,” the counsellor continued. “Grief is a long journey.”

YEAR FIVE?

The counsellor continued to talk. I heard her say something about grief being work, about needing to honour the body’s need to rest if it asked for rest, but I wasn’t fully focused on her.

YEAR FIVE!

I can’t do this for five years, I thought. I’m not going to make it. As the counsellor continued to talk, I choked on overwhelm and horror.

To be fair, I don’t know what I thought the grief counsellor would say. It’s not like I expected her to tell me that grief would be resolved in a few months (I already knew that wasn’t true), and I knew she wasn’t going to tell me that one day, I would wake up and not be a widow anymore (I also knew that wasn’t true). Still, confronting, so directly, the reality that widowhood is and will always be a permanent part of my past and present and future, was jarring. I began to doubt if knowledge about grief really would be helpful.

Even as someone who is actively grieving, the fact of the endurance, the longevity, the breadth of grief still shocks me.

Now, mid-January, almost a month after that first call with the grief counsellor, I have noticed an upwelling in my acute sadness.

As the dark wing that’s fallen over me deepens in intensity, I wonder: is it because of emotional run-off from the holidays? Is it because of the looming five month anniversary of his death? Is it the advance of the predicted six to nine month decline?

Other worries, based on grief knowledge I have worked to glean, hoping it would help, intrude too, foremost among them: Am I wearing people out with my sadness?

I worry about wearing my loved ones out, in particular, because it’s statistically likely that many widows and widowers lose over half their support base in the first year of loss due to grief-attrition.

As a result of this worry, I end up trying, very hard, around friends and family to manage how much of my sadness I reveal.

Part of this management often involves dodging the question, “how are you?'“ when it’s asked of me (I’ve written here about finding this a difficult question). I avoid answering because I don’t want to lie and so feel like I discount the breadth of my grief, but I also don’t want to be honest, and so risk losing people I care about to the awful reality of how much grief, to put it lightly, sucks.

Instead, in texts and video calls and in real life (which is to say when I am outside on a socially distanced walk), I try to emphasize what I imagine people will interpret as ‘good signs.’

I play up markers that I am “hanging in there,” or “doing okay,” or in “better spirits,” or “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.” I emphasize smiling, always crack jokes, make deliberate mention of eating and exercise, ensure I ask how my friends’ children are, or their husbands, or their wives, or their partners.

To be clear, it’s not that I don’t have genuine interest in how my friends’ children or spouses or partners are, I do, and it’s not that I don’t eat relatively regularly and exercise, I do, it’s that I present all of these ‘good signs,’ outside of the context of my always-sadness.

When presented without the always-sad context, these ‘good signs,’ appear to be the whole picture, and so people interpret me to be ‘feeling better’—an interpretation which I hope brings them relief and so, I also hope, prevents the predicted grief-attrition that I really fear.

However, if I were to be entirely honest, while I am so glad to be with my loved ones, and lucky too that I have so many loved ones with whom to spend time, I am also, always, relentlessly sad and aching and afraid.

That’s the duality that I have come to understand about grief.

Emotions can exist simultaneously. One does not mitigate the other.

For all the jokes I make, or food I eat, or at-home spin classes I take, there are the other things I don’t mention: the nights I sob in my bathroom into a towel; or the persistent pain in my chest that will not close up; the constantly running refrain in my mind—he can’t be gone, he can’t be gone, he can’t, he can’t; or even the half-nightmares that wake me at 3AM and leave me staring up at the ceiling wondering how much longer I can handle living, such as it is right now.

I have also come to understand that a lot of grievers worry that people will think they are no longer sad if they smile or laugh or display what I have called the ‘good signs.’

The natural bent of people is to make assumptions about others based on their behaviour, after all, and particularly when someone is in pain, people are hopeful for signs that this pain is lessening. It’s a kind hope, wishing for less pain for someone, but it’s a hope that can lead people to wrongly conclude that grievers have ‘gotten better,’ when they haven’t.

The view from my walk with K, January 2021

On a walk this month with my friend K, she kindly, astutely, and rightly told me that sometimes, she has to actively remind herself that I am still grieving.

“You have such a good poker face,” K said. “Sometimes I find myself forgetting that you’re in pain, and then I remember.”

“Crippling pain,” I said, with a smile so that the suggested mirth would soften the reality that I was not joking.

I really appreciate my friend K, always, but especially in that moment. I was so grateful for her display of knowledge about grief—about the tendency for the exterior of grievers’ faces to only reflect a part of the larger realities of their grief.

That K revealed to me that she worked to remember that my ‘good signs,’ existed within a context of enduring grief, that K did not allow herself to forget this context, that she did not try to lessen or diminish my pain, that she simply told me that she knew I was in pain, and held space for it—that is when knowledge has proved helpful to me.

Moments such as with K are the moments in my journey here to almost-five months, where more knowledge about grief has brought about, not a lessening of my sadness, but a sharing of its weight.

I don’t know how helpful knowing that grief will still swell at five years, or that months six through nine will be difficult, will ultimately be for me in my journey, but I know, though perhaps my desire for more grief knowledge took me down some scarier paths than I intended, as with K, the moments of knowledge between myself and my friends with regards to grief have and are proving helpful.

In another instance, this time in early January, when I was walking with my friend S, she mentioned she had avoided texting me on Christmas because she didn’t want to say Merry Christmas, because she knew it wasn’t, but also she didn’t know what else to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.

She wondered if that was the best thing to do? She was caught, I saw, in both too much knowledge (Christmas won’t be Merry) and too little (what do you say to a widow at Christmas?), but she wanted to know. She wanted, in a beautiful, sincere way, to know how to help.

I appreciated her question.

It was a genuine one and I gave a genuine response.

I told S that, for myself, I really appreciate hearing from people on the especially difficult days (holidays, month markers, major milestones, Tuesdays) because the messages always remind me that I am not alone. The messages do not have to be complicated. Even just hearing something like, “I know today is hard, and I know you’re always sad, but I’m thinking of you,” lands as a balm.

I count myself very lucky, in this area particularly, as I have wonderful friends and family who send me versions of the aforementioned message, in one form or another—many sending the missives every week since my beloved passed away.

It cannot be overstated how important these weekly notes or calls or emails are to me. There is something so powerful for me about my friends (you, dear readers, among these friends) and family just being present with me in my sorrow, without attempt to forecast or predict or fix. Every instance, big or small, reminds me—you are not alone. You are loved.

These instances are so precious to me because they speak into the silence I feel without my beloved. When he was here, and alive, somehow, over our almost seven years together, we fell into a regular and eye-rollingly cheesy habit of telling each other how much we loved each other. We would just say it, “I love you,” in a quirky, rollicking voice often, but we also had a roster of shorthand for it—“fifty years,” “you’re my favourite,” “be safe,” “see you soon,” “you’re the best,” and on.

Him, July 2018

Now, with my beloved gone, more than ever, I cherish the moments when my friends and my family make a deliberate and careful point of saying that they love me. It’s such a gift.

One friend, in particular, my friend P, made a careful point of looking me in my eyes and saying “Amy, I love you,” the first time he saw me after my beloved’s memorial. The care with which he said it, the deliberate use of my name, the full and intentional employment of the words “I love you”—I was deeply moved.

Later, my friend P would tell me that he felt awkward about telling me he loved me; he worried that he had overstepped, that perhaps he shouldn’t have said anything at all.

I was surprised when P said he was worried. I told him that I was so glad that he told me he loved me as deliberately and carefully and thoughtfully as he did. It was, it remains, a sacred moment of abiding friendship between us.

Indeed, I had been inspired and strengthened by P’s example. I think about it often, the power of that moment, the way in which the knowledge of love can be so steadying, so sustaining.

I know that my grief experience cannot be extrapolated to others’, as ultimately, one person’s grief is simply one person’s grief, but, that is perhaps the most useful knowledge I have gleaned about grief thus far.

As I approach the seemingly impossible five month marker of my beloved’s passing, I find, more than ever, that grief is a frightening and uncertain place; but, I have also found, have been lucky enough to discover, that though I am completely broken apart by love, I am held together and sustained by it too.

One does not mitigate the other.