grief

Eating for Comfort

November 9, 2012

“What you don’t let begin can never end.” – Geneen Roth

I watched myself do it. That in itself was a revelation.

I had just spent 8 days either being frantic with worry, supporting my husband and his Mom as they processed their grief, holding down the supporting role, doing some work from home or trying to suppress my need to organise and plan. By the 9th day, when they were with the funeral director, and I was on my own for an hour, I had hit overwhelm.

And that is when I watched myself do it.

The tension had built in me until I could hardly breathe, and I felt compelled to go into the nearest shop. Making a beeline to the fridge, I found one of my favourite little gluten free cakes. Mostly made of ground almonds and cinnamon, and dusted with icing sugar, it is usually a treat and a complete delight to eat. Delight, however, was not what I was looking for.

Barely waiting to get outside the door, I had the package opened and the cake eaten before I had gone ten steps.

I felt better. There was the moment of numbness. There was the moment of relief. There was the moment, the briefest moment, where I felt a little release. The tension and pain lifted for a moment and I could actually breathe again.

Normally the next moment would have been filled with regret, self loathing, frustration or disgust.

But something deep inside of me seems to have shifted. Even while the cake was being eaten, there was a small part of me standing outside myself, understanding what was going on. I could see my small self needing love and comfort and peace, and looking for it in the only way she knew how at the time. The extreme situation had called for an extreme reaction, and food was easier and more acceptable than a temper tantrum or tears right there in the street. I knew all of that, and I was able to see myself with love.

I’m not sure if this calm watcher will last or whether it will move deep enough to help me choose the right kind of nourishment in times of extreme need. What I do know is that the more I look at the world and the more I see the narrative behind the action, the more convinced I am that the power to change ourselves and our world lies in the stories we tell.

Healing begins when we tell a different story.

emotions, grief, love, Musings

Missing You ~

March 27, 2011

“People come and go in your life but they never leave your dreams. Once they are in your subconscious, they are immortal.” – Patricia Hampl

I’m full of thought today. Memories have been swamping me, leaving me feeling a little breathless. I’m not sure what has triggered them all, but I know that these days in March always leave me a little sad. I lost people dear to me over a span of days in subsequent Marches some years ago, and the anniversary of those losses has never gone away. Does it ever? Can you ever get through an anniversary without thinking about it? I doubt it.

My dreams have also been filled with old, old friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in at least a decade. Why are they all stopping here now? Why are they so fully with me that I want to ring them up to make sure their voices sound the same? Echoes and memories and 17-year-old versions of us are giving me shivers up and down my back as I let them in. They are so close I can almost smell them.

Big stuff must be surfacing.

In 2006 I wrote a poem about a friend who we lost one March a lifetime ago. It has been one of the voices in my head so I need to put it here. I ask you again ~ do anniversaries ever get easier?

For M ~

When you died
we were twenty.
Two souls –
three days apart.
Salt and pepper
light and dark
girl and boy.

It doesn’t get easier –

It gets harder
because some days
I don’t think of you at all
and then when I do
I remember.

Where is the line?
The one that you crossed.
The one between
sadness and darkness?
Why couldn’t you see
the way back?

I miss you.

There is a hole inside of me
where you used to be
It is surrounded by questions
that you can’t answer.

You’ve missed a lot
you know.
I’ve danced alone at two weddings
and you’re an uncle now.
I’m an aunt, too.
Or do you know that already?

Please
come back.
Explain it all to me.

Two souls.
Three days apart.
One will be twenty forever
and one never will be again.

xoox

grief

Untangling Grief

October 29, 2010

“If we are identified with being married to a certain person, with a job, with our very body and life – that’s how deep it goes – there’s not any real peace or freedom because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile. So we are always on some level kind-of tensing against what’s around the corner.” – Tara Brach

When I was 20, I woke one morning in March at 6:30 to the information that my oldest friend had committed suicide. I say ‘information’ because that is the only way that I could process it. The moment that it went into my consciousness, a little part of me shut down. Within an hour of finding this out, I was sitting in a breakfast restaurant mainlining black coffee with a group of close friends. Within 8 hours my basement began to fill with our mutual friends – people who I loved with a passion born of spending teenage years together working at a summer camp – and we huddled together trying to understand our pain.

This morning as I walked to work, Tara Brach’s words on her podcast cracked that shut-off place open for the first time in 16 years.

I’ve written before about feeling like a bad friend. I do not write this for sympathy, but because if I compare myself to who I was until that day, I am a bad friend. I used to be the one who knew what was going on in everyone’s lives, the one who had people over, the one who would drive absurd distances to check in with someone at the merest whiff of unhappiness. Now I don’t answer emails for months, lose phone numbers, and generally hide away from the world. Only a few of those people who I sat and grieved with are still in my life because I let those relationships dwindle until they disappeared. But I think I understand now. All of this is because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile.

That day was the last in a line of three Marches in a row when I lost someone I loved. If I had had to learn any lesson it should have been that life is precious, love everyone fiercely while they are here. (In fact, psychologically I thought I had learned that lesson.) I should have become even more determined to see and talk to and know people. Instead, I started tensing against what was around the corner – because I knew without a doubt that something terrible was – and shut down. The lesson I learned was that it fucking hurts when people die, that there is often shame and guilt and agony surrounding death, and that the safest way for my sensitive heart to proceed was to become unconnected.

It sounds so simple written out like this, but now I can see all of the relationships that I have let slide, the chances I haven’t taken, and the love that I have missed out on and I am sad all over again. Grief is an unpredictable animal. And now that I know – now that the light has been switched on – I’m wondering how I can now heal. Somehow I need to learn to begin saying yes again.

“We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.” – Charlotte Joko Beck

Older Posts

Eating for Comfort

“What you don’t let begin can never end.” – Geneen Roth

Missing You ~

“People come and go in your life but they never leave your dreams. Once they are in your subconscious, they are immortal.” – Patricia Hampl

Untangling Grief

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