The Richter 8 that crushed me has stilled, and I have clawed my way back to the dust, just. The Tsunami that broke me against the rocks has receded, and the dripping blood has dried. The funeral has passed—she is buried nine feet down. The bouquets and casseroles and cards have ended, and the hugs and I'm so sorrys, though the looks of concern linger. Life in this house again is back to just Mom and Dad and me and the occasional visitor. Now begins the long hard slog through ankle-deep pitch, dragging my feet exhaustedly through my returned routines of emails and deadlines and insoluble problems, and cooking and paying the bills and spending just enough time and energy with people so they know I care for them still, ever hiking with the pack of preemptive grief for losses yet to come. And all I want is to sleep, to rest my eyes and ears from the blare. I have entered the stage of grief characterized by an uncontrollable strangling desire to scream. I am too old and injured to hit the weights or the jogging trail, and movies bring a drug-high that drops abruptly with the credits. On Death and Dying. The stages of grief. Denial—Anger—Bargaining—Depression—Acceptance. Did you know that Dr. Kubler-Ross did not intend to prescribe a sequential series of steps for normal grieving? Her studies of grieving people discovered five realms of grief emotion: people grieving death experience denial, anger, and depression, and eventually, one hopes, an integrating acceptance. Any grieving person may experience any one or more of these emotional realms, sometimes overlapping, or all at once, in comings and goings of degree. American pop psych culture has twisted her sets of discreet grief emotions into a linear progression of mandatory stages, imposing on 500 million people a "correct" way to grieve. Bull shit. Horse hockey. How absurd to cram the human heart, big as a galaxy, into a soda straw of grief normalcy. That ain't how grief works. And so, Mom and Dad and I muddle through our days of grief, with years still to come, clashing the impossibility with the actuality of what happened, chuckling at life's banalities while choking on screams of rage at the dirty dish in the sink, laying my exhausted head on my desk at 2 p.m., caring about nothing, throwing a go-to-hell look at the first person who dares to suggest I get to work, looking at Sarah's smile framed, impossibly, inexorably, on my desk. I will grieve how I must, not knowing beforehand what it will look like or how it will feel, and I will be kind to myself in grief's non-formulaic messiness. In random steps here and there down the road of time, I will find ways to integrate into myself the experience of death and loss, for they are, inseparably, part of my being.
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