And afterwards at…

Grief is a shit sandwich;
Presentation doesn’t do much to improve the taste.

It’s inevitable, of course, that the older one gets the better acquainted one becomes with The Grim Reaper and his modes of business. Friends, relatives, friends of relatives, relatives of friends; a ripe old age, a good innings, a flower untimely plucked, all his life ahead of him; swift and sudden, long and lingering, expected, predicted, surprising, shocking.

One thing is common to all death’s primary colours, and to all their subtle shades.

Grief.

And whichever way you cut it, whichever way your helping of bereavement is served up, grief hurts just the same.

Sure, the details may be different. A “graphic equaliser” of our individual emotions will show a very different profile between, say, the protracted, painful and inevitable death of an elderly loved one, and a young relative killed instantly in an auto accident. But grief is about loss, pure and simple, and the way in which that loss occurs can’t increase or diminish its measure. A constant in your life has been taken away and will never, ever return. You can never right the wrongs you did them, can never say the words you never got round to saying, and you will never, ever see them again. Synapses in your brain fire that are no longer joined together. Something is fundamentally broken and it is disorienting, nauseating, and weighs on your mood for months like a lingering flu.

In the week it took for my sister to fall ill and die I didn’t get a chance to visit her. In the week before her funeral I didn’t see her either. As I carried her coffin, stood by my grieving family, watched their tears, shared a comforting hug, I felt totally disconnected from what they were going through. Not having seen her over that time somehow made it all seem unreal. The weight in that casket could have been anyone.  I felt disengaged from it all and for some months afterwards I continued to feel I was disengaged from it; not grieving, not suffering, not having accepted it. But grief was there all the time, in my mood, in my outlook, in my drinking, in my indolence. It was several months later, after I started to emerge from it, that I could look back and see how much I’d been hurting all along.

Physical wounds take their own sweet time to heal, and so it is with emotional ones. Day by day we may not notice the improvement, but week by week, month by month, we slowly and steadily mend. It just takes time. And there isn’t a damn thing any of us can do about that.