Grief

I want, no I need to talk about grief right now. Yeah, that's right. So if you needed something cheerful to read, I apologize. Please click out and I wish you a pleasant day (or evening).

Who doesn't know about the suffocating gray blanket that settles over us when we lose people, pets, even trees to death? (I cried my heart for a whole day out when they cut down an ancient cedar tree on my street earlier this year.) Grief is the heavy blanket that settles over you when someone or something you love dies or leaves. There is a specific event: death or the break-up of a relationship where you realize you're never going to see that being again. That nothing on earth can replace her/his/its unique presence and belovedness. The grief engulfs you with a near unbearable weight. You can't eat, sleep, function. You just want to crawl into a deep, dark womb and pull it in after you. You don't want to deal with daily life or ordinary circumstance. You remain in an echo chamber of loss for some time--sometimes years. You want to die without your beloved's presence. Everything is diminished. Everything loses its colors, even bright spring days fade to shades of cold gray. You think nothing can ever be set right again.

You are allowed to go through a period of time that society calls "mourning." Your reclusive, emotional, erratic, unconsolable behavior is accepted and you are bestowed sympathy and understanding, at least superficially. But you know that you are the one going through this agony and that no one can reach in and console you, no matter how good their intentions. Around others you find yourself trying to "buck up" for their sake. You go through motions, prop up your smile, show gratitude for their concern and sympathy.

But no matter how traumatized you are, time has a way of healing the grief from death. The sharpness begins to soften, the memories begin to fade. You begin to come out of yourself. It's as if a deep wound has begun to scab over. You can begin to laugh a little again. You feel the heavy gray burden begin to lighten and gradually, imperceptibly, life continues as it did before. The snow melts and the river begins to flow again. You discover you no longer need to act as if you're healing. You actually are healing, thanks to loved ones, friends, spirituality, therapy, drugs, whatever was there for you. Now your loved one lives on as a faded memory. Their photos and belongings don't fill you with such an agonized sense of loss any more. You realize that love hasn't disappeared, it has only transformed. You realize life and you have both moved on and you can face new beginnings. You have moved through your grief.

Now, I know from first-hand experience that adoptees, despite brief periods of respite, live in a state of low-level, permanent grief. Everything I described above, only without relief. At birth or at a young age, the adoptee's entire universe, her identity, her sense of self dies. There is no respite. No consolation. No recourse to heal unless she breaks laws or bends spoons with her mind. Her frozen grief will never melt; the dark and empty room will never light up with people to whom she belongs. Often she has no memories or keepsakes to hold. Her entire existence is propped up, manufactured for other people's convenience. Her grief exists far beyond the relationship level. It exists at the cellular, even genetic level. You can't touch that, even if you're a scientist. Her entire existence is defined by and saturated with grief from birth to death. Even if her nfamily was simply awful, it was still her nfamily. Hers. Her anchor, in spite of everything.

People mean well when they speak of healing. "You have to stop wallowing in your misery. You can begin to heal if you really want to," they suggest. To me, that's like telling a gay person they can begin to be straight if they really want to. I write this blog and read and listen to spiritual teachers because I want to heal. I really, really do. My last few posts prove that I have days when it's a joy to be alive. Wish I could write uplifting, spiritual posts every day.
But days like today I want to vanish. Days like today I wish my mother had had an abortion because I feel as if I'm just taking up space. What I feel is beyond self-pity. It's cellular exhaustion and death. It's like a Monsanto death seed. Today is one of those days I can't help being so grim. It's the way I feel.

Every adoptee deals with her own grief and trauma in her own way. Yesterday I read about Masha Allen for the first time on The Daily Bastardette. Masha makes my grief and trauma look like a dish of vanilla pudding. But I too am living in permanent grieving in my own way, in the shadows of a life that died--my own.

Tomorrow we leave for San Francisco for a week, but if I can access wi-fi, I'll try to write more cheeful posts from there.