Ordinary Grieving, Late Night Grieving, Then Tomorrow

Quarter to four and no sleep for me. Grieving is weird, isn't it? It fills you, okay, it fills me, and I get bigger with it, but I can't shrink back to my normal, just because I want to and it's logical to. Logical remedies don't work on grief. It takes its course. I wait it out, suffer it more, or less, but still have to wait.

Most times I don't recognize it at first. I know I'm feeling something, pain, but I don't know it's grief. I usually have to write about it for awhile. Tease it out of myself, separate it from all the rest, the anger or sense of betrayal or injustice, make all my logical arguments about it, those stabs at it as if it were something I could defeat. Maybe I cry, but in frustration or woundedness, not really grief.

I set aside time for it, was planning to do it tomorrow, but no, it is here tonight. I'm a good sleeper and I rarely toss and turn. It's easy for me to read myself to sleep, if I have the right sort of fiction that pleases me and then lets me ease into closing my eyes. Then sometimes I get these nights. I didn't have the right sort of fiction. I picked up some James Baldwin from 1962, way wrong. I put it aside quickly but the mistake had been made. I tried to get back into The Feather Thief, which is engaging and fascinating, but no, didn't engage. Didn't fascinate.

A hug won't fix it, though I do wish I had a cat. A cat in my lap would help some. I can't talk this one out, it's mine to sit with, it's mine to let run and then be released from, eventually. I expect to be released, for a time anyway, but this one is going to last awhile, in cycles. I think a year or two, on and off, to be realistic. I can hope for a better scenario, but I'm kind of a practical person. I'm the age when people are leaving the physical realm, people I need, so that will layer in and make this worse. Is all aging grieving until you die? Maybe that's the kind of thing people are too kind to tell you.

I've been rehearsing for grief, since my Mom is 93 now, but I know I can't really do that. That one has the potential to devastate, particularly. We've been together so long. She's been finishing up her book, and her writing is really in the zone right now. She will next be writing specifically about grief, herself, about her grandmother's intense experience of losing a child in a blizzard and not finding him for months. And then being prevented from seeing his blackened, ruined body. Help me if I ever have to feel that kind, help us all if we do. We talk about it, as a writing exercise. I'm dedicated to helping her finish this book, helping her keep the momentum going until Johanna is released, figuratively and literally. It's exciting but fraught. She sent me two chapters this week, though, and there's just the blizzard to do, and then the after the blizzard. The waiting. She has a baby to nurse, then right when they find her son's body, she gets pregnant with my grandfather. Then the deciding to live. What a compelling story. Even more when you know it was real life, and it sits here in my genes.

I imagine it will be hard for Mom to even write it! To write deep into feelings like those takes you halfway in yourself, as you try to articulate it. You know you can't really, you'll be summarizing it at best, but you give it a good try and you have to draw on your own grief to do it. She's had some to draw on. We shared a bit of that, but it was 50 years ago now. Still, it's not hard to summon it. I can go there instantly, how I felt on the plane when I cried all the way back to Delaware, how confused I was for the next thirty years or so. Even though she didn't get to meet her grandmother, it was there in her family whenever anyone told the story, probably whenever it snowed. They lived in Johanna's dream house, with its big rooms built for parties and beer drinking. That grief was probably alive for a hundred years, is still. She's going to tap it. I feel like I could too, and I might, just for something to write about that isn't about me.

This grief tonight, it's a tough one. I have pushed it aside a lot. I am good at denial and I kept working hard at not framing it that way, but it's for sure grief. It's loss, for something I don't get to hold onto, something that really lives in me in particular and probably won't even be noticed outside of me. I brought it to life, because of the heart I have made in me, and I value it, but it has little value in the big world. I guess it comes out in service, so that's where it gets its external value. Service is useful, and it helps, helps me and the community. So I can forge my grief into more service, I suppose. Eventually. After I sit with it.

It's my job to keep it to myself, to hold it in an abstract place and not spread it around. I gave myself tomorrow to work on making that strong plan and working out how to stick to it. I know I don't make the rules of grief, though. My plan will be thin. It might take more than one day.

I have some good things coming up that will help diffuse this grief. I am going to get to recieve the grant, which is amazing and I will be proud and happy about that. I have Jell-O, which is just pure joy and we worked on our narrative the other night and it was pretty fun. But two, three, of our people were holding grief down, and I was feeling it. It was scaring me, but I kept it in then too. I was switching back and forth from one grief to another and it was in the midst of laughter and discovery as we unfolded our tale. I get to put that all in order tomorrow too. It is my special job to take all the brainstorming and make it make sense, an organizing task that really fits my creative skills I guess. I do love it.

Oh, that word love. Of course that is where all the grief comes from, since if we didn't love we wouldn't feel loss. I watched the Mr. Rogers movie tonight, Won't You Be My Neighbor. What a tender soul. What a powerful soul. There was a part at the end that I should watch again, as I kind of missed it in trying to process my grief, which he was pulling out of me with Daniel Tiger. His wife was saying that right before he went into the coma before he died, he asked her if he was a lamb. I think he was asking if he was easy to love, since everyone finds lambs easy to love, right? And she told him yes, of course he was, and then he passed into death. Am I a lamb? Mr. Rogers says yes.

I was telling myself yes at that point, my process having moved into affirmations and reassurance. I hadn't recognized my grief yet, I was just processing feeling wounded. I hadn't looked out at the bigger picture and the denial and all that. I was just in today, but what made me not sleep was trying to look at the whole of life, with yesterday and tomorrow and what will happen and what seems like it will happen and what is the best that could happen which is the work for tomorrow.

But I tried to put myself to bed and I miss Mr. Rogers, and my other loves, big and small, and I do want to get to tomorrow and the deciding about what is the best that could happen. It helped to write this, it helped to cry through Mr. Rogers' movie, and it will help to sleep and wake up and have a new day, foggy or maybe fine. Maybe the kind of day to spend pruning the apple tree and not falling down to break a heel this time. Maybe the day to work on the Jell-O Show narrative and feel that joy. Maybe the day to feel like a spring lamb and gambol a bit, feel the lifting of the grief with the benevolence of daphne and witch hazel. That could be a possible scenario I suppose.

I'll try sleep again. It's almost five, and look at all I have accomplished already today. Love you.