What are you grieving?

All grief is connected. What are you grieving?

When your therapist uses a phrase enough, it starts to echo in your head, and you start using it on yourself. That’s probably the goal.

I struggle to be kind to myself; to have patience with my own challenging emotions; sadness, anger, frustration, disappointment. There are things to do, people to take care of. The line between sitting with pain, “without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it” and wallowing feels so diaphanous, so thin, that to do the former feels like teetering dangerously on the edge of the latter. Like standing in the waves at high tide, just at the point where you can withstand the onslaught, but knowing that any of the receding waves or sudden eddies could suck you off the shelf and drown you. Control to chaos; coping to depression. The line between is tenuous, the contrast on either side is stark.

Grieving feels dangerous.

And yet, it is more permissible than sinking into disappointment, frustration, or anger. It is acceptable to grieve. That particle of truth is sunk deeply into my bones. So when those emotions, which feel so unproductive and taboo, are viewed as the results of grief, I can permit myself to feel them without trying to smooth them away like wrinkles in clothes that you did not notice until you are already running out the door late for work.

The problems in the world feel too enormous to grapple with, to come to terms with. They are too tightly woven to slice them into bite-sized pieces, but if I tried to swallow whole the enormity of the shift in the world that Covid has wrought, I will choke on it. So I ignore it. I ignore all the changes and the sadness that accompanies them lest I find myself with the weight of the world halfway down my gullet, unable to dislodge it, either to be swallowed and digested, or spit out and pushed aside.

But today, when my chest swelled with sadness as NPR droned about isolation and Christmas, instead of hiding it or fading it by changing the station, my head asked me, “What are you grieving?”

And it was okay to grieve the loss of family traditions. That one word changes everything.