Grief Graffiti

These are just some of the books I’ve read since I lost my son. (Some I have given away or lent to fellow grievers.) Some I reference in this blog, others I have gone back and reread at different stages of my grief. There’s just something about hearing what others experienced, learned or realized in their journey that makes you feel the kindred spirit & not feel so alone & isolated in grief. Sometimes we just don’t know how to put into words what we’re feeling & having someone do that feels like turning on a light, illuminating the shadows to show us what it really is.

I’m currently devouring the book, “Here After”, by Amy Lin. It’s reminiscent of a “Daily Light”, short passages (sometimes a page or two) journaling her early grief. It’s so good you want to savor each piece, not reading too much at a time so that you can save some for later, like a favorite snack. Here’s a few excerpts that stirred me:

[We] talk about this ghost limb, this love, we have for our beloveds. We keep wondering if they are cold or if they need rest or what they might like for dinner. I tell [her] most nights, when he came home, I would ask: “Did you eat today?” Often, I would text him at lunch, to make sure he ate. I explain that I find myself picking up my phone around noon before I realize thoughts like these, thoughts about what he needs, now have no use. I ask [her] if she thinks our loved ones – if there is an After and they are in it – can hear us when we call for them? Of course, there is no answer to my question. There is no way to know. [She] has different questions too. Questions to which I do not have any answers. Neither of us has to explain the pain we are in to the other. That is something at least.”

I decide to take [my therapist’s] advice about writing because I do not know what else to do. I am overcome by what feels like limitless sorrow. I tell him I will write a letter about how I feel each week. I will make the posts public, for anyone to read. I show him the website I will use. It’s like a digital newsletter, I tell him. I explain that people can access the letters when or if they want to read them. This way, one person alone does not have to feel obligated to help me bear the enormity of my grief. “Are you sure?”, he asks me. He is worried someone as private as I am will struggle with something as public as what I have suggested. “No”, I say. “I am not sure.”

“How are you?” They keep asking me. Friends, acquaintances, strangers: they all say these things to me. “How are you doing?” I do not know how to reply. “He’s dead”, I say. They wince. “Passed away”, they say. I stop answering. “Oh, you know”, I say. “I’m doing”, I say.

“It’s difficult to hear”, they say.

“It’s too heavy.”

“I can’t take it in all at once.”

“It makes me too sad.”

“I need a break.”

I am just telling them what happened. I am just telling them how I am doing. I am just telling them he died.

“‘I have to protect my light”, someone I have known a long time says. “I can’t hear about this all the time if it’s always going to be this sad.”

One morning I cry on the floor under his urn for hours, though I only realize this when I look at my phone. [My therapist] tells me a window into this early, acute pain has to be opened, even just a little each week. If this window stays closed, eventually it will seal and the body will adjust to the pain, grow used to its weight. “You are so young, he tells me. Do not carry this your whole life.” My whole life? I think. What about his whole life?

~Amy Lin, “Here After”