C.S. Lewis married Joy Davidman when he was 58. She was 41 and dying. She had bone cancer when they met and they both knew she didn’t have much time left. Lewis spent the first year of his grieving writing it all down. The result is A Grief Observed, which is a raw and stunning window into that first brutal year. I couldn’t read any firsthand accounts of grief those first years. It was too close. Too raw. I wish I had been able to, though, because when I finally did I came across a sentence that resonated so deeply it actually made me gasp:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.”
Me neither, C.S.! Why does no one talk about that? About how the first days, weeks, months are like getting plunged into an icy ocean? About how the loss is all that you can remember and yet you somehow wake up in the morning and fucking forget for a second and then have to re-remember? About how it reorders and recategorizes everything leaving you feeling like someone came into your house and rearranged all of the furniture in the middle of the night? About how hard it is to judge how you will feel in the next millisecond, which makes it impossible to be a reliable human or make plans? A few months after my Dad died, I found myself plunged into panic and absolutely terrorized by panic attacks. They were so frequent and so relentless that I was not sure I was going to make it.
But I held on. And life got so much bigger.
One of the hardest things about grieving is that it’s nearly impossible to give an account of. We are used to giving an account of ourselves - of our lives, of our work or whatever we are engaged with. “How’s work going?” “How are your kids?” “How’s that new place working out?” These are all questions we answer on the regular, and mostly with ease. “How’s that grief?” Well that’s an impossible to answer question, partly because it never gets asked. But partly because it’s really difficult to give an account of. “Well, today I came to the realization that my father doesn’t know how to do his own laundry because my mom - who I miss with every aching breath I take - enabled us all so much that we didn’t even see that she was doing it.” Or, “Well, before work I was so panicked that I worried I was going to launch myself out of my window - not because I want to, but just because I really need this panic to stop.” These aren’t conversations that we have. We should, but we don’t.
So that’s what we do in this episode. We talk about how these losses plunged us into the darkness, what we learned while we were there, and what we would say to our newly-grieving-selves if we could go back in time.
We also talk about grief and anxiety (& mention Claire Bidwell Smith’s excellent book on it), how difficult it can be to lose your mother and everything that goes with her, how beautiful unexpected support can be, and how devastating when those we thought we could count on turn out to not be able to handle being there for us.
If you take away only one thing from the episode, we would like it to be this: if we can learn to have more open and compassionate conversations about our losses, it will be so much easier to let grief be the transformative force that it is.
And:
Want to share your grief stories? Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird on Instagram.
You’ll be able to share your love for your lost loved one there.
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