symptoms of grief

i thought i would be better at this

I wake up at 7 am every day, play the word games until I win or until they frustrate me enough that I pin them for later. I wait for the coffee to brew, drink half the mug and skip breakfast. I get dressed, though I don’t care much about what I wear most days anymore. No makeup. People tell me I look tired. They can have this image of me. I get in the car and I leave Spotify closed, opting instead for audiobooks. I can’t bring myself to listen to music. I drive to work, I hit traffic, always, because the interstates take turns with construction. If I stray from the (voluntary) captivity of this routine, I will think about loving music, keeping my hair long, driving over the broken asphalt before the road closures. I’ll think about the first warm days of spring, then, the warmth of knowing each of my family members was alive (even if not well). I will suspend my disbelief and feel insulated by my loved ones’ peripheral, fixed existence.

It’s six months later, and grief has settled into the shape of the one we have lost. I’m not doing this—grieving—the way I thought I would. Last weekend I shared this with my mom whose sister’s passing we are collectively grieving, and she said Victoria, you can’t choose how you grieve. News to me. I thought my grief would look like crying routinely for about half a year and settle into an acceptance. I thought it would look like bursting into tears at random times (sort of true) and a general heaviness to bear until time kicked in and let me off the hook, offering to take a few stones off of my back (deeply untrue, the stones only shuffle around as I move). 

Instead, my grief looks just like depression. It looks like the window I cover with a dark sheet midday so I can nap in darkness (I don’t nap). My grief looks like Lake Erie, waveless, every time I have sought its sanctuary, and my grief looks like the anger I feel that my tumult is not reflected in the condition of the water. It looks like blank days in my calendar that I used to fill with coffee dates or trips home to see my healthy, living parents and sister whose vitality I certainly take for granted through my absence (sorry Lizard, mom, dad, T). 

I have resisted grief, and that’s why it hasn’t looked the way I believed it would back when we first learned my aunt was sick, that her time was running out. Any intense emotion has always felt indulgent to me, and grief, perhaps, is the stickiest, the thickest. I didn’t cry at all after her funeral in June. Then, in October, it started. Since then, I cry often at almost anything that elicits any emotional response. I turn the music on, then off.

I feel selfish to grieve her because she is not my parent nor my sister (I think this is because people are traditionally given only one or two days of bereavement leave for extended family, if any, in the U.S.). I don’t even want to think about the grief that will accompany the passing of my own immediate family, but of course, I do think about it, especially after this.

I think the intensity of my grief speaks to my aunt’s character. I feel lucky that she is my sister’s and my aunt, that my mom has her as a sister, that my cousin has her for a mother. I won’t use the past tense. I feel lucky that I see my own relationship with my sister in my mother’s relationship with my aunt, no matter how flawed, no matter how long it took us to learn we do love each other. 

I don’t know what else to say about grieving because I am at the center of its labyrinth, so I’ll share this:

I mine my memory for her, lay the slides of all the years on top of each other to form the person I picture when someone says her name. It is morning, she sits at her kitchen table in her pajamas, glasses on, pen in her left hand, a notepad with a list before her. She is framed by two tall bookshelves full of texts she has catalogued in one of her hundreds of journals. She writes an itinerary of sorts, things she wants us to do while we visit. It smells like coffee because she’s made a the largest small pot possible, and she’s drunk most of it. Her eyes are impossibly bright (no matter her mood) as she asks how we slept and wanders into several tangents. We poke at her for this, we laugh with her, sometimes into fits only we will understand.

Sometimes my memory lends me the smell of the perfume she wore when I was younger (Hermès, maybe Elixir des Merveilles) mixed with her laundry detergent (Tide), or the vision of her coming downstairs, thoughtfully dressed, colors coordinated, shaking her wrists full of bracelets, adjusting each of them with her middle finger and thumb.

I am often reminded of her parenthetical way of speaking, or the easy way she would say something that felt beyond a wisdom I would ever know. One of my favorite quotes was about 15 years ago when we were discussing how much I missed my grandmother’s house, and she said I go there in my phenomenal world and float around sometimes.

This was the fact of her.

I don’t know what to say other than grief makes no sense, but I do know it’s better to do it in community. My biggest mistake is that I haven’t shared it enough with anyone. Time won’t pull the stones from our back, but I think people will if we reveal there’s weight. 

from @thelitarchives on IG / Loss by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Thanks for letting me share <3