In the Silence

I am learning a truth I probably always knew but simply didn’t attend to.  We grieve in silence.

Grief is universal.  None of us escapes it.  We lose people we love.  We lose parts of our identities.  We lose circumstances and situations we depend on and that matter to us.  We all know grief.  And yet we seldom speak of it.

Why is it, I wonder, that we button up and batten down our grief among our kindred and then mourn alone?  Do we hope not to disturb others?  Perhaps.  Are we afraid of burdening them?  Possibly.  I suspect something more though.  I think we are afraid that, in their discomfort, others will leave us.  Maybe, challenged by the belief that they must mitigate our pain, they will simply fade away.  And in our state of bereavement—a state in which our skin is paper thin, our hearts are shattered glass, our cognition works only in fits and starts, and the world beneath our feet is pock-marked and unstable—the thought of any further loss is beyond reckoning.

And the truth is, some do leave.  Some we love and who love us leave when we need their love the most.  It is beyond the capacity of some and the interest of others.  Some have too many of their own burdens to carry.  Some, I’ve learned (because they’ve told me) are afraid that fragments of the loss will strike them—perhaps infect them with losses of their own.  Some (again, as I’ve been told) can’t maintain their carefully constructed optimism about life by letting in the reality that loss is part of it—that sometimes the loss is unexpected and even unjust, perhaps cruel—and that there is nothing to be done to make it “right.”

I visit online groups where other mourners gather—particularly moms and dads who have lost children.  There is great comfort in sharing with others who know this pain.  Yet, I am heartsick every time I see, “I could never post this on my home page….” or “I could never share this with my friends.”  And I see these phrases often.  If the most basic of life’s truths—love and loss—cannot be shared, we are disconnected from something that is at the core of our human experience.  I feel profoundly sad this is so.

I see, too, the frequency with which the brokenhearted are left stunned and bereft over the living they also lose after their beloveds have left this earth.  Often those losses are among siblings and long-time friends.  “I miss who you were,” they often say.  The bereaved cannot help but think, “Me, too”—knowing full well that “who they were” is not coming back.  What a heartbreaking truth to learn the conditionality of kinship.  As a parent, a child’s birth changes one profoundly and forever.  Imagine, then, what a child’s death might do.

I am a born observer, and I have learned to speak my experience.  Or—with more frequency—to write it.  Words are a medium that ground and comfort me.  And I deeply value the shared human experience that comes with the sharing of words.  I value a listening ear as well.  So, I will continue to speak.  I will continue to listen.  And I will continue to share this grief.  And, I imagine, I will ride the wave of further losses.

And here’s another truth.  In the end, I don’t think I care.  Not really.  The loss precipitating any other loss has taken all the air from the room.  Other losses are like flies buzzing against a cracked window while I sit flayed and fragmented in a field of broken glass.