An Unsettled Path
A post traumatic experience, unpacked
“Grief is a kind of storyteller. It lays down its own, unsettled path to healing. It is a well-traveled road, sometimes brutal, sometimes generous.” Kay Redfield Jamison
On a bright Saturday morning near the start of this year, something terrible happened that struck me and my closest family with volcanic force. Respecting such privacy as can be offered considering the scope of all that occurred, I will redact the name of the person we lost and substitute an apt descriptor: “Sweet girl,” keeping details to a minimum.
In the aftermath, I grappled with academic journal articles and books on topics I thought might have played a role in the tragedy. I wrote to organize my learning, juggling plausible ideas in vain attempts to make sense of the unknowable. This work has been my way of loving this young woman in absentia.
Sorrow’s grip is tenacious. Memories of prior losses arise as if to push us further into despair. The compounded griefs of a lifetime reveal just how far over the threshold into hell we can go when we’re rubbed raw and depleted. It’s a long road back to any semblance of peace and, one hopes, a life landscape that we can endure despite damage sustained.
Last February not long after the event that altered life for so many, I sat in front of a blank journal page to deal with broken-heartedness and feelings of helplessness. I don’t know what to say about “healing.” I believe in broken hearts mending, but the road isn’t just long – it’s steep and hard to navigate. Still, I suppose, what might otherwise drive us to madness might also lead to a sense of ourselves as stronger – at least, better able to deal with the tenuous nature of life and the ever-present vulnerability we all face each day.
It’s at least possible to return to life, to a larger world of the seen and unseen, to daily experiences that seem “more”…everything. I have nothing to share but my truth regarding this business of being alive in our beautiful, terrifying, inscrutable world.
I come to this jumbled conclusion upon recently re-reading the following, written on a cold Thursday morning that also happened to be my birthday. Warning – it’s neither pretty nor neat, but the sort of flow of consciousness that either eventually makes sense or not, depending on the day.
February 15, 2024
My birthday, again. I don’t know what to do about that.
Why am I still here, and someone else so precious and so young, is suddenly not? She was born into love, and I wasn’t.
When it was clear I wasn’t loved, I kept going. I survived and can say that it was bad then, but I’ve had a particularly good life. Brother and sisters have struggled differently and seemingly more. Will I ever be able to feel gratitude without a twinge of guilt for surviving what we did?
It feels guilty and wrong to remember the bad things of my childhood. Nothing makes sense. Our sweet girl, beloved only child, had fine, devoted parents. Isn’t parental love supposed to be so powerful that it protects and preserves young, uncertain life? Logically I know it can’t, but now I understand in ways I didn’t before just how far someone can float out of reach without anyone knowing what’s happening. Anyone can lose the thread of anything, even everything, and so much depends on what we can’t control.
All the bad things I did in my early days of trying to cope with my siblings in the house we lived in are now things I can’t seem to forget these days – a pattern I’ve tried to break for so long. I’m drowning in grief on this “birthday” over our sweet girl, and all the things I did and didn’t do or allow myself to see. For her, or anyone. Things I didn’t know how to do and can’t make up for.
The other [siblings] and I [the oldest] proved to be bad caregivers to the two youngest who won’t even talk to us now. I tried to have a life starting at 13 and should have been home more. I knew this then and know it now. It hurts to be disliked and discarded. Our parents’ attitude, perpetuated. All my grown up efforts to atone for everyone’s pain and grief at having been abandoned have come to so little in terms of lifelong relationships I never wanted to lose. Well, it had taken me long enough to figure out who I was. What can I ever really know of the others? I don’t blame anyone.
I can count the mistakes I’ve made in my life. Mainly these are big and small breaches upon others’ lives and upon their space. No, not robberies or anything, in case my kids ever read any of this. My sins involve breaches of trust and love. I took things from others who deserved better of me. I took freedom where commitment was expected, for example. I took selfish solitude when my presence would have been of some value.
I can’t give myself excuses. I’ve lived with regret a long time, wondering why simple self-forgiveness based on prior ignorance is never enough. I devised rituals like throwing rocks from a bridge into the still waters of a creek. Each rock was supposed to represent something wrong I had done that bothered me still. Their aggregate weight was heavy in my hands. As the burden lightened, I felt better. But every so often the old regrets return to shame me. I’m tired because I don’t know what else can be done to atone for past ignorance. Is there hope for that sort of thing?
It seems trying to deal with all that our sweet girl carried within her broken heart – and put her own self through, straight to the end— has laid bare a space within my own heart, forcing me to stand there and confront my own crap so many years later, again.
Been thinking of Nancy’s [my sister] death a lot. Is it four years ago or five? I’ve lost my grip. Hard to measure pain and longevity all at once. It would be nice to think she’s with our sweet girl now, but who knows. Soon enough we’ll all be gone, and with it, my hope for family unity in this lifetime.
Now, this. Sweet girl, beloved child. Tell me what happened. You were kind and noticed and so loved and respected by all who knew you! I just saw you weeks ago; spent time with you. Took your photo. Why didn’t I see what was happening? Could I not just have looked, really looked? I look at that photo, I study it. Oh, the things we can’t ever see.
I’ve had a series of indistinct dreams lately. They haven’t been disruptive or disturbing. I have no waking memory of their specifics, but I can grasp something of the backdrop in which the dreams occurred. Actions, I don’t remember. Context, I can describe.
I had helpers (?) surrounding me. I don’t recognize even one of them. In the dreams I am walking through places I’ve been before, parts of towns or cities with which I’d once been familiar that I no longer recognize. I seem just to be walking through and looking. Some feel to be sites surrounding a past home or places I love, others not. Kindly people point out one feature or other to me on a new bridge, a building, a wall. I recall most were of stones and bricks. Some were beautiful, and others in ruins.
When my cats woke me too early all I felt was disturbed and nostalgic.
Pondering this:
Who are the people around me in the dream? A cloud of witnesses or saints? Or firing neurons in my weary brain, aiming at past miseries and pointless longing – offering one final close look before they dissolve into space and time?
Why have I been so blessed with the life I’ve had these past decades?
Sweet girl. Your story wasn’t finished. I enlarged your photo, removing you from the original context, the life that swirled in vibrant colors around you. Your gentle smile means something more every time I look. Today, I hope it means peace. Know that your memory is more than a blessing - it’s part of me, a renewed intention, to see and to cherish, beyond reason if necessary.
I would have been one of so many willing to hold you up here, help you to mend, if only I’d seen, if only I’d known.
_______________________________________________________________________
“Grief, lashed as it is to death, instructs. It teaches that one must invent a way back to life.” Kay Redfield Jamison
“If only?” One says that even when the loss was expected, predicted, given a number. It’s the outcry of powerlessness. After my first session with my grief counselor, she wisely said “We can’t defeat nature!” At the end of my enormously helpful series of sessions, I heard myself say “if only”. But they made it possible to find my way back to life and joy—some of the time.