When grief gets reactivated

Need some end-of-year creative oomph? Join us for this sweet online gathering on Friday (9am PST // 12pm EST). We will do a dance party, drawing lesson, and hear gorgeous song and poetry live. Free and all welcome.

---

Around Thanksgiving a weird little bump showed up under John’s eye. We did our share of wildly ineffective googling (trust me: typing “cyst” into search leads you to some very intense images). We took pictures. We messaged our doctor. We tried not to overreact even as the bump became two bumps and then one scabbed over right under his eyebrow and then a strange pain started stretching into his scalp.

Finally we got a little desperate and asked Sri, our doctor poet friend who lives in the neighborhood, to take a look after his endless shift at the hospital did, in fact, end. He took one look and said, “Zoster,” which is to say shingles, and then he said, “Go to the ER immediately.”

Shingles near the eye threatens your vision permanently. Thank goodness for doctor poets, am I right?

It turns out that shingles is both notoriously painful and also truly fascinating. Shingles is caused by varicella zoster virus, the same virus that causes chickenpox. After a person recovers from chickenpox, the virus stays dormant in their body. If your immune system gets haggard by stress, the virus can reactivate, causing shingles. In John’s case, the varicella zoster virus has basically been sitting at the base of his skull for three decades. He didn’t feel particularly stressed, but in any case, there it was.

Just as John was healing up thanks to good care and medicine, I got a reactivation of a different dormant phenomenon: grief. I was walking around the neighborhood last weekend, trying to hone my attention on the beautiful reflections in the puddles (yay for California rain!) and the wide variety of leaf shapes (perfect for more etchings with Stella), but really I felt like there was a medicine ball in my chest.

Someone I love very much has a truly terrible disease. It’s slow and mysterious and strips them of so much. It’s been going on for years and years. Sometimes I can go weeks without locking into the reality of it, and then, quite mysteriously, the medicine ball will return. It’s not just sadness—the kind of emotion that deflates me and then gets drowned out by the pick ups and the drop offs and the chapter books and the art projects. It’s grief—dark purple and inconsolable and unspeakable.

When I first noticed the medicine ball, I was a little outraged. Who invited you? I would think, as I talked back to my grief. This isn’t a good time. Plus, why now? Nothing significant happened. Same old story.

I’ve learned that grief has a terrible sense of timing and is definitionally irrational. I’ve also learned that it’s not particularly cinematic. In my early days of these reactivations, I would try to orchestrate some kind of catharsis. Okay grief, I’m sitting by the lake. I’m staring at the water. Someone else is taking care of my children for one hour. Cue tears.

As you can imagine, particularly if you’ve ever ridden the strange, uncontrollable waves of complicated grief, it didn’t go like that. It’s unruly, terrifically tender, and bad at showing up in public.

As with all pain, this one has brought me more in touch with the rest of humanity’s experience. We don’t all get chicken pox (I think my generation was the last to know the strange delight of the “chickenpox party”), but we all grieve at some point. In this way, grief is like a dormant virus in all of our bodies. It sits at the base of our skulls, or the pit of our stomachs, or the curve of our hearts, and waits to be awakened. Sometimes it takes decades. Sometimes it engulfs us day after day. Always, it is unsolvable. The only way out is through.

The public conversation about grief rarely mirrors this shape. We talk about stages. We bring casseroles. We check on people for a couple of weeks. And then we operate as if the virus is likely gone, the person is moving on, the loss has been named and contained. But that’s not actually how it works. If we were showing up for people in a way commensurate with the true shape of grief, we’d text a best friend 945 days after her dad told her about the cancer diagnosis. We’d bring a casserole on the 8,422nd day since his sister had her first overdose. We’d sit shiva off and on for 100 years following a kid’s death.

And so many griefs are either secret or undefinable—the miscarriage, the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the suicide. There are no casseroles. There are no collective rituals of helping the person to carry the medicine ball for a couple of weeks. So many griefs, hard enough on their own to carry, are intermingled with anger, regret, shame. Turns out that the worst suffering sometimes repels our friends and neighbors. They want to show up, but pity feels easier; it distances them from the truth that we are all this vulnerable. They don’t have the right words, which they convince themselves is a reason to stay away.

Everyone, everywhere is carrying around grief—more or less dormant, more or less tolerable, more or less secret. When it shows up on our faces is as mysterious as shingles. Most of the time it doesn’t. It won’t. Most of the time it is born alone or, much better, through a phone call to a friend where you just cry. Or don’t. You just name that the medicine ball is back and your day is heavy.

And somehow it’s slightly lighter in the naming of it, the risk to be tender and real. It’s not about having the right words. It’s about feeling emotionally safe enough to send a signal to someone that loves you, that knows your grief is sometimes dormant and sometimes reactivated, and simply risk the tenderness it requires to be accompanied by their knowing. Or at least that’s what I’ve been learning. The only medicine I’ve found is other people’s loving witness. And surrender to one of the most universal and stormy of human experiences.