raw and rough and real

Grief, like death, is non consensual. The wind was knocked out of my sails. I’m all but capsized in moments. My world has shrunk down to the size of my computer screen, of my bed, of my backyard where I watch the chickens peck because it’s something to do.
**
Mostly I am okay. I am not sobbing or beside myself. Now that I’m out of acute grief, the hospital, her apartment, the plane ride, the moments when part of me could believe maybe it wasn’t real, I’m okay, but impaired. Grief is a temporary disability. Full sentences are hard. Spell check seems pointless. Social graces or good manners take a heaving effort and even then are executed ineloquently at best.
**
Everything is an effort. Every decision. Concentration. After a brief bout of focused work I can practically feel my brain out of breath, gasping for air. I have an idea and want to write about it. Or I know it’s time to brush my teeth, but I can’t quite get my limbs to move in compliance. My bedside lights are on voice command and night after night I fail to turn them off. The house is clean by the grace of my roommates.
**
Sleep is my friend. I am in bed at least 12 years each night. I meant to write hours, but years is appropriate. I’m profoundly tired. I feel okay because I’m not pushing myself to lead a normal life and ‘do things.’ If I was trying to ‘do things’ I would be failing because I can’t concentrate and everything is so hard. Failing to focus or accomplish even the simplest of tasks is frustrating because I wish I was who I was three weeks ago. I had plans for this month. I had momentum. I was starting to be who I was in the world and had found solid footing with my mother for the first time in my life and then this.
**
Sunday I cried when my vacuum wasn’t broken. Then again when my chicken run was built. “What will I do now?” I didn’t want to do things, but the chickens needed me. Now that task is complete and I have to wake up tomorrow and live in this gray limbo or find a new task that rides that fine balance of doable and also important to be done.

**

Day by day grief is blooming like some gruesome flower. The complications of my relationship with my mother. Her papers explicating the complications of her relationship with hers, family secrets, love letters from college. We had so much in common that we could never speak about. I inherited so many of her deep philosophical questions, but was worse than alone in them. Only now after death do I have access to her beyond the mask of ‘mother,’ beyond the attachment to our dynamic that kept us locked in battle.
**
My sense of spirituality dictates that this happened for a reason. If it wasn’t for a reason it would be desperately unfair. My life started feeling differently when I saw things as fated vs fatalistic. In the vulnerability of grief I feel my old patterns creeping in, the reflex to hide, to present a calm and collected facade, to stay in the realm I can move elegantly versus allowing myself to be out of control, to be seen in that raw space. As an antidote I force myself to write this, to out myself. I do this for myself, but also anyone grieving and wondering why they feel compelled to hold up a mask when everyone around them is asking so earnestly for the chance to be there to support something real.
**
My conditioning believes that if people see me raw and rough and real, they will see the part of me that is unloveable. If they see that they will leave me. All people. A collective judgement, a collective rejection. The irony is that I have come to believe that the very thing I’m hiding is the key to being loved and feeling loved in this world. This vulnerability, my fears, my wounds, my softness, this is the essence of me that can be loved. I feared it. I hid it. I pushed people away so they wouldn’t see it. But those who stayed suffered the rest of me because they could see and love this intensely beautiful suffering thing that I am, that I’m too close to see myself.