Grief & the Unexpected
My friends and I have a running joke that we have to schedule our mental breakdowns, or they’ll sneak up on us.
Like all inside jokes, an element of truth exists within it. Since the death of my uncle a little over a year ago to suicide, I have a little habit. Whenever I have a long bus or train ride I listen to music. Sometimes I’m imagining characters and story ideas. Sometimes the song is full of feeling too aligned with mine. When I look out at nature, especially, I think of him.
I’ve made it a ritual to ‘visit’ him like this, in these safe moments where I have time to hide tears if there are any, and compose myself before being asked to socialize again. For the past several months, when I enter that space, there has been sadness. Tinged with anger. I open the floodgates in these moments so that the feeling doesn’t sneak up on me when I’m with my family, or trying to live my life.
Last week I had one of these grief check-ins. Everything was prepared. A long bus ride, music, a seat to myself, a stretch of Thailand landscape that I think he would appreciate.
And then — when I reached for him —the sadness wasn’t there.
I was so afraid, at first. That I had fully cut myself off from my emotions. That I was callously ‘over’ grieving, when my aunt and my family and any sane person would still be feeling this loss deeply.
But no, that wasn’t it. He was still there —I could recognize that, even if you don’t have any spiritual beliefs, you know what I mean — but this time there wasn’t familiar sadness. There was just peace.
As if he had been waiting on a park bench, waiting for me to tire myself out running around the playground.
There is more feeling there that I am still finding words for. There is some acceptance there I am still too greedy for to share, though I did tell my aunt, texting her tearfully from my shoddy phone signal from a boat in Khao Sok lake, pictured above.
But what I wanted to share with you is this — the moment of new emotion, in a practice of sadness I had become too addicted to.
Maybe the dead can continue to surprise us after they're gone. Just like when we knew them in this life and could not predict their beliefs or actions or love.
Art is inextricable from my life. I would not have survived without poetry. In a more complicated way, I need the novels in order to stay alive, too. Every time I have writers block or lose momentum in my projects, it's because everything goes according to plan. I've learned cause and effect. I feel that I can predict the outcome, so what is the point of doing the action if I already know where it will end up?
The antidote is faith in the strange nature of everything. When something can still surprise you, it's always worth exploring. What a reassurance in possibility, and that the world is so much bigger than what I can predict. Any writer knows this — we don’t know anything at all.
What a relief to be proven wrong. What a relief to encounter the unexpected. What a relief to reach for something familiar and to find it unrecognizable and new.
