The year has been unkind so far. Beyond the overwhelming political pressure across the world, my internal world has also been particularly violent. When I write about my grief, it’s seated by my side. I’m not drowning in it. I’m somewhere in the process of observing it: the way it’s presented itself this time and how our relationship is evolving. Usually, I’m also finding more precise language to communicate how I’m feeling to myself. Over time, this has helped my loves see my grief more clearly and reach out in ways that are more comforting. I’ve felt less alone when I can name the different parts of my grieving. I know this sounds like an intellectual exercise and I’m very good at those. It’s not purely one though, I oscillate between the thinking and feeling more deliberately these days. I’m trying to be observant about when my feelings are too far away from me and I am doing the easy thing instead – watching and dissecting those feelings.
I recently lost someone again. My heart has clung on to that ‘again’ part. Before I could even get to the colossal scale of this particular loss, I have been stuck in the weeds of what feels like a merry go round of whiplash moments. So before I got back home to attend to the rituals of grieving, I had a sliver of time when all I had to do was allow myself to be stuck. I cried walking home on a beautiful spring day that felt like it had taken everything left in me. I drank tea with my friend and didn’t talk about how cruel this felt. Another friend got on the first bus to me and fed me spaghetti whose first delicious bite is all I remember. I also did what was necessary. I called and broke the news over and over. I held space and I listened to the things I was saying, the parts I had to repeat. Those parts were the ground beneath my feet, they were constructing this reality where he had died and I was still alive.
Then, when it was my turn, I listened. There was this one call where after the “can you talk? are you alone?’ shpeel I’ve begrudgingly gotten used to giving, the person on the other end held me with their words. I remember standing at my kitchen counter and how quickly I became porous, like I was slipping away and nothing could contain me. The truth finally felt like it would wash over and then through me repeatedly. As they continued speaking, I tucked those words in my heart because they gave me permission that I knew I would need to keep revisiting. They said things I didn’t yet know I needed and spoke directly to a part of my heart that had felt unreachable for anyone but me. So I sunk, I let the rest of me disintegrate and reminded myself I was never going to be ready for a world without him, without all of them.
There is a methali on loop in my brain and it is the most accurate depiction of this feeling, the moment I am trying to characterize: Maji Yakimwagika Hayazoleki. It doesn’t neatly translate into “you cannot cry over split milk” because in Kiswahili, the saying doesn’t require anything of me. It merely observes that spilled water can’t just be scooped up.
The losses are compounding and the griefs are certainly expanding beyond what I am meant to hold. For this reason, I’ve been meditating a lot about what Yrsa Daley Ward calls “the daily work of staying here.” I’ve stripped this down to breathing, sleeping and eating. Somehow this doesn’t feel as short a list as it looks. Somehow there’s not enough air or lung capacity or perhaps my lungs have just forgotten how to do this — keep breathing when it hurts. Are they too preoccupied with my heart? There aren’t enough hours of sleep to tend to the pain either. Other times, the sleep is absent to keep the break of dawn at bay. To buy more time before I have to live another day where the world continues on without him. Cue John Hanna’s recitation of WH Auden’s poem Funeral Blues that I have been playing obsessively:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
… The stars are not wanted now,
Put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Blooming Butterfly 