A Grief Deferred

My father died last year. It was sudden, painful and our time in the hospital (and the actual moment of his death) left my Mom and I traumatized. We’ve been grieving ever since. On his birthday, the world went into lock down. I passed the one-year anniversary of his death in quarantine with my mother, unemployed and uncertain of what the hell had happened to my life. Sound familiar? That “what the fuck happened to my life?” feeling, is echoing across the globe. I was already there before the world plunged into a pandemic. I’ve been living on a strange cocktail of sadness, rage, and exhaustion for the last year. I swing between the three without rhyme or reason.

Grief is one of those things you don’t understand until you’ve experienced it. When those who’ve suffered major loss stumble upon each other there is a sad kind-of joy at having found someone who knows. “Hello! You’re broken like me, sucks right?” There is an aversion to the uninitiated, no matter how well meaning. I live with a constant background rage, occasionally bounding into the foreground to wreak havoc at the unfairness of it all. My kindhearted father is dead at 58, but someone like Trump lives on.

I’m a twenty-something trying to be a professional creative in Los Angeles. Of course I had four jobs. Running from job to job, barely sleeping and silently screaming inside. How could this be life? How could I be expected to function let alone succeed at anything? People were kind and worried about me for a month or two, then moved on. Who could blame them? It wasn’t their loss; they had their own shit to worry about. Left alone with it, you start to wonder... If I was stronger would I be doing better by now? Was something wrong with me? Grief has a LONG timeline and I’m still considered to be in early grief one year out. It takes years to adjust to your new normal. Your loss appears out of nowhere to sucker punch you in the heart the rest of your life.

I hung on by my fingernails for the rest of the year. I lost friends, I lost jobs, I drank too much, hopped into bed with people I barely knew, and agreed to any project that came along. If I just kept moving maybe I’d make it out alive. Maybe I’d make something of myself and justify my loss. Every image of grief I’d been shown in media told me that grief would transform me in some magical way. This was when I would write my Pulitzer prize winning book or Grammy winning album. I couldn’t imagine anyone handing me an award, or a decent salaried job, in my current condition. Why was there no provision for people suffering a major loss? Something that would let me rest and not have to worry about surviving for a few months?

Then the world shut down. I moved back in with my mom and while glad to be close to her, it felt like going backwards in my life. All my work disappeared and my unemployment became the only thing keeping us afloat. Despite how hard I had fought to keep my life together, everything had fallen apart.

I sank gently to the depths of depression. Nothing was expected of me so I let myself be nothing. I stopped trying to fight my feelings. Spending days in bed; if I wanted to cry, I’d cry through breakfast and laundry. I attended every meeting of grief support via zoom and recommitted to a meditation practice. I called dear friends for 3-hour conversations, read the pile of books on loss, and stopped drinking. I started saying no to things and began to see how to live in grief without feeling like I had to put on a show for the rest of the world. I let myself be whatever I needed to be. This is privilege.

Thanks to expanded unemployment benefits, for the moment I am able to shelter in place and am not forced to put my life at risk as a frontline worker. As a side effect of the global pandemic and my own privilege, I’ve been given time and space to process my grief.

Our world requires that we keep going, keep producing or get left behind. There is no room for grief, which requires rest and time to feel your pain, and understand what you need to live with it. The corporate schedule doesn’t allow space to mourn the death of an innocent man for taking to the streets in protest. Or to gather with your community to make plans to change a system that is so clearly broken and fatal to the most vulnerable. There is no job security should you choose to participate in a strike or protest.

The tarnished silver lining of lock-down is that I’ve had time to slow down and listen to nothing but myself for the first time in years. The pandemic interrupted our regularly scheduled programming, created a void, a silence where our own unfiltered feelings could finally be heard. Grief came up to fill the gap. Not just losses like mine, but the systemic grief of life in America. Most evidently the grief of life as a Black person in a country steeped in white supremacy.

There’s the inter-generational grief from centuries of oppression and violence compounding since slavery. That horrific loss of home, family, community, and autonomy, the initial sin for which America, white America, has still not atoned. And the daily assaults of modern day life, trying to survive in a hostile white dominant culture, witnessing law enforcement murder innocent citizens with impunity. The Black community has been carrying the weight of this for centuries, and their grief has never been given the space required in our culture. We are just beginning to hear to it now.

Grief needs to have a place in our everyday lives. I tried to outrun it, subdue it, outwork it. Despite all my efforts, it was still there waiting. Not to destroy me, but to make me feel the heartbreak of losing the person I loved most in the world. The pain of how hard life had become. If we want to change our culture, we need to let ourselves grieve for what the old one has put us through and let ourselves be changed by it.

As a white person who wants to be an ally and a supporter of black grief, I’m still figuring out what this means. I know I have a lot of learning and listening to do. As a grieving person, I’ve learned: Allow those previously unable to grieve, to “not be OK”, for as long as it takes. If it takes as many years as their grief has been deferred, then so be it. It is uncomfortable to witness another’s grief, witnessing the human reaction to pain and loss is raw as hell. Get used to it. Don’t say you understand when you can’t.

You don’t need to fix someone’s grief, there is no fix. But you can make the world an easier place within which to grieve. Notice the things you say when someone is in pain, the way you respond to another’s anger or depression. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told, “how strong I am”. What I hear is “I’m glad you’re handling your shit because I sure don’t want to hear about it”. As a culture, we need to create some sense of safety for vulnerable times when our emotional well-being may need tending.

In this time of radical change and shifting perspectives, many of us are finally wading into the realities of systemic racism. The issues of grief and racism are interlocked. We have to consider how healing one means learning to make space for the other. As we sit down for these uncomfortable conversations, don’t let grief be deferred, give it a seat at the table.