gladly i will grieve
/I think if you spend enough days in silence, if you pass enough nights alone in the dark, all your defenses against the ghosts of buried pain must eventually crumble.
Alone in the dark, there is no one to perform for.
Alone in the quiet, there is no activity loud enough to drown out my mind.
Alone, there is only myself and God and grief.
It's been three, maybe four years of meeting this ghost on a regular basis. I've tried dealing with it in a myriad of ways. I used to write about it a lot, indirectly; then I became too self-conscious and managed it by distraction instead - little tasks and busy work under the guise of "productivity" that could at least keep it out of sight.
The trouble with these efforts was that they never allowed the ghost to have a name.
I didn't know the identity of my pain, only that it was there, that it was excruciating, and that it loves the night. It's not as if there is a particular loss or death that I can link it to - and that's what has made it seem so wrong, illegitimate in a way. Who grieves over nothing?
But of course it isn't nothing.
Every ghost has a name.
Mine finally introduced himself to me last night, at his favorite time: after midnight, pitch-black, pouring rain.
His name is Home.
Of the four of us that have left home, I'm the only one who went at eighteen. Straight out of high school, I boarded a plane bound for Orlando.
I was not ready, and nothing could have changed that except maybe - and only maybe - more time.
We don't think of losses like this as worthy of a full-on grieving process. Maybe that's why so many of us walk around in the company of invisible ghosts. I never had the time or the opportunity to deal with the sudden end of my childhood or the time I lost with my sisters or the new families I formed and then left behind in two different states - let alone the fact that once I was home, I got engaged and planned a wedding and got married and moved again in the space of half a year.
I don't regret any of it. This is my story - this is where God has led me, ghosts and all. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
It doesn't mean that there aren't far-reaching effects that I sometimes don't even notice... like how hard it has been for me to attach to new people and put down roots in this place, how much I depend on making at least a monthly or semi-monthly trip back home, or how easy it is to blame the pain on something that seems less silly than mourning a major life change that happened four years ago - especially a change that only I, out of all my siblings and GCBI classmates, seem to have been harshly affected by.
Maybe the scariest part is feeling lost, not really knowing what grief entails or where it might take me if I try in earnest to get through it - or where it might leave me if I don't. As C.S. Lewis said, "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." But I read something helpful the other day: grief isn't something you should "get through." Its function in the mind and body is not to force you to cope or to forget the source of your pain - actually, it's an emotional response inspired by your need to remember. It is there to keep the memories alive. It's no wonder that people who try to fight it instead of cooperate with it often block out whole chunks of the timeline of their lives.
If to grieve is to remember, then gladly I will grieve.
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
- George Eliot
Writing this, I could immediately feel the urge to be less specific, or maybe not publish it at all... after all, who has any compassion to spare for someone working through a loss that most wouldn't even consider grief-worthy and is almost half a decade past? How can I show my face writing about such petty pain when others have lost so much more? I guess because I know that others HAVE lost so much more, and some less, but either way a tragic number of them are trying to bury their ghosts instead of meeting them, naming them, and giving them a chance to fulfill their purpose so they don't have to be the enemy anymore.
