I Can Carry Both

Christmas, 2016. Three stockings filled.

I was just talking to a friend about how strange it is to walk around in the world looking normal and functioning, while carrying grief so heavy it sometimes makes it hard to breathe. It’s not a bad thing to be upright, I suppose. But it does feel unnatural and strange to be utterly steamrolled by the loss of my son, while also capable of making respectable small talk like I’m not quietly dying inside.

Yesterday I went into Barnes & Noble to buy my daughter a book and spotted a perfect stocking stuffer in the checkout line. I grabbed three absentmindedly before putting one back, the first time I’ve had to grab two instead of three. This hit me in a way that should not have surprised me, but somehow still did. He would have liked what I picked out. And of course that sent my brain into a downward spiral of doom: Do I still put up his stocking? Of course I should put up his stocking, I’ll never stop putting up his stocking. Are we still filling stockings this year? Maybe I will just fill the stockings for the girls to make it less weird. I wish I had known last year was his last Christmas. Actually, that’s completely irrational. I silently commanded this inner monologue to get out of my brain, and it did not work. It tumbled around for several hours.

But this is what grief does. It holds you hostage in the middle of mundane errands while no one around you has any idea of the turmoil inside. I have blurted out my stream of conscious thoughts about death to unsuspecting strangers enough to know that it is usually not worth the admission of what I am wrestling with. So instead of oversharing that that my son died and it is weird to buy two and the thought of Christmas is making me sad, I chatted with the cashier while feeling like I was breaking out in stress-hives over the small stocking stuffers I almost put back, before reminding myself, sternly, that my daughters are still alive. They deserve good things, too. I bought them. Just two.

In the past six weeks, so many people have mentioned, thoughtfully, that they can’t imagine what it feels like to lose a child. And the truth is, you don’t want to imagine it. You already know, instinctively, that it’s worse than you can picture. And it is. It is every bit that horrible. It has happened to me, and even I can’t imagine it, if that makes any sense? It feels like something beyond the limits of a human mind, even when you’re actively walking through it.

Sometimes I feel like Wile E. Coyote in Looney Tunes, shot through the stomach with an Acme cannon, walking around with a perfect, gaping hole blasted right through my center. Not bleeding out. Not collapsing. Just… carrying on because apparently the coyote still has tasks on his agenda that day.

That’s me, this week. Injured cartoon coyote. Cannon hole. Agenda.

Some afternoons I make it all the way until evening before I collapse face down on the couch, so exhausted by grief that I forget to even turn my head to breathe. Sloane will poke me and tell me it makes her uncomfortable when I lie like that. But honestly? That’s exactly how I feel. Face-down. Flattened. Trying to remember which way is up.

I cannot speak for Brady in terms of what he would want from us in his absence these first few weeks, or for the rest of our time on earth without him. But I did know Brady and how he ticked and how what made him happy. I knew his soul. He was joy. He was light. He loved the holidays. He loved life. He loved with a devotion that shaped the architecture of our family. And I know with absolute certainty that it would not honor him in any way if I shriveled up and disappeared from my own life, wrapped up and ruined by my crushing grief when I have the hope of seeing him again to sustain me. I have two daughters who still need me. Two daughters who have waited with heroic patience on the sidelines while I tended to their brother’s complex needs for a decade.

So I do small things that keep me tethered to the living. This week, I volunteered in the school lunchroom, handing out French toast sticks and small syrup cups, first to middle school. Then a lunch break. Then to high school. I genuinely enjoyed it. I liked catching glimpses of my daughters’ secret lives. I liked meeting new people, and sitting next to a friend I don’t see often enough, eating lunch with new faces in a place I haven’t belonged to in years.

I bought myself a new Bible. I watched TBN with my 97-year-old adopted grandfather in his living room. I laid on my living-room floor in a patch of sunlight with my dogs asleep beside me by a cozy fire. I had coffee and muffins with friends, and was the last one to leave. I have not been the last to leave anything in a decade. I probably overstayed.

I wandered Barnes & Noble for an entire hour, thumbing through books, lingering in aisles, letting myself remember what it feels like to casually browse. I bought Mere Christianity.

I joined a peer grief support group. I can’t decide yet if it’s the right fit. In some ways, it’s deeply comforting to sit with other parents who are reeling from the loss of a child. In other ways, I’m not sure the grief trajectory fits mine exactly. Caring for a child with profound medical needs conditioned me to function through trauma after trauma, crisis after crisis, without falling apart. It produced a strange mix of endurance and stoicism that doesn’t always translate neatly into a traditional grief response. I decided to give it four sessions and see how I feel after that.

I think I’ve learned the most these past few weeks from spending time with a friend who also lost a child, her 4-year-old, many years ago. She carries years of wisdom I find myself borrowing from repeatedly, someone who has learned to live through her decades of grief, around it and within it. She still misses her desperately, and that helps me to know. At first it was hard to hear this: I won’t stop missing him; it doesn’t even lessen. But the realization was I wouldn’t want to. I will learn to live around the gaping void. I will learn to embrace my invisible cannon hole.

Meep Meep!

Sloane has four snails. They’re delicate little creatures, full of substantially more personality than I would have expected from a $3 aquarium pet. Of these, I have a favorite named Sweet Cheeks. He has this ritual where he climbs an impossible, bubbly path up to the filter at the top of the tank. Sweet Cheeks clamps on and lets the stream of water pound him, which is too strong for his tiny snail body, but he does not give up. He hangs on and hangs on, longer than you would expect, every single time, and then, when it becomes too much, he lets go. Just tucks himself into his shell and allows the current to carry him gently back to the bottom. No drama. No shame. Just full snail surrender, and rest, and when he has the strength again, he begins the whole climb again.

I see you, Sweet Cheeks, and I relate. The daily ascent. The getting pummeled. The holding on until the holding on becomes too much. And the letting go, not in defeat, but in release, trusting that I will find my way back up when I can.

If you see me out in the world, chatting, functioning, laughing, slinging French toast sticks, please don’t assume it’s easy or that I’m fine or have moved on in any way. I have not. It’s intention. It’s choosing to stand up and carry on when it would be much easier to stay face down on my couch, hair unbrushed, retainers still in, yesterday’s comfy pajamas still on. Looking okay doesn’t mean the grief is gone, or better. It means I’m learning, imperfectly and tenderly, to find my footing between the happiness that is still out there, and devastation I think I may never shake.

Joy and grief. I can carry both.

I miss you, buddy.