Member-only story
People tell you a lot of things about grief — the phases, the stages, the array of emotions.
They tell you about the heart-stopping-grasp that grief has in your chest, a constricting band that hurts your heart and tightens your breathing. They tell you that each experience of grief is unique, that the absence of a life long companion hurts in a way that is different but not greater than the loss of the baby you never got to meet.
And they tell you that you while we do not alter when we alteration find, the gulf from that the ever fixed mark must coexist with the edge of doom just beyond our view and so close we can feel it coursing through our veins.
What people do not really tell you about is the loneliness, the walls that go up between your heart and the rest of the world through no real fault of your own. The ruptured relationship with the lost one requires other fortifications. About being lonesome.
My therapist asked me today how many social contacts I’ve had lately, both to assess my grieving process and my general social anxiety. I could think of five in two and a half weeks.
- the repairman for our microwave and dryer
- the two men who came to meet our foster kittens (they demurred adoption)
- the cashier at the bakery
