On Grief, on Suffering
Once upon a time, I had a dad. I still have a dad, but he’s not in my life anymore. My dad had a special gift for suffering. He could string his hurt, anxiety, and paranoia along for years, spinning it into elaborate stories and using it for ammunition in any argument or seemingly harmless conversation. His suffering could explode at any moment. It was powerful, and it was righteous. Born of true trauma, it was never resolved and never properly grieved. So it became suffering.
As an adult, I got along fine for a while, but there came a time where I had to decide whether I would suffer from the legacy my dad left me, or properly grieve it and move forward. It was a quiet revolution within myself to end something I thought was in embedded in my DNA.
I know I’m not alone in this. Few of us know how to grieve, so we all suffer in some form or other. I don’t think I learned how to grieve until my Aunt Rosy was diagnosed with liver cancer. I came home from San Francisco for 10 days in December to care for her as she transitioned into hospice. It was painful and uncomfortable. She had no children of her own, but she was a mom to me and my sisters. I was sleepless and helpless as I tried to make her last days comfortable. She was frustrated and confused and oscillated between gratitude and irrational outbursts. I drained her lungs of fluid daily and helped her with her medication. I had never felt so tired and so heavy in my life. It was the first time I had experienced grief from a place of absolute love.
Rosy was still alive, but her old life and her future were not. She knew she was not well but no one spoke of death, and she decided not to reveal how sick she was until a month before her death. We should have known, but I think we didn’t want to know. Cancer sucks. The holidays have been very hard since her death and I always leave a little space to acknowledge it.
When I found myself sitting on a couch last December staring at the Christmas tree, and sulking heavily in the silence of that winter day, I realized my dad left me a lasting Christmas gift that I never bothered to acknowledge: a roadmap on how to live inside your hurt and never allow yourself to truly grieve. As I sat on the couch, missing my aunt and wondering if holidays would just be a big reminder of who wasn’t there from now on, I had to ask: “Do I choose to suffer, or do I choose to grieve?” Choosing grief allows it to make its journey into reckoning. So I shed some tears and took some deep breaths, and remembered that grief isn’t linear. It comes back around when it needs to, but it does not cling and leach like suffering. It cleanses.
Our life right now is reminding me to make the intentional choice to grieve this world, not suffer in it.