| Credit: Gretchen Schmelzer |
There are times I just feel so lost without my Emily; I just want her to be here so badly, it takes me down. The intensity of this craving will shudder me senseless, often when I am not expecting it. These are early days still. I hope the random spontaneity of this longing will lessen. I am so grateful for this mourning house, to grieve and heal in. Don and I still need to be mostly removed from the world. We’re not quite ready to reenter yet, except in tentative, small meanderings with close friends and family and to do the diurnal, mundane tasks: shopping, banking, picking up and dropping off. This bungalow has been a blessing beyond words, keeping the world at bay so we can come to terms with this enormous tragedy.
The other day, I was well and truly taken down, beyond what I had experienced, except maybe in the early days of loss. It came on so heavily and so hard, that all I had were sounds coming from a seldom accessed vault of me. My grief could not be contained: not in this house, not on this street, not in this world. It bled out into the universe in fierce, sharp screams of pain. There were no words. I lay on the bed, alone in the house, untethered. There was no escape until my body became boneless.
I’ve found two times when I can access my Emily: when I am still and at peace and when I am on the other side of the stick: when I am in such turmoil that I have lost touch with the earthly realm and have succumbed utterly to the void. I am grateful for both, though I much prefer the peaceful path to my dear one.
On this day, after my heaving had subsided, I looked out through the window at the looming sky, so overcome with clouds and rain, and the marmalade daub of the setting sun. The clouds kept roiling relentlessly, never still, part of this universal imperative of a constantly shifting state. Nothing can remain static, nothing can ever stay the same. But such a sudden and shocking change had come upon our family and friends. How can there be any solidity when the universe is based on this principle? I cannot accept this kind of change, yet it has already happened. How do I make my peace with this? How?
Lately I’ve been thinking about vulnerability: how, since I have started writing, I have put it all on the line. I’ve always joked that I am an open book: I connect with people because I share my foibles, my hangups, the adventures of my life, including the dirty laundry. But this: this goes to the very heart of vulnerability – it goes to the molten core of me. That’s where my Emily sits. To share this, I need to dig deep, past many layers of what didn’t seem superficial, but now does.
Lying on that bed, looking at the silver-tinged clouds, I thought about how I needed to gather myself because Don would be coming home soon with our daughter Charlotte in tow to spend the weekend. We have been very conscious of not bringing her under with us, of helping her to navigate her own grief and our collective family grief, but not being too raw in front of her because she has enough to deal with and does not need to hold our sorrow as well.
As I huddled there, tangled in blankets, eyes bulbous and red, raspy breath and body noodle-limp, I knew there was no hiding my sadness from Charlotte. Don already knew that I was beyond repair for the day: he had seen the bubbly beginning of this meltdown, as I have witnessed many of his. This is the inner circle of pain that we have somehow both gifted and cursed one another with.
In this state of complete hopelessness, Emily came to me: It’s okay for Charlotte to know what you are going through, Mama. You don’t need to hide it.
“But she has enough going on,” I argued.
You can let her know that she doesn’t have to take it on, but it’s okay for her to see how much you and Daddy love me through this rawness. It helps her to also see the love you have for her. It helps her to know love at its deepest level. This is a gift.
‘How can it be? I just want to protect her.”
Protection is overrated. Just be vulnerable.
And there it was again. That word: the word that I had found action to accompany by sharing my journey through writing, by talking to Matt at the pool, where I had told him why I was there on that Thursday evening in January, because my daughter had ended her life.
“All this time, I could be writing and talking about grief just through my lens of losing you, but I am also talking about how you took your own life, Emily. I am going beyond that depth of grief, to one even deeper: the fact that you made an active choice. What can be more vulnerable than that?”
Emily’s words were spoken at a soul level, and that’s when I deeply understood what a privilege it was to have the ability to be vulnerable. It became clear to me that one of the things that Emily could not be was this: it was just too hard to share the depth of her pain, too hard to go to that place with others again once she had been in it herself, too hard to burden those she loved with what was ineffable to us, and what she probably could not even put words to.
Mama, your vulnerability is what will heal you. It is what will help to heal others.
That was the clear message. And my cry back was, “Why could it not heal you, Emily? Why couldn’t I help you?”
I couldn’t receive this gift, Mama. But others can. Please use it.
And so here I am, writing this, being vulnerable. Giving you my heart. Because I have this gift that Emily did not, and she wants me to share it.