Grief

I read June 17th on the screen and it hit with a distinct pang, like a birthdate of someone I once loved but no longer know. Maybe I dreamed it. Is it the summer solstice? Not yet.

When I got home, I googled the date. The Statue of Liberty was delivered to the New York Harbor, 1885. Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775. The Watergate Burglary, 1972.

I sat down to write about my ongoing grief with parallels to the ol’ freedom statue we hold dear, but by the time I wrote the first question mark, my personal association with the date arrived. 2000.

my first experience with grief

On June 17, 2000, Elvis Earl McCain died at 69 years old. He was my Pappy by choice: he and my Granny, Barbara, adopted my father and three other infants in quick succession. He stuck around when my dad didn’t and was the brightest male figure in my life long after his death, until I dated my now husband. When Pappy died and I was not-quite 12, I learned grief for the first time.

I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t know I was handling anything. Being a kid is like that. Hindsight, ya know? Five days later, I walked 3 miles with my best friend to the home of some goober I was obsessed with, landed my first kiss, and walked the same distance back. Within the next month I started getting high and drinking with boys (men?) old enough to drive cars with their treble low and bass up so high it felt like warfare was underway within my ribcage. Old enough to reserve a motel and make their best efforts to harm me, a child. The downhill was fervent and rapid. I didn’t see the connection.

grief is not limited to death

Loss comes in many forms: break up, divorce, incarceration, illness, emotional change, job loss, move, the end of any era. To grieve is to have loved, to feel a connection so deeply that its severance feels like carnage. To lose a loved person, identity, place, or dream you must learn how to live without it; strengthen the surrounding muscles to make up for the void left behind. Every day is an exercise: learning to lean on aides, regaining balance, catching yourself when you feel yourself slip.

does grief ever go away?

When I realized it was the quarter century anniversary of my grandfather’s death, I wept. I wish I had more of him in my life. I think often of Matt, one of my childhood best friends who died suddenly in a car accident when I was 18. My best friend in high school, Darrell, died last year. We hadn’t been in contact in years yet the news cut deep all the same.

Grief carries on in loss of other kinds as well. I have grieved the mother I wish I had through every milestone, during both my best and toughest times. When I struggle, weak enough to to lean on her despite the wobble I know she possesses, the rug is again ripped out from underneath. A few years pass and I fool myself again. She has used my struggles to gain and relish in attention for herself, at my detriment, at every turn. My therapist was the first person I witnessed to be aghast that someone with a preschooler undergoing chemotherapy would choose that time to go back to school, no summer breaks. Many times, she said my mother was dangerous. Maybe the grief gets too heavy and I suspend disbelief, experiment with the notion of reaching for the person that’s supposed to be there for me that never will.

new grief

The grief I have now is that for my oldest son. At 17, he is only two years away from the age I was when he was born. Fighting the shame of teen parenthood, adamant about loving better than I was loved, with a dash of competitive flair, I mothered like it was an Olympic sport. We always were so close.

Teen years are tough. Everyone knows a horror story, many have their own shame about the way they treated their parents.

Though I’ve willingly told any listening ear about his recent departure, I’ve told few the direct reasons why my son is no longer living at home with the family I built around him. I’ve woven anecdotes together for a narrative, but left the most glaring transgressions out. Some may walk away thinking the reasoning doesn’t add up.

It’s been my job to protect him for so long.

High school hit hard. “We only have four more years to give him all that he needs to go out in the world.” I’d say regularly. Then “three more years”. “Two.” And right about when we were gearing up to say “one more year,” there were none.

protest & despair

The process of grief is a wild ride of emotions, energy levels, and even hallucinations. John Bowlby narrows down these reactions to two categories: protest and despair. Acts of protest are refusals to accept the loss as fact, while despair is a lack of energy to carry on due to hopelessness that you will recover from the loss.

My experience corresponds with this notion. Energy levels have been zapped. I see his face wherever I go, seeking a grand part of my life that is now missing. I see kids his age driving, and it breaks my heart that I didn’t get that milestone of buying him a car because a year after taking him for his permit and buying driver’s ed, he still wouldn’t attend the classes. I grieve the milestones I missed out on that I was excited to award my own child. I grieve all that I wanted to give that was not accepted.

welcome to Holland

There’s an old essay about grieving our expectations while remaining grateful for the results we’ve received, originally written by a mother of a child with special needs.

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Welcome to Holland
Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this…

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things... about Holland.

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I am going to make the most of Holland. Making the most of things is what I do, what I have always done. Wooden shoes don’t seem comfortable, but I assume in due time they will rub in the same spots long enough to create the toughness I’ll need to wear those clogs with grace.

grief will not end

Just as Welcome to Holland’s author, Emily Perl Kingsley, shares, the pain does not go away. There will be the Italy visitors, proms–other things I can’t muster the strength to type out right now, tears forming in my eyes. The pain will not end.

Less than a month before our cross-country move, I lost my Granny, Barbara McCain. Elvis McCain’s wife. Her last day was silent, and I held her hand for hours awaiting her final breath. But the day before, she was coming in and out of consciousness. The many things she said on that night will stay with me forever, but most notable was a moment of awakening after a brief nap, seeing people she loved surrounding her in a hospital bed, various machines attached to her at all angles.

My Granny, 82 years old, the adoptive mother of four children, ten grandchildren and a few great grandchildren, looked wide-eyed at her surroundings and asked: “Am I having a baby?”

She made Holland look so damn good, we thought we were all in Italy all along.