Real Grief

I really hope that at this time next year I can look back on this summer and just think, Wow, I was really a total mess. What a hard time I was having. I don’t know how I got through that, thank the Lord I won’t ever feel that shitty again.

I always felt like Sarah’s death was a scenario we were going to have to face some day and I worried about it. Max said he never did, that he thought Sarah would live a long, long time. Even though I thought Sarah would die before us, I pictured her dying when she was around her mid-thirties. I would be in my seventies. For some reason that seemed right and appropriate to me, and I never pictured my grief about it either. I have no idea why. Maybe I just thought that it seemed like an appropriate life cycle for her and the right time in my own life to have her die. Like my seventies were the time to “clean house” or something.

I think I had the notion that death would be easier if it weren’t a surprise event, if Sarah had been ill for several days before dying and I got to say goodbye. But I always seem to cling to a notion that I wouldn’t be upset about — whatever the upset is — if the situation had just been carried out more sensitively somehow with more regard for my feelings. Clinging to that notion always seems to make me feel better for some reason. I don’t care that X Boyfriend broke up with me, but why did he have to be such a jerk about it?

I also seem to have the notion that the way I feel right now: upset, crazy, unreal, irritable, shitty, is somehow not “real grief.” Real grief is those very red eyes I saw on members of Crissy’s family at Crissy’s funeral. Crissy was a little girl Sarah was friends with, also disabled, who died when Sarah was ten. I attended her funeral and her family’s faces were so wracked with grief. I don’t think I cried at Sarah’s funeral, at all. I was very calm. I felt too unreal, as if I were playing a part in a play. I was hostess to a lot of people, and reading my carefully-written remarks about Sarah.

None of this is what I expected. I did not expect that when Sarah died, it would be so hard for me to feel centered in my life. To have things to feel good about. Things just don’t unfold the way they should in the universe for the purposes of maximum sensitivity.