Grief Stones
A Life Without Riley.
They call it a “grief journey.” They say you have to “do your grief work.”
I’m doing this thing I’m calling “walking grief” okay, this two months after my (step)son Riley died. Okay being relative. I am back at work. We have had friends over, have met up with others for a glass of wine. I keep telling everyone, “I’m hanging in there,” and so I am. My bed doesn’t hold me after 7 or 8 AM, much as I wish I could sleep away my days, this week in particular. My cells want coffee and cheese. My feet need to feel the Earth. The photographer in me wants to see the evening post-solstice sun glowing on the leaves of the oak trees. My work project is momentum and velocity and I am thankful for its all-encompassing moving parts, the safe space of my engineering family, for the self-imposed demands of showing up. I still cry quiet tears at the first, “I’m sorry,” a close work friend offers along with a soft and soulful hug, my eyes well up behind my sunglasses as I ponder the onward pulsing of time from the stained seat of a stalled BART train. At home there can be hours weeping, Sundays especially. I am tender and alert. But I am of this world, and it of me.
My living boy gets his packed lunches and his spelling words drilled and we share little everydays and the best of best hugs, and at frequent times share favorite Riley memories or let each other know that for some unknowable reason the day was especially hard. “I’m sad, I’m crying” he says with Skype emoticons, followed by, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t still have fun.” Indeed, little man. I am hyper-aware that his journey through this tender and confusing time is being written, the chapter of his book that begins, “In the days and weeks and months after my brother died…” I want that chapter to be an account he writes from a place he remembers as being felt, held, honored, listened to, engaged, and loved. A place where he knew that we all know that his grief is special and important and so big. I want him to know that everyone who loves him was always doing the best they could, and that the best you can is a dynamic spectrum not a static pinnacle.
People who know that Riley died October 20th, who know of the decimating, traumatic ~252 ICU hours that led to his last breath, look into my eyes and I see our wretched tragedy reflected back me. Tear ducts swell and throat muscles tighten and collections of words tumble out. I seize myself, hoping against, “he’s in a better place,” and “these things happen for a reason.” Because no and fuck that. I see by the searching in their eyes that their minds are grappling with the unfathomable, their thoughts hitting the wall of conceptualization that protects their minds from projecting our horrid reality into their own beautiful lives. Know this: It is utterly unimaginable. It does not make sense. It will never make sense. It just is. It permanently, infinitely, horribly is.
My boy died. It’s a fact that paints my being and resides in the atomic structure of my bones. And though I know this skeletally, I still find myself wandering the house murmuring, “my son is dead. my son is really dead,” as though I must convince stray molecules of me which are refusing to believe what my bones already know. It is soul-shattering. Magnetic north no longer exists.
I’ve come to decide that the words and phrases broken-hearted, he left a hole in my heart, and heartache are a precious wordform gifted to us by ancestors. They are words that let me know that what I feel bodily and emotionally is true and real and ancient, that these feelings do reside in me physically while my mind grapples with the enormity of an Earth without Riley.
My body feels as if a crystalline mass exploded in my sternum, my heart is ground zero, I am gutted and charred, I am confused among the smoldering the ashes of me. Once there was a glowing part of me, joy and light pulsing from my heart, and now the jagged shards of that part of me are embedded inside me in places they do not belong. All of me hurts all of the time.
The other day, walking down Market toward UN Plaza, a woman dressed as an elf hollered at me, “Your beautiful orange aura matches your outfit! Glow, sister!” Is my aura orange? Do I even have an aura? Who ordains the meaning of different colored auras, should they exist and be seen by elflike inhabitants of San Francisco? Was my aura always orange, or before October was it shining a translucent ruby red, and now it is yellowed, clouded by my falling tears, soiled by my heartache, and so now I emit the Crayola shade of bittersweet. All the light in me is transformed; I am not who I was.
I am a list maker by nature. I catalogue and sort. I sift and record. There is The List of Things Riley Will Never Do, The List of Firsts Without Riley (e.g., first Christmas without), The List of Things That Riley Really Enjoyed and Really Made Him Riley.
The List of Things Riley Will Never Do.
The first is an endless list. Its making is triggered by the lingering objects that inhabit in our space, and the reality of a child’s death. It is an endless list for all of us of course, because of our finite time on this Earth, but the fact that I will not climb shivering to the highest peaks of Everest is in heaping measure less sad than the fact Riley will never have a college roommate. This particular list, I have decided, serves me no good. It is a view into the abyss, it is his story never written. In its saddest form it is an inventory of things simply too mundane to ever have made it onto a bucket list, the million adulting experiences we take for granted as we stumble from childhood and out from under our parent’s wings. Too, it is a true bucket list made by an 11 year old: all the MLB ballparks not visited, all the steps in the magical streets of Pompeii never taken, all the art never to flow from his heart and mind onto the canvas, college years never spent at RISD, the trip never taken to see Falling Water. The enormity of this list serves only to drag me down, anchor me to a desolate seafloor I cannot allow myself to inhabit. There I can’t breathe. There is no room on this journey for this list. It does not serve.
The List of Firsts Without Riley.
I tell myself the jarring pain of this second list will wane in its intensity, as First Time to His Favorite Brunch Place (Town) and First Time To Goetz Brothers trail behind us in time. Surely there are only so many big knives with these labels. By necessity, those special, cherished everyday things we shared will stitch back into the sorrowful fabric of our lives. There is still hummus to be eaten, Little League Opening Days to revel in, National Park stamps to ink into special passports. So long as the Earth turns with me upon it, the list will grow. It turns out it is also the list that contains the First Time Someone Asked Me How Many Kids I Have, the First Time I Mistakenly Said Our Dinner Party was Four, and the other barbs that catch me tender in this new world. As I will continue to have experiences, and Riley will not, this too is an endless list. It is populated with mileposts in an epic endurance run not of my choosing, it is a view of my own experiences. This is the list that marks the hours, days, weeks, months (and someday years) since my moppy blonde-haired, beautiful blue-eyed, charmingly nerdy, kind, curious, sarcastic, spectacular boy walked and talked. It is the distance between where I stand and October 9th, 2014. It’s the journey I am now on. This list is my story, the story of living a bereaved life.
The List of Things That Riley Really Enjoyed and Really Made Him Riley.
The last list is the list that honors Riley and tells of who he really was. It is a list that, though telling of a beautiful life, is crushingly finite. We fill it as best we can with our memories and shared stories, it’s the place where the tenuous grasp of the highlight reel of visual memory and the sound of his voice hopes to hold on. It is something like soothing to call upon this list, turning those special everyday moments over in my hands. They are favorite rocks, a comfort in my hand, and with them I am holding his memory nearest. Still, tears fall as I fry hashbrowns, sit down to beans and rice at the table set for 3, or guess as to Riley’s strident opinion of the Red Sox picking up Pablo. This list is full of memories too precious for checklist form, each is deserving a story in a book filled with sounds and smells and sights too perfect for adjectives, pages of feeling written into my heart. It is the list that I will seek to turn over in my mind, pressing the cherished pieces into my bones alongside the pain, sharing his glow and uniqueness, carrying Riley along with us on this long journey. This list shines light on this path I’m walking. Holding onto this list is how I will put the broken pieces of me back together.
I am all metaphor.
The bits of my light that exploded into me are solidifying, searing lava mixed with tears, now hardened, translucent obsidian. The acute becomes chronic, at least most of the time. One by one I take the sharp corners of the crystal shards into my little, shaking hand, feel raw edges and how they cut into me, begin to know the curves, rough textures, and ridges of each shattered piece of me. I now carry literal stones, each assigned a purpose, a mantra: protect my heart (rhodochrosite), give me balance (moss agate), hold only that part of my grief which serves me (apache tear obsidian). Over time, they say, you’ll rub the piercing edges smooth, the pieces will be my own and knowable. But they will still be broken pieces of me that I must carry. My burdened palms will be tender and invisibly scarred. These shattered bits will be the segments of a new mosaic form of me, pieced back together from the parts of me that once were my light, mortared with Riley’s forever shining green light. I won’t get over this. The load will not lighten, it will shift, I will get stronger. I will learn to carry it. My waking days leave me no other choice. I know there will be days where I can’t carry the weight, where I must sit on the side of the road, dump out my basket of shards and gems, immerse myself in their pain and truth, catalogue the beauty and the hurt, and try to simply hold what serves me as I try to absorb this thing I know is unfathomable and infinite.
