Complicated Grief
Or just another word for messy.
[Originally published on September 28, 2020]
I commend Kayla for her beautiful and eloquent piece last week about the anniversary of her mother’s passing. It was heartfelt and raw and I really appreciated her sharing those words with us. When you experience grief, it is so all-consuming. No matter how many years pass, the pain never dulls. You’re always grateful for the time you had with them, but it’s hard to face the grief that comes with loss.
Today is the second anniversary of my own loss. My grief is what they like to call “complicated”. In the first few months after a loss, normal grief looks like intense sorrow, pain, and rumination over the loss of your loved one, focus on little else but your loved one’s death, extreme focus on reminders of the loved one, or excessive avoidance of reminders, and/or intense and persistent longing or pining for the deceased. It’s important to remember that everyone’s grief looks different, but these are common grief symptoms. “Normal” grief symptoms begin to fade over time, but “complicated” grief happens when the symptoms linger or get worse, preventing you from healing.
My grief is something I still grapple with daily and it’s hard to put into words. When someone like a parent or a spouse or a sibling dies, there are so many resources and support groups there to help you and guide you. People understand why you are sad and it’s socially acceptable for you to grieve. For me, it is not the same. My grief is confusing and messy because the person who died wasn’t a parent or spouse or sibling. He wasn’t my boyfriend and I’m not even sure he was a friend, but I really really loved him. Like a lot. So much so that sometimes I am afraid that that was it for me. When your relationship with the deceased is so confusing and messy that you don’t understand it yourself, it is hard to expect other people to understand it. It’s isolating.
What’s even harder than just the simple loss of someone I cared about so deeply is the fact that I don’t even have a reason why. He just went to sleep a seemingly healthy 31-year-old and never woke up. My understanding as to why no autopsy was done was for religious reasons, which I can understand and respect. Perhaps that is why mourning has been so extended for me. I’ll never truly know or understand why he died.
Afterward, I lost myself. Our relationship was so private that I didn’t have anyone to turn to talk about it. Not that it mattered, I didn’t know how to anyway. I never expected to experience this kind of loss in my life let alone in my twenties. No matter how hard I looked there was no one whose grief looked like mine. The support groups I looked into were only for family and significant others. Worse than that I had my therapist quit her practice one week after his passing and I was left with no one to help me.
I’ve said in past pieces that my memory of the time preceding his death is blurry for me. There are a couple of things I remember like the funeral, a work conference, and my acceptance into my Birthright trip, but everything else is just blank. I remember being so sad I couldn’t breathe. I remember the quiet. It was so quiet. I couldn’t bear to watch TV or listen to music. It made my pain worse. Just one glance between characters or a touch too real of a bridge could send me spiraling. That’s still true, but I’m not quite so sensitive. I know my limits; which songs to avoid and when a show might be too raw for me. I had to stop watching This Is Us and still haven’t seen Modern Romance.
I have never been to his gravesite and that is something that weighs heavily on me. I am not sure what I will get out of going there, but it feels incomplete that I haven’t. It’s inaccessible by public transit and is too far to take an Uber. I had a poor experience with car rental and am hesitant to do it again (plus I probably won’t be in a good headspace to be driving anyway). My one option is to have someone with a car drive me, but that’s hard to come by in New York. The lovely Aimée was going to drive me today on this anniversary, but the cemetery is closed in observance of Yom Kippur. This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted to visit his grave. I like to think that my plans keep falling through because I might not be ready to see it. Maybe it’s a higher power trying to protect me, or even Sam saying it isn’t time yet. Whatever the reason I have to believe it’s for the best.
Grief has a funny way of reinventing the past. Sitting in my bed writing this makes me see Sam through rose-colored glasses, but the reality is that our relationship was hard and sad a lot more often than it was good. We were never in the same place at the same time. We were never ready for each other at the same time. I know he cared for me, maybe even loved me, but it wasn’t meant to be. Dead or alive, the thought that it wasn’t meant to be is a harder pill to swallow than the loss.
