I was talking to Mary tonight about grief, noticing how it comes in waves. I suggested there are tides, too, which ebb and flow more slowly than the waves. As time moves forward (away from the central event which sets the waves and tides in motion), both the waves and tides settle down and may in time dissipate altogether. Their original magnitude and duration, and the time it takes them to dissipate, may vary depending on the kind of loss, and depending on the person experiencing the grief, but its wave forms look similar.
She told me she had seen the comparison (waves and tides) about grief before, so I guess others have had this thought.
It's weird to stand outside yourself and watch it happen. You think things like, "I'm a little more normal today. ... Oh, there, it's back again." And it's weird to notice that there are feelings of loss associated with the ebbing of those waves and tides.
It's supposed to get easier as time goes on, and it does. But it feels like that's mostly because you can't keep thinking about it in the same way for so long. It takes too much energy to continually hurt like that, and plus you have so much to distract you from it. Your brain just can't keep it up, so you let go, naturally.
But at the same time, you don't want to let go, and you feel bad for letting go. It’s too much of an admission that the person is really gone. (I don’t want to ever get over losing you.) And that feeling comes with its own waves and tides, which are also observable if you stand outside yourself and watch.
...which leads me back to a recurring thought I'd been having a lot of the time over the past few years.
Existence is weird.
Existence, and within existence, sentience, are in so many ways completely baffling. Sagan, I think, observed that the universe is made of stars, we are made of star stuff, and we are that part of the universe that contemplates itself.
How did star stuff give rise to this? How did the universe grow a navel to gaze at? And why does it feel so good sometimes and hurt so much other times? It’s so weird that this is happening at all, that THIS is what life is like.
When I think about death and suffering being such a big part of it, especially when I think of them in very personal terms, I am beyond baffled. I am overwhelmed. When I think about the opposite, though, all of the life and joy there is in the world, when I hold that in my head and in my heart, I am filled with awe and gratitude.
I don’t know why we must suffer through those darker things and their associated feelings, any more than I know why we are lucky enough to get experience those wonderful things and their feelings. But it seems that they go together, and are in fact intertwined to their very core.
A friend told me years ago that, even though he struggled with clinical depression, in his worst moments of anxiety and fear and hopelessness, he still valued those feelings, and clung to them, because those feelings meant he was alive. They are proof of existence. I know I exist, because I am feeling these feelings right now. These feelings are not all there is to life, but they are among the most interesting and meaningful parts of it, even at their worst.
So I am grateful I am feeling these feelings, whatever they may be, however long they may last, however they may change, because I feel indescribably lucky that I get to exist.
