Chop Wood, Carry Water

If grief is a checklist then I am winning.

Counseling.

Support group.

Making myself leave the house at least once a day.

If grief is a sprint then I am losing.

The tears haven’t slowed.

The pain hasn’t subsided.

I feel further behind one week later, or is it two? An eternity, it seems.

If grief is a research paper then I am passing.

2% chance of happening.

Six weeks away from viability.

7% chance of happening again.

If grief is a personal journey then I am lost.

I return to work only to sob at my desk.

I attend a meeting only to run when the facilitator announces she is pregnant.

I feel more parental guilt in death than I ever experienced in life.

But grief is not those things.

If Hope is the thing with feathers, then Grief is the thing with claws.

It is binding, and smothering, and It doesn’t allow any release or reprieve unless it is ready to let you go.

Grief is not being able to remember if you ate today, or made your kids take a bath in the last week. It is clutching onto a single word, that you repeat in your head with the hopes it will work its way down to your heart.

Anomaly. Anomaly. Anomaly.

Grief is realizing that you will someday have to let the word go, just like you had to let her go. There is no way to prepare to say goodbye to a word, or a baby.

Grief is a half-knit scarf, four books you read the first page of, and nothing else to account for the last two weeks of your life. Do we have Christmas presents? Can the rest of the world really be celebrating holidays?

Grief is welcoming the beginning stages of being sick so the outside of your body can match the way your insides feel.

Grief is not being able to recognize the person you have become in grief, and not liking who you have discovered.

Grief is just not ready to let me go.