When one of my friends lost her dad to a lingering cancer shortly after her own wedding, her newish husband later said to her something like, "okay, it's been a week, you should be over it by now."
If only.
Given that it's the height of insensitivity to tell people it's time to get over it at any time, there's a point where I'm sure others wish we would, and that's because people are, often, crazy when they're grieving. It may manifest itself in different ways, but we're not right in the head, entirely, and it can last a long time. Years, even. Some of us might never be quite right again. It might take a decade. We might be "over it" in a few months then freak out sometime down the road. No telling. Don't make the mistake of thinking we're fine though. My boss, who thinks she is family, also thinks that because I'm back to work I'm mentally there 100%. Not bleedin' likely. 75% on a good day, and I can't make myself care.
It's not that people who are grieving want to be crazy, we just are. There's not really any other way to react to having people you love disappear from your life, not matter how it happened, no matter how ready for it we think we were. It's just so wrong that your brain can't really wrap itself around the idea. One minute they're there, the next they're not. The result is that we're sometimes clinically depressed, insomniac, short tempered, or we can't stop crying, make inappropriate comments, lash out, drink too much. That's because, to state the obvious, it hurts, goddammit. Or sometimes it doesn't, and that's even weirder.
Me, I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my head right now. I'm hoping I won't do anything too incredibly stupid. I'm trying not to make any major decisions for at least a year, aside from the ones involving closing out the estate. Now that Mom and Dad are both gone, or as one person so kindly put it, now that I'm an orphan, there's the impulse to think the restraints are gone; I can be and do whoever and whatever I want. Get that tattoo. Find a guy online. Fly off to Iceland for the weekend. The big impulse I recently gave in to was to sign up for a class in letterpress at the Center for Book Arts. Woohoo. That's me, living dangerously.
When I first met the woman who's my current landlady, she'd recently lost a large chunk of her immediate family in an auto accident involving a semi tipping over. One nephew survived with numerous broken bones, another was in a coma for way longer than anybody, especially a little kid, should be before waking up not quite himself again. Both were orphaned. Even a couple of years later, when I first met her, it was obvious she was still in shock, still grieving, still trying to cope with the loss and massive changes in her life. Even without knowing what she was like before, I could see how tremendously detached and depressed she was, and no wonder. Now that I know her better and more time has passed, I'm amazed at what was underneath that. She's frighteningly smart, very funny, and deeply compassionate, and I'd have guessed none of that after that first dinner. She was a cipher, a blank wall shutting out the world. After a loss that sudden and shocking, she withdrew so far inside I wondered if she'd ever find her way back all right. That she did is a testimony to human resiliancy and her own determination.
There are days I'd like to do the same thing, if only for a little while. Sometimes I give in to it, usually when I haven't gotten any sleep. I go back to bed with a book, pull the covers up, and doze when I'm not immersed in someone else's problems. I keep telling myself I was ready for this, that it was a shock but not a surprise. Mom was 76 and in ill health, Dad was 86 and lonely as hell without her. I tell myself I'd expected her to go the way the rest of her family had: quickly, from a heart attack or a stroke, and when that happened, that I wasn't surprised. When she came out to visit me a couple of months before she died, I thought then she wouldn't last much longer. I was ready to lose her.
And I was, in the sense that I could let her go without having a the total nervous breakdown I would have had ten years ago, but that didn't make it easier, and it didn't make me miss her less, and it didn't make me any more sane than anyone else. I did my own deer-in-the-headlights act, I'm sure. I spent a lot of time staring at the tube with Dad, when we were walking zombie-like through the errands we had to do. Then I came back home to New York and started grieving in earnest.
I cried a lot, especially after talking to Dad, which I did every day. The weekends were unbearably long and lonely, though I couldn't bear to see anyone. Often it was a huge act of will to haul myself out of bed and not get back in it again. I had my long-postponed housewarming party in May, hoping that would ward it off, and if that wasn't an act of madness, I don't know what is. I invited everyone from work and all my friends, and people I wasn't actually speaking to (who came! And that was even weirder) then panicked and made way too much food. Afterwards, the world turned the grey of clinical depression around me. I first considered and then got recommendations and finally went back to therapy. I'd had one session with the new therapist when Dad died.
When Mom died, I thought Dad would do one of two things: he'd either make it through the first year somehow and then I'd have him around for another decade like his mother, who lived to be 94, gruxing around and complaining; or he'd give up some time during that first year and I'd lose both of them. Truthfully, I think I underestimated how lonely he was without Mom. He'd tell me he'd wake up talking to her all the time. But he was so damn healthy, right up to the last two weeks of his life, and then the only thing he complained about was some weakness in his legs, dizziness, and a little shortness of breath. He had a massive heart attack and never knew what hit him one night, almost eight months to day after Mom died.
Once again, I flew out to Michigan, and then something really strange happened: I quit feeling anything. Color came back to the world, but there was no emotion in it, either joy or sadness. My emotions had been amputated. I'm still waiting for them to come back, even as phantom limbs. The four weeks I was in Michigan clearing out the house and closing it up for the winter, I was fine. I slept hard, worked hard, and spent the evenings flippign through the channels to watch non-stop episodes of "CSI" and "Law and Order: SVU."
And the minute I hit New York again, I fell apart. The emotions are still on stand-by, but it's all coming out in physical ways now: I'm exhausted, short of breath, have chest pains, and have no stamina, which sounds like heart attack symptoms but is really the return of the costochondritis I thought I'd licked a year ago. My back is twisted like a pretzel and I'm carrying a lot of tension in my shoulders in a way I haven't in years. Stranger still, my hands are seizing up with what feels like arthritis. None of this was present when I was in Michigan, but it all appeared within 24 hours of coming back here. Psychosomatic symptoms anyone?
And you know, I'd rather have the emotional horror show instead. I know how to deal with that. This disconnection from myself is perplexing and scary and unfamiliar, and I don't know what to do about it. The only available emotions are anger and relief, and they're not enough. I'm in that space my landlady was in when I first met her, and I don't much care for it. It's a cold, damp, uncomfortable cave. Worse yet, there doesn't seem to be any end in sight.