Mock me for having 10,000+ emails in my inbox all the time if you want, but I'm telling you you're missing out.
I was searching for something unrelated and found the sweetest email from my big brother while he was in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu to his terrified little sister who had recently graduated college and was feeling lost. I turned to a book on Buddhism he'd given me before he left ("lent", "gave"...what is the difference, really?), something I keep telling myself I'm going to do again any day now and haven't yet. There was a lot and it was all great but my favorite passage was this one:
"We get so wrapped up in our delusions, desires, attachments, plans, fears, expectations, etc. that we forget to actually live our life. Yes, we need to do things like plan and save for retirement. We don't, however, need to save every penny we can so that our life sucks today but will be full of comforts in 20 years. What if you get hit by a bus in 19? The practice is about finding the balance of living like you'll die tomorrow and planning like you'll live forever. Of course you need to make plans, improve yourself, build relationships, get an education, and save for the future. You also need to live your life. There is so much in our experience every day that we ignore. So much beauty we miss when we are stuck in our heads. I will find myself striding down the road to Melsisi, thinking about my lesson for the day or what I'm going to eat for dinner, or what witty comeback I should have made hours earlier. Then something will catch my attention and I'll realize that I've been completely ignoring this beautiful place in which I live."
It's good advice. Advice I've heard from everyone, advice that is easy to think about and (at least in my case) almost impossible to follow. But it felt so good, hearing it from him. Hearing that your self is just a story that you cling to even though it's always changing and that "Suffering is caused by our desire for the world to be other than as it is."
My last post is an example of me 100% rebelling against all of this advice. Dwelling on the story that we weren't where we wanted to be as siblings and now we don't get to get there. Clinging to the idea that he isn't really dead, that it's my job to save him and also everyone. I am not good at following this advice no matter how many times I hear it or who I hear it from. I will not get better at it just because I read the words he wrote to me five years ago.
But just for a minute, while I was reading them, I got to feel pure, unattached grief without shame or blame or clinging or terror or anxiety. Just love with no place to go.
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Friday, June 16, 2017
Grief is a Form of Love but Maybe Also a Form of Insanity
I've been having a lot of trouble with tenses lately. When I talk about Jason do I have to use past-tense? I hate it and sometimes refuse. I still say "I love Jason" because that is firmly in the present and doesn't stop, but I also sometimes say things like "Jason once told me that he thinks..." which is past and present at the same time. When I refer to what is now just Gaea's house I find myself unable not to say "they're fixing it up".
I am in this very weird stage of denial, and have been for a while, where I know and believe that Jason died but do not believe that he is dead. This can't possibly be forever. No way. A thing happened and it was terrible and it is terrible still but like, nothing this bad could be true forever. Even Trump has term limits. It cannot keep being this way indefinitely. I find myself thinking about things I wish I could do with my brother, like taking him out to my field site the way I took my mom this week, as things I will do with him, you know, when this whole death thing is over.
Usually I feel like it is my job to make it stop. Like, if I could go back and change some of the things we said to each other in the months before he died. If I could take back some of the words and some of the feelings it could end this extended Scrooge scenario where I'm supposed to learn some lessons and fix how I act and then go back and avert the Darkest Timeline. Or like maybe I can't go back but if I treat everyone in my life perfectly now and make them all feel good all the time and be a better more open person then this whole "death" thing will end and I get my brother back.
I can't tell if this is normal grief or me going insane. Maybe feeling like you're going insane is a part of normal grief. Or "normal" grief for someone who also has unresolved mental disorders.
I suppose it is interesting and also pertinent that Christians and people of many other religions do think that they have to be very very good the rest of their lives to see their loved ones in the next life. I get why that is comforting. If I believed in that kind of afterlife I would throw myself into volunteering and do everything I could to make sure I got to see my brother again. It would be nice to have a concrete thing I could do to work towards it.
But I don't. I'm not Christian. I'm not religious. I don't believe that when I die I'll meet Jason on a cloud and we'll wear Birkenstocks and fly around. I don't know precisely what I believe but it's not that and that's a different blog post.
Instead I feel stuck. I feel helpless. Call me a classic younger sibling but I feel like there must be something I can do to get what I want, to get my brother back. I don't want to heal. I don't want to move on. I don't want to stop obsessing over what I could have/should have/done/said/if only...because that's giving up on the idea that I can fix it. That I can get to the Underworld level and drag him back like a video game. If I start to heal I might start to forget him. If I start to move forward I might leave him behind. Assuming I live five more years I'll be older than my older brother. That's unacceptable. I refuse to do that. I don't want to wallow for the rest of my life, either, but there has to, HAS TO be something productive I can do for Jason, for my parents, for Gaea, for his friends, for my friends and family, for anyone else who is hurting. I need to make it up to him, make it up to them. But how could I?
Did you know that the more often you remember things the less accurately you remember them? Because every time you call up the memory small things change and then you call up the slightly changed memory and it slightly changes again and again and so on. I want to remember everything. I want to build a perfect memory castle in my mind, but the more I try the more likely the memories are to slip.
Then there's the whole part where we are siblings. We fought. A lot. Mostly when we were kids, but also more recently. We've been arguing lately. I was still feeling pretty freshly hurt on April 30th. I was only feeling hurt because I love him so incredibly much, but still, I was hurt and angry. Do those feelings no longer count? Sometimes we didn't talk for long periods of time. Not that big of a deal when you're going to have each other for the next fifty years at least. How do I stop beating myself up for not calling him monthly or weekly or daily knowing what I know now? Do I focus on remembering the things I wish were different just as much as the good times?
When I was at my grandfather's funeral in Virginia I had a dream that Jason was there with me only it wasn't an idealized vision of sibling love, it was what would actually probably happen which is that there would be some awkward silences. We would argue about something and I would feel like he wasn't listening to me fully and he would not understand why I wouldn't just let it go. Do I let him become a more perfect but less interesting person in my head? Is that kind or a disservice and to whom?
Shouldn't I wallow and feel terrible all the time? After all, there is no good reason why he should have died and I shouldn't. It probably should have been me. Shouldn't I never ever feel better? But also, do I now owe how I live my life in part to my brother? Should I be happy sparkly rainbows all the time? How can I learn to take up more space in other peoples' lives when I know that A) I am a shambling wreck right now and hurting the people I love, especially because I'm not even ready to try to do anything but grieve and B) by loving other humans I am opening myself up to the possibility of another beloved life that might just be lost too soon.
Is there a way to grieve healthily? If you grieve healthily does it mean you didn't really love the person who died? Is worrying about how I'm grieving super self-involved? Should this whole blog post be about other people and not about how I feel? Is it okay for me to decide it's okay for me to feel okay sometimes?
All this, to say: I've got therapy on Monday.
I am in this very weird stage of denial, and have been for a while, where I know and believe that Jason died but do not believe that he is dead. This can't possibly be forever. No way. A thing happened and it was terrible and it is terrible still but like, nothing this bad could be true forever. Even Trump has term limits. It cannot keep being this way indefinitely. I find myself thinking about things I wish I could do with my brother, like taking him out to my field site the way I took my mom this week, as things I will do with him, you know, when this whole death thing is over.
Usually I feel like it is my job to make it stop. Like, if I could go back and change some of the things we said to each other in the months before he died. If I could take back some of the words and some of the feelings it could end this extended Scrooge scenario where I'm supposed to learn some lessons and fix how I act and then go back and avert the Darkest Timeline. Or like maybe I can't go back but if I treat everyone in my life perfectly now and make them all feel good all the time and be a better more open person then this whole "death" thing will end and I get my brother back.
I can't tell if this is normal grief or me going insane. Maybe feeling like you're going insane is a part of normal grief. Or "normal" grief for someone who also has unresolved mental disorders.
I suppose it is interesting and also pertinent that Christians and people of many other religions do think that they have to be very very good the rest of their lives to see their loved ones in the next life. I get why that is comforting. If I believed in that kind of afterlife I would throw myself into volunteering and do everything I could to make sure I got to see my brother again. It would be nice to have a concrete thing I could do to work towards it.
But I don't. I'm not Christian. I'm not religious. I don't believe that when I die I'll meet Jason on a cloud and we'll wear Birkenstocks and fly around. I don't know precisely what I believe but it's not that and that's a different blog post.
Instead I feel stuck. I feel helpless. Call me a classic younger sibling but I feel like there must be something I can do to get what I want, to get my brother back. I don't want to heal. I don't want to move on. I don't want to stop obsessing over what I could have/should have/done/said/if only...because that's giving up on the idea that I can fix it. That I can get to the Underworld level and drag him back like a video game. If I start to heal I might start to forget him. If I start to move forward I might leave him behind. Assuming I live five more years I'll be older than my older brother. That's unacceptable. I refuse to do that. I don't want to wallow for the rest of my life, either, but there has to, HAS TO be something productive I can do for Jason, for my parents, for Gaea, for his friends, for my friends and family, for anyone else who is hurting. I need to make it up to him, make it up to them. But how could I?
Did you know that the more often you remember things the less accurately you remember them? Because every time you call up the memory small things change and then you call up the slightly changed memory and it slightly changes again and again and so on. I want to remember everything. I want to build a perfect memory castle in my mind, but the more I try the more likely the memories are to slip.
Then there's the whole part where we are siblings. We fought. A lot. Mostly when we were kids, but also more recently. We've been arguing lately. I was still feeling pretty freshly hurt on April 30th. I was only feeling hurt because I love him so incredibly much, but still, I was hurt and angry. Do those feelings no longer count? Sometimes we didn't talk for long periods of time. Not that big of a deal when you're going to have each other for the next fifty years at least. How do I stop beating myself up for not calling him monthly or weekly or daily knowing what I know now? Do I focus on remembering the things I wish were different just as much as the good times?
When I was at my grandfather's funeral in Virginia I had a dream that Jason was there with me only it wasn't an idealized vision of sibling love, it was what would actually probably happen which is that there would be some awkward silences. We would argue about something and I would feel like he wasn't listening to me fully and he would not understand why I wouldn't just let it go. Do I let him become a more perfect but less interesting person in my head? Is that kind or a disservice and to whom?
Shouldn't I wallow and feel terrible all the time? After all, there is no good reason why he should have died and I shouldn't. It probably should have been me. Shouldn't I never ever feel better? But also, do I now owe how I live my life in part to my brother? Should I be happy sparkly rainbows all the time? How can I learn to take up more space in other peoples' lives when I know that A) I am a shambling wreck right now and hurting the people I love, especially because I'm not even ready to try to do anything but grieve and B) by loving other humans I am opening myself up to the possibility of another beloved life that might just be lost too soon.
Is there a way to grieve healthily? If you grieve healthily does it mean you didn't really love the person who died? Is worrying about how I'm grieving super self-involved? Should this whole blog post be about other people and not about how I feel? Is it okay for me to decide it's okay for me to feel okay sometimes?
All this, to say: I've got therapy on Monday.
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