Month: July 2023

It is not the job of the bereaved to make you less uncomfortable

Grief is pain. It is messy. It is unpredictable. And grief is countless times harder to bear if we’re asked to hide it away.

Allow me to start with a definition. The etymology of “bereave” lays bare the brutality of loss itself.

bereave (v.) Middle English bireven, from Old English bereafian “to deprive of, take away by violence, seize, rob.” Since mid-17c., mostly in reference to life, hope, loved ones, and other immaterial possessions.

Anyone who finds themselves in this place has suffered violence of the spirit. But we don’t treat all deaths as equally traumatic.

I have found myself angry during the times when I felt that the people around me were asking me to cower in the shadows to spare them the discomfort of my pain. The times when someone went out of their way to ask me about how I was coping, but they only wanted a chipper answer of no more than two sentences and disapprovingly reacted when that is not what I gave them. The times when people avoided me (sometimes physically dodging like cartoon characters) because they could not handle the possibility of being met with my grief.

To be clear, whenever possible, I have opted to not put myself in a public or social circumstances when I am at my worst. I understand the importance of retreat at times while I ride out the upwelling. However, I have to go to work, because I can’t take months of leave, paid or unpaid. I have to attend certain events, because my future self will regret not engaging with the people I still have and care about. I have to walk out into the sunlight because she loved the sun. I wish it were a societal norm to wear a physical mark of mourning, because I want the world to subtly know that however I seem, however I act, there is a wound under the surface that hurts all the time.

And so I want to unequivocally state here, on this space on the internet I’ve carved, that it is not the job of the bereaved to make the rest of the world less uncomfortable. Grief is pain. It is messy. It is unpredictable. And grief is countless times harder to bear if we’re asked to hide it away. Grief is also the desire in one moment to not mention who we lost and in the next moment, a profound need to tell someone, anyone, about them. Telling stories of my sister still makes me cry, but if I can’t tell them, then no one knows her, and that’s worse.

The people who will sit through the discomfort of watching my eyes fill with tears as I try to finish a sentence before looking away to collect myself enough to speak, those are the people who have made each day more survivable.

I cannot worry about how you feel right now. You may feel as uncomfortable as you wish, and I apologize for that feeling I may cause. But if you’re up to it and willing to lean into the discomfort, that gift you give me is so much more valuable than you know.

[Poetry] This Pain

This pain is not like the others
Because this pain is mine

I sit with it
I feed it my regrets and rumination 
I wake up with it snuggled around my chest
It sits in the corner and watches my moments of joy

This pain knows me intimately 
and strikes when I’m at my most vulnerable
It reminds me every moment is fragile
And it makes me doubt my choices

It can reach my heart, my mind, my DNA itself 
Any place there are traces of you
It patiently bides its time
And whispers, “your sister is dead.”

Please forgive me when I cry,
It’s not you that brings the tears
It’s the pain⁠—it robs me of the ability to remember you in joy
For now, but not forever

I promise.

Some days are harder

It’s never clear which day will be a better day and which will be a sucker punch.

Some days you are about to work out and something reminds you of them and you cry for twenty minutes as you sit on the floor in your workout space.

Some days you’re having a normal conversation and one word sets you off and you excuse yourself from the table without explanation.

Some days you’re having a text message conversation that looks normal and cheerful from the other person’s side while you sob alone in bed with your phone.

Some days you’re sitting at work silently letting tears slide down your face while continuing your task. And your boss comes in to ask you a question and doesn’t understand why you’re crying when you say, “Sometimes this just happens now.”

Some days you’re late to everything, even though you were never like that before, because it’s too hard to will yourself to do the next task that will get you out the door.

Some days you feel like your body is going about your business while your mind is somewhere else entirely, or maybe doesn’t exist at all.

Today was one of those days.

I chose not to view my sister’s body

Death rituals are a way to honor those we lost, but they are also for the living. My sister would have done the same as I did, and I am comfortable knowing that.

We didn’t have a “proper” service for my sister. She didn’t particularly like large to-dos, and none of us were in a position to put on anything formal. Instead, it was just the family (her partner, his immediate family, our parents, and me) and a small subset of her closest friends⁠, “her people.”

I had told our parents ahead of time that I would not be looking at her. Years ago, at a funeral for one of our grandparents, she and I had talked about how creepy we personally found the whole business of viewings at funerals. I clung to that conversation as confirmation that she would have completely understood my decision. I allowed myself to not view her, dressed in the clothes her partner and I had picked out together after standing in her closet the day before, crying and holding each other.

I couldn’t look, because to look would have replaced the last time I had seen her⁠—months before when I was home for Christmas and had hugged her goodbye⁠—with this moment, and I couldn’t bear to do that.

I also understood that her partner needed to see her, because his last memory was of her body on the floor where he had attempted CPR. Where paramedics had also failed to bring her back. Where she had been declared dead. Where blood of as-of-yet still unexplained origin stained the carpet around her. He needed to see a more peaceful, final vision of the woman he was supposed to spend his life with.

I likewise knew why my parents wanted to see her. If they hadn’t, there would have been a part of them that doubted this was real at all. They needed to behold her final sleep so they could wrap their minds about this out-of-sequence event in life. They needed to say goodbye to their baby, who should have outlived them by decades.

The private viewing room was small, and I had to stand in a corner near the door not to look at her when the four of us⁠—parents, her partner, and I⁠—entered. I ended up standing with my back partially toward her to avoid looking inadvertantly.

Hearing their involuntary reactions when they first saw her was hard. Nothing prepares you for the sound of hearing your parents realize their worst fear came true. My dad’s quiet, simple, “I’m going to miss you so much” as he barely contained his sobs will be etched into my memory forever. It’s also heartbreaking hearing your sister’s partner apologize to her lifeless form despite there being absolutely nothing he could have changed. None of us knew what to do, and none of us wanted to leave. Because after we said goodbye, she would be cremated. Because this special collection of atoms that made up the woman we loved would never again exist, not like this.

As I went to cross the threshold of the door and leave, I turned and looked not at her but at the casket where she was. I wiggled my hands in the stupid way we had taken to waving goodbye for years and said my last farewell, using the nickname we used for each other. And my heart broke again as for the first time, I got no echo in response.

The first 39 hours after I knew

I didn’t know what to do after finding out my sister was dead. No one prepares you for how to navigate the complicated first hours of receiving life-altering terrible news.

8:08 AM Missed Call – Mom

8:09 AM Missed Call – Mom

8:10 AM Outgoing Call – Mom (6 minutes)

My Saturday morning started the same as any other. I was up prepping breakfast and deciding what order to tackle chores, a workout, and a social plan, my phone to the side. I didn’t hear it vibrate, twice. They were FaceTime video calls, too, which was weird. My parents never call via video without a text exchange first. I called back with some confusion but no sense of how much my life was about to change, in just 6 minutes.

I greeted my parents, both in frame, anxious looking. My mom asked if I was sitting down. I knew the news would be bad, but I couldn’t comprehend what it could be. Both of them were there in the video. I complied and sat down. With no preamble, she told me my sister’s partner had found her unresponsive in bed that morning and tried to do CPR but that my sister was dead.

I can remember her words verbatim, so I knew I heard them. But I didn’t feel them. I simply could not superimpose my reality with the words she said. It wasn’t surreal or an out-of-body experience. It was just like the part of my mind that ascribes real-world meaning to the things I’m told wasn’t clocked in for work yet. I stared at my phone, at my parents. I am pretty sure I asked, “what?” in a clearly rhetorical way.

And then the overthinking kicked in, big time. Why wasn’t I upset? I should be upset. I better respond upset. “Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Obscuring my face would help me hide that my reaction wasn’t appropriate. You should be sad. You should be crying. Why aren’t you responding the right way? I felt my face start to pinch in the way it does when you try not to cry. I felt tears well in my eyes. Was I forcing this crying? Or was some deep, subconscious part of me bringing up that well of despair I wasn’t consciously ready to confront yet?

My parents told me to get there as quickly as I could and that they were haphazardly loading the car. It would be a 5-hour drive for them. It would be a 18-hour international journey for me. We ended the phone call and I sat, stunned and lost.

Getting home was a logistical nightmare. It required me to notify multiple people at my workplace and then set a bunch of administrative tasks in motion. Within an hour, news had spread to people I didn’t want knowing. I got text messages and phone calls from people I didn’t have the mental capacity to handle. It took three hours before I had a plane ticket in hand, but the flight wasn’t until 24 hours after the first missed phone call.

I was left in my apartment to ponder, alone, the injustice of the universe. To berate myself for somehow still not being as sad as I was “supposed” to be. To do an absolutely terrible job of putting things in a suitcase in preparation for the long journey ahead. To will time time pass, since it refused to go for me in reverse.

I scrolled through her social media and dissolved into a blubbering mess. I screen shotted a bunch of content and worked myself into a tizzy over how little we had spoken in the last few months. I made my eyes and nose raw with the low-quality toilet paper I was using as tissue.

I only remember sporadic bursts of time from that Saturday. I didn’t eat. I could barely sleep when the time came. I drank tea and did a lot of mental spiraling.

All night I tossed and turned. Every time I woke up and looked at my phone to see the time, I wondered, “Is this when you died, sister?” We didn’t know anything, except that at 5:16 AM in her time zone, her partner found her.

I was afraid to fall asleep and somehow not wake up for my alarm, despite the fact I had set three separate alarms on two devices to ensure it was not possible to miss them. If one thing I could count on had failed, what was to stop the rest of the world from crumbling in on me also?

At 6:30 AM I got in my taxi to the airport. On the way out, the apartment building’s concierge said the very normal human greeting of, “Good morning, how are you?” I couldn’t contain myself and started crying as I choked out, “I’m not okay.” He looked concerned and worried, but I had to leave. I got in the taxi, sobbing.

I arrived at the airport, barely done crying for the moment. I ate something because that’s what I was supposed to do. I got a tea that was so hot I could not drink it for ages. And I focused as hard as I could on achieving the task at hand⁠—being in motion and getting home to my family.

It was three flights, two tight layovers, and I had to rush during both. I nearly lost my mind when people took their sweet time getting off the plane and couldn’t find where they put their roller bags. Some of us had places to be. Being “that person” on the plane⁠—the impatient passenger acting like a bit of an asshole and pushing ahead without waiting their turn⁠—has forever changed how I’ll think of those people moving forward. I know that I was in crisis and just needed to not be standing still.

At 10:49 PM local time, but 12:49 AM the next day to my body, I finally arrived. I had held it together the entire time, not crying since my taxi ride that morning, on another continent entirely. By the time I made it there, I was too tired to cry. But I fell gratefully into my sister’s partner’s arms as I collected my bag and went out to the car to meet up with my parents.

There was a lot to do, talk about, and feel, but not that night. I was running on three hours of sleep and needed⁠—desperately⁠—to not be conscious. We went to the home my sister and her partner had shared, the place I would be staying, with her partner. My parents hugged me many times before leaving to their own accommodation. I stood in the house, a place I had never been before that moment, and willed my brain to not think about all the things I could confront in the coming days.

I told you this story, in part, because there was something cathartic in it for me, to recount the steps of my old life fading from existence. But I also wanted you to know that in that first 39 hours, I judged myself for my reactions, I had long stretches of forming no memory of what I did, I cried and then did not cry for a long time, I was a menace to fellow travelers, and on and on.

If you were not okay and are now berating yourself for it ⁠— please don’t.

If you were okay and think that means you’re broken ⁠— please don’t.

When you receive life-altering news that sucker punches you out of nowhere, you’re entitled to whatever reaction you had. It was a valid response. You are not “doing it wrong.” You need yourself more than ever, so please be kind to yourself.