The Molecular Weight of Sorrow

How much does sorrow weigh? A lot. Does time help? Oh yes. And no.

I wrote the following one year, five months and 22 days after the death of my husband:

I wake up every day feeling like shit.

A pervasive sadness follows me like a hungry dog wanting food. But what do I give it? Seems like I’ve already given my whole life to this sadness, this longing, this emptiness. I’ve given my life to missing John.

Tears well up in my eyes. Again? Really? My thoughts are not helpful: Is this never ending? Is this forever? Why do I even bother to go on? No one can live feeling like this every damn day. No one. Why should I?

My heart literally aches for what I have lost and the significance of it. My eyes well up with tears and spill onto my cheeks.

All my hopes for the future seem stupid. All my plans seem fruitless.

What does anything matter if at the end of it --- all of it --- is loss, empty hands and an aching heart?

Some mornings you open your eyes and the very first conscious thought is one of alarm: What the hell is that on my chest?

Oh. That.

Just sorrow. The heaviness of sorrow.

How can something that you can't even see be so unbearably heavy.

That's not a question. It's a cold, flat out statement.

I don't know what the molecular weight of sorrow actually is but I bet it's somewhere between "a block of lead" and "your average auto-bus sardine-packed with Sumo wrestlers."

Shit.

Tears for breakfast again.

My toast is wet. Again.

Shit.

Where is the Weight Watchers for sorrow? 

"Congratulations, Therra. Your heart lost 17 lbs. of sorrow this week. Isn't that great everyone?"

*enthusiastic clapping as I take a victory lap to "Eye of the Tiger"*

Me: "Only 4,000 more pounds of sorrow to go!"

*the crowd goes wild*

That's a net-loss program I'd sign up for.

In the meantime there are mornings I have the soggiest toast in town.

The dogs wait for me to give up and just give it to them. They know the drill: Mom cries. We get toast.

Here ya go, you little sorrow scavengers. Here's your wet toast.

And that’s what grief is. Heavy, heaving tears and wet toast.

And today at the 7th anniversary of John’s passing:

I’m still here.

I don’t know how, but I am.

I think about you every day, John. I suppose I always will.

I spent much of five years after you left just trying to regain equilibrium and energy after the immersive exhaustion and medical mess we found ourselves in with your brain cancer. We had just bought a cottage with some in-need-of-care acreage only two months before you got ill. We had dogs. We had cats and chickens. We had careers. We had plans.

Cancer didn’t care about any of that.

Being left with all those animals to care for and all the bills on our little urban farm, along with a brother (who now had special needs) to look after didn’t lessen my exhaustion. It increased it.

It seems it took me forever to even learn to breathe again. Not that I wanted to.

It’s been a journey with many dark and painful days and nights. Yet I am — surprising to me — doing well. I somehow managed to traverse that tunnel of sorrow even though it immobilized me at times. Even as grief tore the flesh off my bones and left my somehow still-beating heart at the mercy of the world.

We live on a planet that is often unkind to the weak. It mocks, forgets or grinds down the helpless or vulnerable. You have to either toughen up, fix your game or perish.

I was too tired, too sad, to be tough, I had zero game and it’s only because of friends and family that I didn’t perish.

(John, I suspect you might have been looking after me, as well. Thank you hon. You always were good at that.)

In 2019 I sold our house and moved to the beach for a year. I didn’t want to deal with Atlanta’s noise, traffic, or memories any longer. As much as I loved that progressive Southern belle of a city, the place that gifted me so much over the decades, I wanted to wake up and smell the ocean for a while.

I wanted to feel warm sand under my bare feet. I wanted to see shrimping boats working their trade in the morning mist, hear seagulls hollering about food and pause on my daily walk to talk to strangers and their dogs.

That year by the water helped. A lot.

Every day the sun rose and set over a long horizon and the tides kept their schedule no matter what was going on in the human world. The eternal rhythm of the sea was, and is, a comfort to me.

Everyone’s grief journey is different.

All you can do, I finally learned, is keep going. However smoothly, however messily, however haltingly. Your life is not a commercial. It doesn’t wrap up in a neat package in 30 seconds.

Keep going. Get help. Cry. Be sad. Get mad. But keep going.

Eventually you will end up somewhere other than huddling under the covers hoping to disappear like smoke. Perhaps, like me, you’ll exit the darkest part of the tunnel dented, grateful and with a truckload of memories that soothe the soul, sometimes make you sob and often bring a smile.

Knowing that missing John will never completely end for me, not as long as I walk this earth, is something I have accepted. It’s just part of my story now.

I’ve sat with a lot of folks who have sustained some pretty severe loss.

They often ask, “Will I ever heal from this?”

Yes, I say, you will, in so many incredible, even unbelievable, ways.

But you’ll never be the same again.

Don’t expect to be the same again. You were handed a time of destruction and you will be handed a time of creation.

It’s not always comfortable but the weight of the sorrow builds emotional muscle over time. When you sustain hard loss and survive you become stronger at the broken places even as your scars become more sensitive.

You’re different person than when you first walked into that fire.

Grief is heavy. Sometimes it will turn on you. But it will also teach you and reach you in places inaccessible by any other emotion except love. Grief and love are twin flames of the fire that burns in the human heart.

Grief is the price of love, I’ve heard it said. It’s true. Grief is a wordless, harrowing terrible tribute to loss.

Don’t give up.

If I can do this, anyone can.

There were times in the past few years I was so frustrated and mad I think I subsisted on tea, nightmares and fury. Yet I refused to give up, embodying the wry humour in Leonard’s Cohen’s lyrics, “I’m stubborn as those garbage bags that time will not decay/I’m junk, but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet.”

My little wild bouquet was whatever value I might discover among the ashes of my former life that I might take with me and whatever energy I might still have to create, experience and love. Perhaps I still had something to offer the world. I wasn’t sure but I was sure I deserved to find out.

Grief, while in some ways endless, is not bottomless. It’s a hole you can and will rise out of. Yes, it’ll change you but if you leave this world unchanged by living in it then you haven’t really lived at all.

Keep the big three tucked in your griefcase: 1.) Allow yourself to fully mourn, no matter what that looks like to anyone else 2.) Seek help when you get stuck or feel like you’re drowning (this can be anything from professional help or support groups to time with a trusted friend) and finally 3.) Keep going.

We still have things to do, you and I. All the grieving folks do. Keep going.

I still feel some days like I woke up from a coma. A deep grief coma, one that lasted years.

But I’m still here.

I’m glad I am.

I’m glad you’re here too.

Keep holding up that little wild bouquet.