It looks like standing in the cereal aisle for four minutes.
Not the dramatic version. Not the version that has a score and a lighting design and the particular quality of collapse that looks, from the outside, like the appropriate response to loss. That version exists. I have been in that version. But grief is not only that version and the cultural emphasis on that version does a particular disservice to the people who are in the cereal aisle version, who are standing in front of the boxes and cannot decide which one and understand dimly that the inability to decide is not about cereal, is about something that has taken up residence in the ordinary and refuses to be located only in the dramatic.
It looks like driving past a restaurant and having to pull over.
Because you ate there. Because the eating there was unremarkable at the time and is now what the grief has chosen to attach itself to, the specific unremarkable meal in the specific restaurant with the specific quality of the conversation that was just conversation, just a Tuesday, just two people eating and talking, and the Tuesday is gone and the talking is changed and the grief lives in the restaurant now, and you did not know that until you drove past it.
It looks like being fine for three weeks and then not being fine on a random Wednesday.
The Wednesday has no reason. The Wednesday is not an anniversary or a trigger you can identify in retrospect and use to warn yourself next time. The Wednesday just arrives with the grief already in it and you spend the Wednesday in the grief and you go to bed and you wake up on Thursday and the Thursday is fine again. This is not progress and then regression. This is just how it works. The grief is not linear. The grief does not care about your schedule for it.
It looks like being grateful and sad simultaneously, which is not a contradiction, which is exactly what grief is when it comes alongside love, which is the only kind of grief that matters.
It looks like a life that is going well and also contains this. Both of those at the same time, the going well and the containing this, and the containing-this does not disqualify the going well and the going well does not mean the grief is finished, and you carry both of them, the joy and the sorrow, the gratitude and the grief, you carry them together in the same hands that are also making tea and driving to appointments and writing poems and standing in the cereal aisle unable to decide.
Both hands. Full. Still going.
