This last week was interesting. My church decided to sell 200 million dollars worth of relics to the Mormon Church. The Mormons like relics. Relics are about the past, and not about the future. I’m a forward thinker, and in the end, while there are some disturbing components, the sale is not a negative. Both churches won.
Relics and the past led me to think about my sister, who died when I was eighteen and heading off to go to college. She died one month before I had to be there to register and orient myself. It wasn’t good timing; it never is. Life and death do their own thing and do it on their own time. Births, for the most part, are not planned, and deaths tend to be inconvenient all the way around. It is all part of the nature of existence.
My mother woke up one morning and announced that Joyce’s room would not become a shrine. We got to work and decided that one of her friends would get the bedspread and matching curtains. I inventoried her clothes, taking the one dress I could wear. Joyce was big and bold in her style, and I took the one calmer red dress because I could pull that one off.
By the time I left for Idaho, the room was neutral. Eventually, the room served as a place for all of us when we returned home on breaks. We all could lay claim to that space. This has made me think about moving forward from loss and how we grieve. In the beginning, the tears are out of our control, and we want them to go away. It feels awful to cry when it doesn’t make sense to cry. It feels awful to get triggered all the time, and days turn into weeks, and then months. Grief sucks.
Eventually, the crazy tears go away. What the crazy is replaced with is tears that are calmer, and tears that we can identify for what they are. When Jon died, I decided to send his things to new homes. I kept tiny things of his that I liked. It was hard and needful to part with his things, and yet I knew that I needed to say goodbye to the things in our closet. I still had his side of the bed to smell and enjoy. That changed when I bought a new bed for myself. I was ready for the goodbye to the bed and the old room, and I was ready for the changes I would be making, from a milk chocolate brown to an ice blue! A very blue bed came in, and new colors flooded into the room. It was now a Gail space! Goodbye to the old and hello to the new. Still, there were tears.
Those tears! Will they ever not be present? I suspect that they will always return in unexpected ways. Now it is different, and I can identify the “why” around them. We move past the old in search of something new. We can’t get to the new without looking at the past. And so, we keep stuff that reminds us of the good in hopes of moving on. Sometimes we deceive ourselves into thinking that if we don’t look, we won’t cry. It never works that way.
Grief, and the work that we must do to resolve it, all has a nasty way of biting at us when we least expect it. It says, “Hello, remember me? I’m here to remind you to look at your past.” Then, if we are wise, we do. If we’re holding on to relics and making shrines, the chances of taking a truthful look are slim. We don’t cross the river Styx. I’ve mentioned before that it took me into my third year to really look at my relationship with Jon, and to deconstruct it. It needed to be done, and I came out stronger for having faced the ugly truths and the deep truths of love that lay beyond the surface of it all. He tried to make it a good thing despite the bipolar depression that plagued his life on a daily basis.
Relics lead us to truths that we need, and they trap us in the past that may not be useful. I choose paths that keep me in the present and guide me to a future that is not known. I’ve found this to be the best way to do the work of grief and loss. What I learned from unpacking the relationship was that the relationship was neither all good nor all bad, and that the various shades of colors were there for good reason. One of the trial notes for his decision of suicide was long. He said that he’d wanted to give me so much more but couldn’t. Reading that pierced my heart: a guy who woke to depression most every morning, feeling trapped because he couldn’t do what he really wanted to do, his truth laid out for me to see and hold. I had to look, and I had to be sad for the past.
Oh, my Jonnythan. I love you for your vulnerability, your strength, your brain that took us both to places on the outside of thought. As I write this in 2024, it seems like a different world. It was a world of sadness, a world that might have been, and a world that was what it was. It was sad, happy, joyful, and humorous. It was a world in which we were both helpful and supportive of each other, and at times not so much. It all stands for what is was. I can live with all of this. The looking back into the dark places no longer brings tears. I’ve moved on, and in this situation that is good. It feels good to breathe the air of progress. This new shore is a great place to get off the boat I’ve been on, and to go into the interior environs and poke around.