The Fifth Season of Grief
Friday the thirteenth, 2017, I get a phone call from my sister, who tells me my mother is gone. Gone. Dead. Died, and went to heaven. Soon to be pushing up daisies. I’m numb. It’s been less than six months since Jon did the deed. I flash back to that Monday, and our phone conversation. It was the only time I had told my two siblings that something was really wrong, and to go and get my mother (who from this point on will be called Momz—Mom-zee) to the doc. True to form they ignored me. They blew it off. She lived in pain all that week.
I just knew. I always know. It is part of my Enneagram Eight makeup.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of the color green. Green was my mother’s favorite color. After doing lots of reading, I’m starting to believe I’m getting a clear message from her: I’m here. Nine years out and I’m finally thinking of her. Mourning the dead happens when we can take in the information and sit with it. She’d be in her nineties now. Had she not had the heart attack on that Monday when I’d called for our normal chat, would she have lived longer?
I didn’t go to the service. Everyone said don’t come. I was still too shocked from Jon’s suicide to think it through. The heavens opened somehow, and my momz was placed into a blue casket. Had I been present, I’d have insisted on that color. Blue, lovely blue with colorful flowers. That thought took me back to my father’s death. My mother says we’ll do yellow and white flowers because those are the colors he could see with his colour blindness. I pipe up: “No! If he can really look down from heaven, he can now see all the colors.” And so, the momz did it right! And I got my two cents in over the color because, somehow, someone spoke for me.
I sit here with the blue sky, and the sun actually shining as I write this, and I think of my clients and the different types of grief they need to work through. I tell them that there isn’t a correct way to grieve. I tell them that the day my younger sister Joyce died, some of us went for pizza. The place where she died, Paradise, California—the actual spot—burned down. (See The Lost Bus on Apple TV.) That grief just hurt because I thought I’d get back there again and see that 76 gas station. I’d go up there and drive by, knowing that here was where she dropped dead in a phone booth. (It was the ’70s)
Grief is like a carefully built chain reaction of falling dominos. It creates designs that we may not expect. When we’re inside the process, we can’t see the creation or realize that, in sadness, something beautiful might spring up. We don’t see it because grief is not for wimps. The work of sifting through relationships might involve a purge involving an iceberg and a trip to your own battlement. This I learned somewhere in year three but couldn’t do it until much later in the process. If we explore our relationships effectively, they must be cleaned with powerful disinfectant. An honest look brings out the dirt of the process, and you shouldn’t go forward with a new relationship until you’ve worked through the past relationship. BUT, you say in protest there is nothing to look at, and I’m lonely and want someone new.
Here is why you clean out the old relationship: unfinished business. We all have it. The thing about looking at relationships after death that stops many from doing it is the old saying of not speaking ill of the dead. The problem with this is that in order to move forward in a healthy manner, the entire relationship needs to be sorted out.
I remember all those years ago, sitting here at my desk, looking out the window, and noticing the house across the way. The thought of holding my marriage up to the magnifying glass was a hard one, and yet, I knew that there were things I needed to address. Was I willing to do it? I had to look. And so it is with my older sister, my older brother, and my parents. We must mourn the good and the bad, because if we fail to look at it all, we cheat ourselves out of part of the process—just like the blue sky going overcast, and the sun disappearing behind the cloud cover. We must look and face our reality.
I now look at it all because, like the seasons of grief, I must encounter a new season that I’ve never thought of as a season: resolution. It is the calm after the storm. It is the time of life where we can open up our souls to the new journey of peaceful minds and hearts. The work of relationship cleansing has taken several years. Now the fallen dominos are displayed in a colorful new manner. My happy iceberg smiles at me, the castle battlement stands emptied, and I turn to face a sky that looked much like the day Jon took his own life. And I think to myself: I can deal with this sky.
