Author: althea

Sept. 20: I am relaxing this evening by reading a book called Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott.  She’s one of my favorite authors.  For moms out there, her book Operating Instructions really kept me laughing in the weeks after Andrew was born.  Anne’s lifelong friend Pammy died of breast cancer at age 37, and she has written some really poignant things about what her grief felt like.
In fact, I thought one of her chapters was so right-on that I excerpted it below.

Anne Lamott Traveling Mercies

Ladders

In May of 1992 I went to Ixtapa with Sam, who was then two and a half.  At the time, Pammy had been battling breast cancer for two years.  I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me.  Then in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement.  The grief was huge, monolithic.

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately.  But what I’ve discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.  San Francisco is a city in grief, we are a world in grief, and it is at once intolerable and a great opportunity.  I’m pretty sure that it is only buy experiencing  that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed – which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.  I began to learn when Sam and I went back to the same resort three months after Pammy’s death.
…
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan.  One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence. I was hoarse for the first six weeks after Pammy died and my romance ended, from shouting in the car and crying, and I had blisters on the palm of one hand from hitting the bed with my tennis racket, bellowing in pain and anger.
But on the first morning in Mexico, the lazy Susan stopped at feeling of homesickness, like when my parents sold the house where I grew up.

I woke before Sam and lay in my bed in the cool, white adobe room, filled with memories of my first day here the year before.  I remembered calling Pammy and my lover that first morning, how they gasped with pleasure to hear my voice.  I lay there thinking this time that I had made a dreadful mistake to return, that I was not ready to laugh or play or even relax, and I wondered whether or not God had yet another rabbit that he or she could pull out of the hat.  Then my Oedipal little son woke up and hopped over to my bed.  He patted my face for a while and said tenderly, “You’re a beautiful girl.”
…
On the third day in Mexico Tom told me that Jung, some time after his beloved wife died, said, “it cost me a great deal to regain my footing.  Now I am free to become who I truly am.”  And this is God’s own truth: the more often I cried in my room in Ixtapa and felt just generally wretched, the more often I started to have occasional moments of utter joy, of feeling aware of each moment shining for its own momentous sake.  I am no longer convinced that you’re supposed to get over the death of certain people, but little by little, pale and swollen around the eyes, I began to feel a sense of reception, that I was beginning to receive the fact of Pammy’s death, the finality.  I let it enter me.

I was terribly erratic: feeling so holy and serene some moments that I was sure I was going to end up dating the Dalai Lama.  Then the grief and craziness would hit again, and I would be in Broken Mind, back in the howl.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it, like a nicotine craving, I would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.
After a while it was like an inside shower, washing off some of the rust and calcification in my pipes.  It was like giving a dry garden a good watering. Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does.  Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit.  Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible.  You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession.  Martyrdom can’t be beat.  While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t for me, but I have found that a stack of magazine can be numbing and even mood altering.  But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you.  A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart.  But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion.  You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.