Or, if you're anything like me, sometimes refusing to accept things as they are, and instead fighting tooth and nail to make them into something they're not.
No one gave me a manual of what this would look like. At best, several people told me it would probably take a few months to begin to move on even a little bit. But the five stages of grief do not begin to encapsulate something so profound as coming face to face with the reality that in a split second, everything can change. Anyone in your life, no matter how dear or how foreign, anyone, anything, in a moment can be gone. This is impermanence. We live around this truth all the time. Most simply, many of us refuse to think about how we will die. But we also hate to move. We also hate to lose our favorite sweater. We struggle to face the reality that everything around us is constantly changing and shifting.
And then something massive happens and we are faced with the hard truth, once again. Truly, all of us, any of us, could lose everything. And, in fact, some day, we all will.
A lot of pain comes from refusing this.
There is a kind of relief in simply acknowledging this profound impermanence, and agreeing to be bound by it.
But that kind of acceptance is an enormous process.
You do not wake up the day after a suicide and say "well, I guess that's just good old impermanence" and laugh and go about your day.
For me, there was shock, and anger, and numbness and depression, and then anxiety. A terrible kind of anxiety. The fear that the people I was closest to, the people I cared about the most, might just slip through my fingers one day. Not just one day. Today. In this moment. Any moment. I was paralyzed. I didn't sleep.
The worst of it is realizing that in fact, this is actually all true. These are not irrational fears. But they are a truth I have to learn to live with. As one friend said to me, every dog, even as a puppy, is just a bundle of heart-ache waiting to happen. He's had six dogs so far in his lifetime. I've only had two. But I know what he means.
Now, I sleep again. Some. I go to work. As the last person in my family to successfully go to her job, I felt relief that maybe things wouldn't be so awful-feeling forever. But as each phase of this process abates, a new one begins.
Instead of being unable to rest, I sleep. But with sleep comes nightmares. I wake up, covered in sweat, heart pounding. Sometimes I don't even know where I am. This is unsurprising considering that I've spent more time away from my apartment since moving to NC than I have spent in it. Of course I don't know where I am. It takes me a moment as I look around my room to remember I am at home. Whatever home means.
Bandit licks the salt off my skin. I can't decide if I think that's gross or not. And I wonder what he thinks of all the commotion. But he seems unfazed. His reality is unshaken. We are here. Now.
We are still here. Now.
Another friend told me that the funny thing about this is that everyone thinks it should be over after a week. But if someone became paralyzed, no one would say to them three weeks later "so are you over that now?" And yet, with death, we act as though once the funeral has passed, the problem, the loss, the lack, is somehow resolved. I can't even begin to describe how 2.5 months later, the unreality of all of this still catches me off guard. A brother is something you take for granted. I still remember holding him right after he was born, thinking he was my baby. I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, (while holding him) which caused my parents to intervene because they felt my two year old grasp of yo-yoing was probably not safe around a newborn. How can I still remember so many moments like that if he is also gone? How could he have been the person I went sledding with at the park every winter if now he is gone? Who is going to remember with me the hundreds of Saturdays of waking him up in his crib and then bunk bed so we could watch cartoons together? How could all of those moments be true and then this one is also?
I feel a lot of pressure to be OK. To not be anxious. To sleep through the night. As if each sign of sickness or of difficulty could only be resolved if I took better care of myself. Or if I just did the right thing. I struggle with the guilt of making other people uncomfortable, or making their lives harder, as I work through this. The weight of this is unnecessary. But I lug it around anyway.
Maybe it's all just normal.
Maybe I need to have nightmares for a while. Maybe my subconscious, which hasn't been allowed to work properly for some time needs to catch up. Maybe I'm supposed to stumble through the day kind of groggy.
Can I be OK with that?
What if we all responded as Bandit does? What if instead of trying to move forward or get better or be OK, we simply said "ah, salt!" and went about our day, just as content with this moment as with any other. Not because we give up and resign ourselves to something less than happiness, but because we accept all of it for what it is. There really is something stark about being centered, because when you are grounded and centered, you can see things for what they are. And what they are is not always easy or beautiful or a relief. But seeing them whole can bring a certain kind of peace too. Because I've never really found anything more painful than denying things for what they really are. Whether it is a pair of shoes a half-size too small or a man you're not really in love with, lying to yourself rarely brings peace.
So, perhaps this is the phase I am in. Maybe I will wake up most nights, covered in sweat, confused about where I am, spending my mornings trying to let go of the fear that gripped my body through the night. I think I can accept that. Not because I enjoy it. Not because I hope to live this way forever. But because I am here now. And this is what is with me. So me and these nightmares, we will spend this time together. Someday, they will probably stop. Until then, they are my companions.
Because we are still here. Right now.
And that's it. That's all I really have. This moment. Whatever it is. I can't cling to anything else. So I might as well just embrace what we have. The feel of my dog, nestled next to me. The heat of my blankets. The pounding in my chest. The unreality. The new day. The sun out. A tea kettle humming. The click of Bandit's leash before we walk. The smell of wet gravel. The sound of birds foraging for seeds in the underbrush. The coolness of the air on my skin. The taste of my steaming tea.
Because if this is all there is, then at the very least I want to be present for it. I want to feel the sadness and I want to feel the fear and I want to show up in my own life. No amount of numbness or avoidance will ever really hurt less than being here. Not in the long run. And no one else will ever get to live these hours for me. They are mine, only mine. And if I can have nothing else, I will at least have them.
Because we are still here. Right now.
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