Like Breathing
In the early days, the grief-as-suffering was like a fresh punch in the gut, overwhelming my ability to cope and causing me to feel each painful breath.
That pain was his absence, and in that early confusion, it felt sacred. I was aware that my suffering would grow duller with time — and yet I also felt it would be a betrayal to forget the sharp pain of his absence. Would forgetting the pain mean forgetting the person? Was the suffering a way of remembering? The days were fluid, and I can’t really remember a sense of time passing in the early months. There wasn’t a waking moment where I wasn’t grieving.
It has been twenty-six months.
In that time, there have been many waking moments where I’m not grieving. It’s now pretty rare for me to feel incapacitating pain.
I’d like to explore whether or not that feels like a betrayal.
I think that remembering Jackson is like breathing: you can do it automatically, or you can do it attentively, but either way, you’re breathing.
We remember Jackson in a thousand little ways. When we look at Owen, we see the resemblance, and wonder how they’d get along. When we see other children, we wonder what Jackson would be doing at their age. When we see flowers, or spiders, or the ♥️ emoji, we remember him. When we catch ourselves with one of his facial expressions, we remember him. Every time I walk by Sunset Park, I think of him. Owen and I say good morning or goodnight to his urn. I’ve got pictures of Jackson on my desk, and Owen’s got a board book.
Those are the automatic remembrances, the idea of grief-as-loving-someone-who-is-gone, or the idea of grief-as-a-gentle-companion. This is automatic breathing. Whether or not we’re fully attentive to it, it’s happening in a hundred little moments throughout the week.
So, what does the attentive-breathing look like? It’s like practicing meditation — I can sit on the bench by our Jackson garden, watch a sunset from the park near our house, open Locket and watch some videos, or sit and read the board book with Owen.
These are decidedly not activities designed as self-flagellation, or attempts to bring back the sharp, shortness-of-breath, punch-to-the-gut pain of the early weeks. They are much calmer, quieter, warmer, softer.
We swear we’ll always feel the pain we feel right now, because to feel any less would be a betrayal — only to find that we grow stronger in our ability to cope, and the absence of pain is not the absence of love.
Grief has heightened our attentiveness to the fragility of life, others’ suffering, and the importance of being attentive and thoughtful. In some ways, our grief shows up in the attention we bring to other activities in our lives.
Whether we take the time to be aware of it, we keep breathing. We might wish we’d practice meditation, but we don’t always make time. We can do better, but we can also forgive ourselves — and recognize that perhaps the automatic grieving is a sign that he is always on our mind. There’s nothing to forgive.