‘Typical’ Grief

Three Slices of Life’s Grief

It is not every day that you find someone who has a piece of your own life’s puzzle. I needed to have a follow-up conversation with Mary Lynn Garner (Substack: Ripening on the Vine) about grief. My podcast with her left me wanting more of her wisdom. https://www.afterhesaidcancer.com/p/called-to-caregiving

She mentioned to me that one of the fundamental pieces of her healing was a total surrender to the process. She didn’t fight the grief, try to drown it, question why it had come, or analyze the injustice of the events. I have done all these things and suffered as a result. But I am tiring of this quixotic fight. Surrender is looking more appealing every day.

I wanted to know what grief looks and feels like to her now. Perhaps it is because I have struggled with bringing the complexity of this emotion to the written page. At times, grief has seemed like an invisible force pulling me down into a dark, black lake. Out of the blue, my grief can appear after being triggered by something as trivial as a smell, a song, or an object. Yet, grief is not simply sorrow. Sometimes, it is all mixed up with love and joy. Grief is a devilishly hard thing to describe.

So, I posed the challenge of describing grief to Mary Lynn. I asked her to write about three recent moments that captured her grief and how these moments relate to the concept of ‘surrendering to grief’. Please enjoy her work below. (Trigger warning: reading her stories might make you want to move to a farm in Hawaii.)

From Mary Lynn Garner

Eight years ago, my wife of 24 years, with whom I lived and co-created a small farm on the lower flanks of a mountainside in Hawaii, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Four years ago, she died of the disease. Kristina asked me to explore with her in writing what is typical of grief and surrender from my vantage point in this journey. What follows are three vignettes from my true and actual experience, each a piece of “typical”.

ONE

It had been a long hard workday under the hot subtropical sun. As the mid-afternoon cloud cover moved mercifully in, I began to wind down and put the finishing touches on the day’s projects. Cleaning up, the last tools returned to the shed, I headed in for a much-needed shower. A few steps in that direction, I reversed course, feeling the urge to walk back out into the center of the orchards.

With energy spent and a flat rock for my seat, I was flooded by an overwhelming joy in the beauty that surrounded me.  The beauty that was brought forth between the Earth herself and the work of my own hands. I felt the sweet, sweet blur of boundaries between what was Earth and what was Me, having joined her so intimately all day.

Alone, there in the field, before I realized I was doing it, I spoke aloud your name and asked you, “Do you see how beautiful it has become? Can you see what I have made of our vision?” A familiar stabbing pain moved in the heart of me for a moment, but eased again almost immediately, as I felt you join me in my communal reverie and answer, “Yes. So, so beautiful!”

TWO

A saddening event happened last week. Somebody I invited to live and work on my farm with me for the past two years decided to move out in response to my needing to renegotiate the terms of our agreement. There was an element I felt as an unkindness involved in their response.

I had a parade of feelings about the experience itself for a few days. I worked my way through to accepting the situation, made my peace with the parties involved and myself in ways I felt good about, and began to prepare for the new reality before me.

Which is when grief hit me like a quiet, but undeniable, wrecking ball. It hit with a great thud: I will now be alone again. Somebody I care about and have made a living situation with will soon be completely gone. Paul Simon arose in my subconscious mind singing his Sounds of Silence, … “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.”

For an entire long day an unbidden tender, oh so tender, even physical, hurting in the center of my chest followed me everywhere I went. Several times at intervals the sadness overwhelmed, and tears flowed.

The four-year anniversary of her death is a month away, and I hadn’t had a day like this for a long time. But I remember there were many.

THREE

I had a difficult conversation to face with some dear ones. It was going to involve telling some important truths that had some potential to be misunderstood or to hurt and would require two things. My strong suit – a compassionate gentleness – and my weakest muscle – standing in honesty at the risk of causing pain to someone I love.

Anguishing over the task, my heart cried out, “Where ARE you?! This is where I need you! You would know just how to pull this off with grace. You would know just what to say to me at this moment to help me know I can do this. Where ARE you?!”  This cry came as a wrench in my solar plexus and traveled like a tsunami across my shores for a good half hour.

After which I rose from my chair, went instinctively to the pegs on the bathroom door where I lifted your old shirt off its hook, pulled it on over my head, and walked out of the house to go have my conversation.