One of the things I noticed as I moved through grieving was the idea of shame when it came to feeling celebratory for any life events. Grief, it seemed, was a zero sum game. There couldn't be any other emotions or you were somehow not "doing grief right." How could you ever celebrate anything or take pleasure in life when all you were supposed to feel was sorrow? How do you pick up the pieces of a broken life and learn to find peace within your self when your whole world has utterly changed? Stop! You can't take pleasure in an event or moment in your life, shouldn't you be sad? We create our own prisons and they hurt so much because at their root they are not genuine. We are chasing the specter of "should" rather than being authentic in our actions as they happen. Does enjoying a moment make the loss any less real? Of course not! The great thing about the dead is that they are consistent - they are dead, they don't put the guilt and emotional turmoil on us that we do to ourselves. Enjoying moments in life does not create distance from those we lost. I think that is where a lot of the fear comes from. We have no choice but to continue moving forward in time but we cling so hard to a single moment of that loss, that severed feeling and we create an extra burden by now grieving time itself as it moves past the loss of those you love. Do not add fuel to the fire, no one can fight time.
There is no easy solution. No quote or ritual that will change the reality of loss. I spent a lot of time writing and doing the rituals of grieving that are comforting but I would feel a deep betrayal when after all the candles had been lit, all the memorials were finished and the tears shed, my father was still gone. It's an impossible situation where we are driven to action and subconsciously we are used to action creating change. Death, is the only thing that is impervious to action. The only change we create is in ourselves, we have to put all the broken pieces of ourselves back together, only this time they don't fit in the same ways as they did before. There is no going back to our pre-loss selves. We don't just mourn the loss of a loved one, we mourn the loss of who we were and have to discover our new selves.
Birthday's, celebrations and significant life events are a particularly difficult time and while time does heal many things, there is never a way to lessen the blow of not having a parent, or any loved one, to be a part of milestones. I got engaged on January 2nd and amidst all the joy I was deeply conscious of the absence of my father. My wedding will not be until fall 2022, at which point it will have just been 4 years since his passing and no amount of memory displays with poems and candles will make up for not having him at my wedding. My father died a few months before my 30th birthday and I was racked with a sense of guilt since I had always feared loosing my father at an early age since I was born when he was already 54. I remember many times as a child and teenager having a deep panic and fear of his age. All I could think around birthdays was the hour glass sands are running out. It was always a race against the clock and as I have mentioned before, I began mourning his death long before he actually left this world and deeply resented the relentless consistency of time.
What I can say that I have learned is that there is no way to avoid the clock. There is nothing gained from imposing suffering on ourselves as a way to prove that we are sad. I think we can enjoy life's celebrations and still honor our grief journey. We have no choice but to live and as cliché as it sounds, our loved ones gain nothing from us contorting ourselves into a performative grieving and while I don't claim to be a medium, the dead do not need us to stop living. Our greatest tribute is to thrive. Our existence is their legacy. We inherit all the love they put into this world and we are responsible for it. Laughing, loving, enjoying are all extensions of those we lost. My father would never want me to not enjoy Thanksgiving or a perfect lazy summer day in the garden. I enjoy them as a way to enjoy my memories of him. We do not exist in stasis or in singularities. I think we can give ourselves permission to live fully, not create living but empty mausoleums dedicated to a memory of sorrow.
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