5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! “
Luke 24:5-6 NIV
I feel like I’m dying.
Okay…wait…that’s dramatic. Let me try that again.
I recently told a coworker I did not want a going away party because it felt like I was attending my own funeral.
I am moving cross country in just over a month. I had to type and retype that sentence because I don’t like seeing it on the screen. I don’t like acknowledging it in real life. This is not a grand adventure, this is not a final frontier, this is not the wide open coast to coast road trip with the shelter dog riding shot gun and the wind in my hair and the sun always shining that moving here was. This move feels like a death march. Slow. Steady. One foot dragging at a time as if my resistance will make the powers that be aware that though they own my body, they will never take my soul. As if my hardened spirits will win over the audience watching all of these trials unfold over the silver screen. I am the heroine, I am the underdog, I am the one you root for until the bitter end.
But life isn’t a movie, now is it? I am not spitting in the face of my captor, I am writing kind, professional emails to detailers and squadron leaders, telling them how grateful we are for their time and attention in this matter. I am not digging a wall through the prison door with a spoon, I am meeting with property managers and discussing my final working days at my job. On the outside, I showcase a Can-Do attitude that rivals Rosie the Riviter.
But on the inside I feel like am dying.
Change is hard. But I have recently found that grief is harder. We talk about grief almost exclusively in the context of death. The death of a loved one, a family pet, a kinda close relative that snuck you those hard candies at family gatherings. We never really discuss the very true, very real, feelings of grief and mourning that come with a major life event. In my personal case, that is moving away from the truest home I have ever known back to my hometown. It almost seems silly. That I am grieving something that is not gone, mourning people that are not dead. It’s not as if my friends are not a phone call/text/marco polo away. But that is not how grief works.
I recently went on one of those runs where you feel like you are flying. The kind where for those 30 minutes, none of your problems can catch you. I don’t do music while I run. I have ADHD and the noteable changing of songs makes the run feel excruciatingly long. Instead, I do podcasts so I can immerse myself in a story. It holds my attention better. On this run I started a Huberman Lab episode on the science of grief. I have been looking for ways to attack this sadness from all sides, and this seemed interesting.
What I learned is that grief is a motivational state. It’s a state of craving, yearning. It’s like the deepest thirst you have ever felt. Your brain so so so badly wants to experience something and it cannot. So we grieve. The brain is a predictive machine, meaning we see patterns and we use the data from those patterns to make predictions. I predict that when I call my mom she will go “Hello, my daughter!” because she does that every time. If she were to instead simply say “hello” in a forlorn tone, I would be taken aback. Because that is NOT the response I predicted. In a stupid simple explanation (listen to the podcase episode it’s so good) our brain predicts a person, an animal, or an experience we feel a closeness to will be where we have always known them to be when we have always known them to be there. One of my best friends, who is also my manager, can be found most weekday mornings at our shared place of employment My brain knows this pattern and predicts it. So much so that she has gone on vacation and I have ordered her usual 16 oz Iced Americano with Cream and Light Ice out of habit, only to have no one to give it to. And there, in the doorway of our job, with an extra coffee in my hand, is when I usually miss her the most. Because she is not where she is supposed to be. It pulls at my heart, but I manage because I know the vacation will end and she will return.
But, imagine if she were dead?
Imagine if I was standing there with a coffee for a friend I know is never coming back?
That’s grief, y’all.
“Okay but Jess”, you are saying to your screen while deciding what coffee you’ll get tomorrow (do a 16oz iced vanilla chai with two shots of WHITE coffee), “you’re not dying. You’re just moving away for a bit.”
You are CORRECT! Though the argument could be made we are all dying, but that’s for a different blog post.
However, parts of my life are changing in irreparable ways. My other best friend’s 18 month old daughter will be closer to 4 years old when I return. The child I know now will no longer exist and I will not be around to watch that transition. I am mourning the version of her I see before me today.
The weekly dinner date I hold with my manager will no longer happen. My brain still predicts it. It will soon not occur. I am grieving that time we spend together.
Grief is not about death. Grief is about desire. A desire for something or someone that we will never have or know or see again the way we once did. And so, we can grieve the living just as we can grieve the dead. We can mourn the people, places, and circumstances we encouter because we know they will never again be this way. Ever.
But in the wake of that grief (see what I did there?), we open the possibilty for something new to grow. My older brother and I became closer while watching our Granddaddy die. I was away at college and my brother gave me daily, sometimes hourly, updates. In the end, we mourned together like only two grandchildren could have. And though the mourning process was long and hard and painful, I can appreciate what that pain gifted me. And now we navigate life without him together.
There is life in this grief, nestled amongst the dead. There is hope and promise and potential amongst the despair and perfidy and void. The dance is learning how to balance the two. For me, as is inline with the Year of the Bear, this has come in letting the dead things die and holding the living close to me. Letting the winter storm rage outside while I stay in my den with my family. I quit extracurricular obligations that I was marginally a part of, I dropped casual acquaintances whose relationships only drained me, I made alterations to my role at work to pave the way for others to carry the load. I have made the sole focus of my energy myself and those close to me.
I have found the living among the dead.
The Year of the Bear 