grieving, in advance

I've been preparing for grief for years. Getting ready for my youngest sister to leave this world after over four years of a terminal brain cancer diagnosis.  We're told it's any time now.

The truth is that when it does happen, I'll hear about it, most likely after the fact, because that's how things are. Maybe I'll stumble upon the news of her death via a random reading of the obituaries or on one of my semi-regular Googles of her name, which is how I found how she was pregnant with my niece all those years ago.  But probably it'll be a phone call from my parents.

Being estranged is its own kind of grief, I suppose.

But nothing, I imagine, like the "real thing," like the grief that attends the death of a loved one.  Truth: my sister and I are not particularly close, weren't close before her diagnosis, so it's been difficult to forge a closeness since.  And maybe that deathbed rapprochement only happens in fictionalized accounts of life where we get our wishes and things are teary and sweet.

Either way, I've been getting ready in the way that I know how, which is to read and study.  I picked up Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief and read maybe 15 pages.  I took a weekend-long class on home funerals, wanting to learn more about the physical process of dying, how to be helpful.  That was fascinating but also profoundly disappointing (I wanted more rigor, less rambling by the presenter, more facts, fewer self-aggrandizing anecdotes, but I digress.)

And then I remembered.  Oh yeah, this is like how I read all those books about childbirth and babies when I was pregnant, expecting that filling my head with the experience via words would somehow prepare me for how it would feel, how my life would change when The Kid was finally born. And all the while my mother shaking her head, muttering, "you just have NO idea."  That annoyed the hell out of me, but she was right, naturally.

There are things you can't know until you live them, things that books can give us a hint of, but that only direct intimate experience can really unlock for us.  Things precisely like childbirth.  Things precisely like death.

But still I prepare, because I have to do something.

It was in that context that I devoured Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives, this month's From Left to Write bookclub selection.  It was super-super helpful to read the stories of these 6 strangers who agreed to get together monthly over the course of a year, as they rebuilt their shattered lives following the loss of their partners.  

Sure, it's not the exact situation I'll face when my sister finally breathes her last, but it was helpful -- helpful to read about how very individual the experience of grief is, that there are no five stages really, that it's not linear.

I suppose I should have known this from my own experience of grief, when we lost Jasper almost two years ago, a loss from which I wasn't sure I would ever recover.  I don't think I have ever been so unhappy in my entire life, really, so hopeless, so filled with a sense that the sun would never shine again the same way.  So convinced that there was no point to getting up in the morning, no one to love and be loved by in that perfect way. Even now, writing or thinking about him, I easily go right back to that place.  Even though things are wonderful in every way, still I miss him so much every single day, wish he were still here with me filling the world with his particular beauty.

And Jasper, they say, was just a dog. 

So it's not like I haven't had real-life recent experience with the heart-break of grief.  It's just that I know this next one will be different, will be the first immediate family member, will be all wrong since it's the youngest of our clan to go, completely and utterly out of order.

Which is why it was profoundly cheering (strange, right?) to read Saturday Night Widows and think about what's coming, how futile yet necessary the preparations.  I'll really learn it when I get there, I know that, but for now I feel a bit better having spent a virtual year in company with these women.

I'm not ready, but I'll be fine. My heart will break, and my heart will mend.

This post was inspired by Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman. After being kicked out of her widow support group for being too young, Becky creates her own support group with an unusual twist. Join From Left to Write on February 14 as we discuss Saturday Night Widows. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Comments

[Jennifer Wolfe]

This is beautifully written. I feel your conflict over losing your sister - twice, and feel your strength to go on.