Part II: Grief among the elephants

I think people in general are uncomfortable with grief.

Most people, probably. Not all… but many, at least.

Some are so uncomfortable with grief that even the idea of it exists as a sort of personal Voldemort for them – never to be mentioned lest it be summoned. When forced to be in the presence of someone who is grieving, their discomfort hangs in the air palpably. It dries their mouths and makes words come out with a certain forced quality as if they are being made to speak in front of an audience without the benefit of a glass of water.

Personally, I’ve always had a certain comfortableness with grief. The concept of it. The experience of feeling it. Being in proximity to others feeling it.

Grief is the memory of love.

That is what it is.

It is a feeling in the present tense that, while painful, is a product of something deep and abiding and true which continues and persists and lives on in the grieving in the present tense.

Grief is the memory of love.

To me, grief is one of the purest, most honest emotions. It strips away all kinds of superficial bullshit and leaves only the heart of the matter. Gone are all of the little inconsequential distractions and noise from a complex human relationship. It strips away all of the “maladies of the quotidian” – the dramas absent crisis which busy up the thoughts and attentions of two people living daily lives both shared and separate.

All of those things – the fleeting stresses and conflicts and emotions of a moment – are water. They are a simple compound. When love meets loss, they are turned to vapor and vanish. They become irrelevant wisps unseen in lifting which are then forgotten.

What is left is a mercury.

The loss of someone you love deeply is like the sudden heating of a pot. All of the water in it is nearly instantly boiled off. What is left is a distillation of a single element. A metal. A liquid itself but one so much heavier than water.

A gallon of water weighs eight pounds. A gallon of mercury weighs 113.

Grief is heavy. But only because it is a reduction that boils off the lighter weight of water and leaves only the heavier weight of feelings.

Most of us go through our days carrying all of our lives’ burdens and stresses like two wooden buckets of water hanging from the end of a wooden yoke balanced across our shoulders. They may feel heavy; the labor may be exhausting; but they are filled with only the weight of water.

For someone deep in grieving a painful loss, there is that same yoke stretched across shoulders and the same two wooden pails hanging from the two ends but within them is a sloshing mercury. It is heavy and shifting. It makes the work of even single steps varying degrees of hard. And sometimes, it is just too much to carry.

This friend of mine – the person I met online and know primarily through only words traded digitally – is carrying two very full buckets on a small frame.

Now, five or six years into knowing them, I know all of this very well firsthand; but even before I did, I knew of it from knowing of their loss. You know of it too. Their daughter was one of the children who lost their lives in the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Ana Grace was six years old. She was a sister to an older brother. A daughter to two loving parents, one of them, a mother who adored her with the entirety of a person’s ability to love another.

The tragedy of that day had affected me deeply – as I know it did most of us. I had felt the pain of it, the hurt, in a wounding, visceral way - but this is not about me or that; and the impact on me wasn’t what led me to seek out my friend’s acquaintance.

I sought it out. I did.

It was an acquaintance I wanted to have.

I hadn’t thought about why that was until I was in the car somewhere in a leafy, springtime Connecticut this week driving to meet this friend in person for the first time. I had time in the car to reflect on it. The ‘why?’ of it. The root of how this acquaintance came to be; why I had wanted it; why the drive felt important and meaningful.

When my stepfather was suddenly killed in an accident a couple of years before the December of Sandy Hook, I had a chance to see the nature of grief up close. The machinery of it. The ways in which the social cogs of community and relationships are thrown to a sudden halt by an overloading jolt of electricity to a circuit but then lurch back into a motion somehow different. It is like a single cog in that machine has been stripped of some teeth but the machine itself is unchanged.

When a mother elephant loses a baby elephant, the herd gathers around it and shares in its grief. The other members of the community join in the mourning with a visceral pain as if the loss is theirs too. But survival requires movement. So, eventually, the herd lumbers on leaving the grieving mother to bear the loss as part of a pack busy moving on.

We humans are like that too.

In the immediate aftermath of a shattering, the kitchen gets busy with feet rushing in to attend to the glass. There are ample hands to push and pull at brooms and tidy up the room. But then they file out until the room is empty save for the people for whom that kitchen isn’t the site of an event but a place where they live.

I think that whole phenomenon is lonely. I think it is isolating. And, in some ways, I think the phenomenon that comes after – the herd returning to its travel with the grieving among it – is even worse.

One thing I learned from my own proximity to loss was that grief changes all of the peripheral relationships around it. There is the person at the center and the network of people to whom they are connected. Friends and family and acquaintances. Relationships with history. Relationships without it. They are all changed.

Relationships take energy. Even good ones. They take energy. When the two people are carrying only pails of water, each has enough of it. When one is loaded down with the heavy silver of mercury, they often don’t. The walking is hard. The weight shifts and slides with each step. When it is the most balanced, it is bearable. When it pulls heavily at one shoulder or both, it often isn’t.

Being friends with someone in grief requires a certain yielding. A flexibility. An adaptiveness. It requires a surrender of sorts.

In friendships between people who are each less burdened, there is a mutuality of expectation and effort. Each pays in their own energy; and each benefits from the other doing the same. There is a reciprocity – and there is some proximity of effort. It may not be 50-50; but it is closer to that than 100-0.

When someone is heavily encumbered by grief, that energy is finite often to the point of nonexistent. Their batteries have a diminished capacity; and even whatever energy they can hold can be drawn down in the space of a moment, an hour, an afternoon.

Even making plans in that state is difficult. Plans are a commitment to the future expense of energy. In a place of deep grief, that commitment isn’t one that can always be honored when it arrives. Canceling then might disappoint or upset the other person. Feeling bad about that adds a debit to a deficit.

In a way, there are no old relationships with someone thrown into grief. Relationships with them may have history – but they have no precedent. They are now different. What that person can offer now is different. What they need is different.

The person not in grief can either adapt to that change or not.

Surprisingly often, they don’t. Not fully anyway.

At best, they instead cut the person some slack in the short-term as if they are giving them time to heal – as if grief is like a prolonged emotional food poisoning which, while terrible, will abate and leave the person to return to the same health as before.  

At worst, they continue on with the same set of expectations of the person and the relationship as before – which are now unmeetable – until the relationship becomes distanced or fades away altogether.

Not long after my friend’s mother died – the same friend from the story above about not needing to send her a postcard – he and I were talking about how he was doing. He said something to me that stuck:

“When someone close to you dies, you will be shocked by who comes through for you and who doesn’t. You will be shocked by the people you thought you were close with who don’t come through for you. And you will be shocked by the people you would have never expected to be there for you who are. People you really weren’t even close with… People you didn’t even know that well… Some of them will shock you too.”

In my own experiences with loss and hard things, that has proven to be true. It has indeed been shocking on both ends. When my life reached its own long-arriving nadir, the one person who made no effort whatsoever to express even a concern about how I was doing was my sister. Conversely, an array of both close and distant friends and even strangers surprised me with their care and kindness when I needed it.

In the case of the online friend I was heading to meet, I have no idea how all of that went for them. I have absolutely no window into who was there for them and wasn’t. I do know this though: when a loss is tragic and public, the kitchen fills up instantly to the point of overflowing and overwhelming.

In the case of the tragedy of Sandy Hook, I also know – as do we all – that many of the feet that rushed in were not there to aid or comfort. Some were there to exploit grieving families; coopt their stories to serve some agenda of their own; or to even rebut that the tragedy occurred or somehow make the pain worse intentionally.

I think people who are grieving deserve for people to show up offering unconditional support without expectation. Delivering on that requires an acquiescence. It requires a release of expectations of mutuality or return. It needs to be an offer made freely in the knowledge that it may not be accepted – and even if it is, that does not bind the person to continuing to accept it.

I wanted to offer that to the person this post is about. Someone I knew of but didn’t know.

I wanted to offer an acquaintance of support which would remain open and unexpiring whether they took me up on it or not.

So, I did. I reached out. And we got to talking over DMs.

[Continued in Part III – A handful of glitter]