While listening to Anderson Cooper's podcast on grief, entitled "All There Is", he does a phenomenal job of opening himself up. He is raw and present and not afraid to show his emotions as he asks the questions we all struggle with when faced with grief and all it encompasses. Of particular note are his interviews with Stephen Colbert (Season 1) and President Biden (Season 2).
Stephen Cobert's interview speaks of gratitude for grief and how he has navigated through that. He lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash back in 1974. Now while I can see the old adage that "Time Heals Everything"...the concept of gratitude for feeling grief is NOT a concept I am ready to embrace. I still feel a vast amount of emotions around the passing of both my moms but gratitude for the process is NOT a way I would explain my feelings at the moment. I still struggle sometimes on the daily or weekly with regards to feeling their absence and it is varying degrees of depth I feel. Sometimes it is a passing thought, sometimes it is a full-on cry fest. I feel them near me still, which I guess I am grateful for but also feel immense sadness that they are not close to me as we have been in the past.
One aspect I CAN wrap my mind around, centers on an interview Colbert did with Andrew Garfield at the passing of his own mother. Garfield compared grief and sadness to "misplaced love". It is the presence of immense amounts of love for the person gone and having nowhere to put it once they leave us to journey by ourselves...and so it falls down into grief. I can totally buy into this concept for sure.
But am I grateful for the grief and sadness? NO. I would much rather have them here and in my life. And for that, I feel anger. For that, I feel sadness and loss. The gratitude I feel for my mom, Bonnie, is in all she taught me, the example she lead, the vibrancy she brought to our relationship, the fact that she waited for me to be there before she went over, but the amount of grief I have felt at this departure is NOT something I am grateful for. Folks speak of the fact that if we are lucky enough to experience grief, we will have also experienced great love and a journey together...but gratitude is not something I feel at this departure and the process I have had to go through since this departure.
For Pam, it is immense gratitude for acceptance, for love, for the ability to connect on a level that I rarely see in others, and for always being willing to listen and help me when I needed her. Her departure is still very raw for me and I am not at a place where I can fully verbalize where I am in my grief process over her departure.
The silence of these departures still feels deafening. They still fill my thoughts and my own mom holds me when the struggle is real...I can feel her presence and for THAT I am grateful. The hurt and anger I feel at Pam's death has yet to shift towards that but I know that it will. Colbert speaks about the rooms in the mansions of our lives where we are able to open that door at birth and inhabit the rooms of our lives together. However, once that door is closed, whether it is in a more quiet manner, or a violent manner, or a medium struggle to close the door...however it eventually happens, we are no longer able to share life experiences together and we are left out in the hallway staring at the closed door with a door handle that has disappeared and we are no longer allowed access and that SUCKS and hurts.
I guess I am still staring at these handle-less doors in a hallway feeling frustrated and unable(or unwilling) ( or not strong enough as of yet) to move fully away from that door and move on. And perhaps that's it...for some departures, we don't move fully away from that door and move forward toward letting everything become just a passing memory. I struggle to keep some memories alive...family and friends pass along and I think about them occasionally...I have not had a day that I do not think about Mom and Pam. And for now, I am okay with that.
Just some thoughts to think about friends...
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