Unimaginable

Four years ago I went to make breakfast and entered a world no one wants to be in. The cost of admission is unimaginable loss. Unimaginable, not in the figurative sense of doomsdayers or dramatizers. Literally unimaginable. Loss so painful that even the most caring, most empathetic souls cannot imagine it. Not the people closest and most trusted, not clergy. The loss of a child is a pain known only by those who have lived it, or something very like it.  

On that day four years ago my life was forever changed. A part of my soul became the home of intermingled love and loss, helplessness and rage, regret and gratitude, stages of grief that overlap and loop back and wrap around each other, loneliness like I'd never known, could not have imagined and still can't describe. It's a part of my soul that even my soulmate cannot touch or comfort, try as he might.

I learned early that I wasn't quite as alone as I felt. This new world is populated by others. Among the many cards, thoughts and gifts, each one appreciated as it helped me feel ever-so-slightly more tethered to the broader world, it was the few who knew this pain that touched me most. It was the women in this new world who knew, not the right words - there are none, but somehow the right touch, a kind of understanding. Maybe I only imagine that their experience is anything like mine, but as I've met them on zoom and on ferries, always unexpected and not entirely welcome, I have found sort of comfort in a shared sadness that we both know. 

In the weeks after this day four years ago, as we looked for ways to let him go, a wise elder in this new world offered one piece of advice. Plan for the anniversaries, she said. Get away, do a thing. The dates of birth and death may only be numbers on squares, but they hold the power of memory. Better to plan for them than to be caught unaware. 

This year Feb 16 snuck up on me. I think I didn't want to remember it. Not that I don't want to remember him. I remember him every day. His living changed me even more than his dying could.  He's in everything I do and I cherish him there. But today is the reminder of losing him, of his cold body, of the relentless alarm that called me to him, of the last pancakes he ever asked for and didn't give me the chance to make. I don't want to remember the day I learned that I will never hear his laugh again. I don't want to remember and I will never forget.

There were warning signs of the anniversary coming, but I ignored them. I didn't want to know.  I don't want Feb 14 to be the day I could have made dinner for him but chose to be with someone else, telling myself there would be other dinners. I was wrong, there were no more dinners. Until I forgive myself it will always be that day. Until I forgive myself there can be no Valentines. It's easier to just not know what day it is. Which is part of why I didn't see it coming.

This year I didn't clear my calendar, didn't plan for any remembrance. I let the day arrive naked and raw, and was still in bed and surprised to find myself knowing and wrecked. 

I don't know what to do on the anniversaries. I don't know a way to ease the pain or to focus on the memories of his life instead of the loss of it. I've tried different things - a visit to the park he loved and where we scattered his ashes amidst the beauty of nature, a meal at his favorite restaurant, looking through scrapbooks full of happy days. None of them have become rituals, none draw me back. I wish I knew a healing way to grieve, a place of comfort.

I suppose each of us in this unwanted world find our own ways. For me the best I have, the one that calls me back, is a notebook where I pour out words that fail to describe an unimaginable loss because there are no words. And yet words are all I know to hold, all I have to share, the only way I can bear to invite connection with a world that cannot know the pain I hold. I hope they never do.