Ravaged

Discovering layers of grief

Hello and welcome! I am so glad you’re here.

April Fool’s Day, with the full moon in Libra, seemed like a good day to launch. So, here is post #1:

Ravaged

I am here, in my son’s bedroom with the door closed, writing this, now.

I am here, in my son’s bedroom, because my son is away at school, and because there is a desk where I can write and there is a door to this room that I can close.

I am writing about what I am imagining, now.

I am imagining: sitting in a circle, at the retreat center. It’s two weeks from now, and we have returned for our next session. A month has passed. We are checking in. As we go around the circle, we each get three minutes. I want to tell them everything. There is so much to say, about what has been up since last time, all the insights and epiphanies, the movement of energy through my body, the processing. I can feel it now, in my son’s bedroom, writing this.

There are only three minutes and so much to say, and I might say the other things, but what I want to convey, what I want them all to know, is that I have been working through things about my father’s death. A lot has been up for me about that, because of the time of year, maybe, and because of the breathwork we did in our last session, how, in addition to all that got released during that process, there is a chunk of energy, a jagged brick of a thing, that has been dislodged but not released and has been working its way through my system. It is still heavy, still sharp-edged. What I want them all to know is that I am coming to understand that, yes, my father died, and the grief around that is its own thing, the natural, human, organic process of metabolizing the loss of my father.

photo by @product.design

And: there are the other parts, other kinds of loss and grief that are connected but separate.

I imagine myself sitting on the cushions at the retreat center, on the side of the room with the windows, the facilitators at the head of the circle, an apex of sorts, to my right. As I say all of this, my right hand is making a circle, palm down, in the air in front of me. This is the grief. The loss of my father.

My left hand makes a circle slightly above my right hand. This is the caretaking piece. I am illustrating the layers. Layers of grief. Subcategories. Related, but separate. Grief from death. Grief from caretaking.

Somewhere in there I might say something about how my friend who does grief literacy trainings talks about how, when practitioners are working with bereaved people, they need to listen for the utterances that keep getting repeated. The repetition indicates something that is hard to swallow, that the person can’t digest, can’t metabolize, something that has gotten stuck.

For me, it’s been this caretaking piece. Because I am only now starting to realize it is separate from the grief/death piece. It’s its own thing, and what I keep hearing myself say is, it was so hard. And, it took so much out of me.

Part of what made it so hard is that it’s so fucking tedious, the phone calls, appointments, paperwork. The waiting. Waiting in ERs and doctors offices and outside of bathrooms and for people using walkers to make their way down the hallway. And it’s all so invisible and hard to explain, to explain why it’s so hard, and sometimes real shit is happening with ambulances and blood and more blood and wondering will this be the time he dies. It’s relentlessly lonely and silent somehow, even with a siren screaming through traffic to the ER.¹

All of that has been lumped in with his death, with that loss and grief, but it’s its own thing. Because ushering people to their death is a human, natural process. But ushering people to their death within the systems that are available to us is not natural. It’s not human. It’s part of something that is inhuman, a machine that takes from us parts of our humanity and parts of our lives in order to keep itself churning, and I am only now starting to recognize that there are no funerals for those losses.

Now, here, writing in my son’s bedroom with the door closed, I imagine myself saying, on the cushions at the retreat center, as my left hand moves up, making a circle above where it just was, to indicate a new level, a different, separate, level of loss, that inside, or on top of, the caretaking are specific incidents that happened, incidents that should not have happened but did happen, that were the result of dealing with the system and that were really fucked up. Things happened that were really fucked up.

So there is the grief of the loss of a person, and there is the difficulty of caretaking and the assorted losses that come with that, and then there is fucked up shit that happens because of dealing with inhuman, inhumane systems. And this piece - my hand indicating the top layer, the layer that is the fucked up shit that happened - is trauma.

Which is different from grief.

It all got lumped together when he died as one loss, one grief, and I’m only now realizing that they are separate, different layers and textures and experiences of loss and trauma associated with my father’s death.

Sea blue on white acrylic painting on canvas by @nikodemszpunar

Part of what made the incidents, the fucked up shit that happened, so traumatizing, is that they were, ultimately, a revelation: the inhumanity of the system was revealed to me. I saw it: a telescopic view of the whole thing, and it was clear, in these moments of revelation, how completely devoid of humanity the system is, how, at its core, is something very, very dark.

I imagine myself sitting on the cushions in the circle at the retreat center, bunching the tips of all of my fingers together and jabbing them toward the very, very dark center, and now as I write this and in the future, as I imagine saying it, and back then, as I experienced it, I see the machine: dark, cold, steel cogs, some so enormous that they expand beyond my field of vision, rotating slowly, steadily, unstopping, sucking me in toward the cold dark center where I - and you - we - will be annihilated.

I say to my fellow retreatants and to the facilitators, sitting at the apex of the circle to my right, all of us on our cushions, when I said that encounters with our healthcare system evoked primal terror, it was because of this. Because of the revelation of the machine. Because I had encountered evil at the core of the system meant for care. Because of the way that I simultaneously comprehended and rejected - could not get my head around - the fact that this is what we have built. We have chosen this. Because of the intensity of the chest pain that woke me at 3 am. Because the cardiologist told me that during sleep is the only time I can squeeze in panic attacks. Because I was also at this time, this time of year two years ago, single parenting two teenagers full time and because I also had a full time job, and it is only now, now as I write this, now as I imagine speaking this, that I can see how fucking hard it was, what it took from me and that, yes, I have been grieving the loss of my father but also:

I have been ravaged.

As I arrive at the word ravaged, I feel its weight and heft, how satisfying it is to say. I think this and feel this and imagine saying it because I want to, need to, because it is only now, having entered into a community, a community of new people who don’t know my story, that I can see how unheard I have felt about all of this but have not been able to understand why. I’ve had such great support it seems I should be - something. That by now I should have been able to metabolize the jagged brick, or to at least have worn down its edges.

But I can see now, only now, that there is something about the lumping together of the layers that has made it so difficult to convey what happened in a way that I might be heard and understood because it was so much more than my father dying and

we don’t have rituals yet for the ravaging.

We don’t have ways to acknowledge what gets extracted from us by the system while we are navigating the decline and death of people we love, and I suddenly need everyone to know, to be witnessed in my gutted state, and I want to have a way to hold all of the others who have been ravaged, those who are, in this moment, being eaten alive. I want them to know that I see them. They can hold out a hand and I will pull them back from the edge of the vortex, from the ravenous suction of the machine that feeds on our isolation, on our exhaustion and confusion, our desperation and our love.

I can see that I am still only able to come at this a little sideways, as an imagined utterance which, I know now, from my seat here at the dining room table, where I am expanding and revising this piece, a month or so since I began writing it, that I will not say all of these things during my three minute check in on the cushions at the retreat center. Which is fine. I know that I am still being held within that container, even when I am here, and I am still, within the writing about the imagining, the imagining of the performance of ravishment, able to get clarity about the layers and levels and categories. To say what I need to say, for myself, for now, perhaps for you. To you. I have imagined being witnessed in saying these things, which, in this moment, is plenty.

May this be a space of healing and connection, of light.

1. Also? There were two of them. My mother began declining rapidly at the same rate that my father did but in very different ways, and is still, at this moment, actively dying. There is much more to say about this part, which for now, I can only manage it as a footnote. For now, my mother and her decline are a footnote.

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