I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,
As once Electra her sepulchral urn,
And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn
The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see
What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,
And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn
Through the ashen greyness.

Sonnet V. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I wish there were a way to carry the burdens of others from time to time. You see your friend, lugging that baggage she’s been carrying for so long, struggling to remain upright as the years add weight and volume — you could come alongside her, let her shrug it off on you for just a while. It isn’t fair she has to carry it alone; it wasn’t hers to begin with! Someone else gave it to her. She doesn’t deserve it. She needs rest, a moment’s peace. She could shake out her stiff arms and sore muscles, maybe get a massage. A glass of wine.

I feel like that when I see others grieving. I want to take the empty, hollowed-out, screaming ache of loss and just let the mourner sleep. Not because I’m some self-important martyr or anything fun like that. I just know what it’s like to wander your own halls like a ghost at 3am, while grief is making itself known, keening like a banshee. I mean, what’s just a bit more added to this maelstrom? I could carry it for a night, ensuring deep, dreamless sleep. Friend, foe, or stranger — it doesn’t matter. Just rest. I’ll be here in the morning.

Life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. Even the grief we share with others — shared loss, shared trauma — is unique to each who has experienced it, and must be borne alone. We can try to bury it, avoid it, deny it, lose ourselves in it — there are as many ways to let it destroy us as there are ways to die. And like death, there’s no escape.

For a long time I chose not to look at my grief. I didn’t ignore it, I didn’t deny it, I didn’t avoid — I just wouldn’t look directly at it. I’m using past tense as if I’m somehow better; no, I still find it hard to look at my grief. If I look at the monster under my bed, will it see me? Will it find me again and rip out more of my heart? Would I survive? Would I want to?

I barely survived my deepest loss — well, the jury’s still out, but I’m still here at the moment. A part of me very much did not. There is a part of me that is brittle, the blood just beneath the surface of a wound that will never fully heal. The potential of loss, the mere hint of it scares me, all that hurt bound up in the tangle of scar tissue of other, older pain. I bleed easily if hit just right. A psychic glass jaw, if you will.

Would I survive? Yes. I’ve been bleeding for years. Would I want to? No. No I would not. I’ve been bleeding. For years.

I’m tired, and I’m apparently not halfway done with this life, statistically speaking. God, I’m so damn tired sometimes.

A modern day woman with a weak constitution, ’cause I’ve got
Monsters still under my bed that I could never fight off

Lana del Rey

But I’ve come to realize that to live with loss and grief too deep to articulate, I have to at least look at what sends me under my Strawberry Shortcake covers. When I peek under the bed, the monster is still there. It is as grotesque as it has always been. It’s terrifying and relentless. It can still hurt me. But am I letting it control me? Yes. I’m allowing it to steal joy and hope and trust and love until I shut down — and then I feel nothing. Nothing is not peace. Numb is more terrifying than any monster. I’ve been there.

Living without hope and joy and love, (and pain and fear), is not living. We aren’t meant to function like that. So I sit on my bed and I study that monster. I try to figure out how we can come to an agreement. It lives here, and so do I, so we’ve got to find a way to coexist. The monster doesn’t cause me to pull out my self-destruction coping kit — I do that in response to the monster. The monster doesn’t whisper soothing words of self-loathing into my ear as I stare at the ceiling — I do that. Those are tools I developed long before the monster, but they’ve been reinforced by and refined over time and through experience. The monster doesn’t cause anxiety, my desire to control the uncontrollable does.

The monster is neutral, neither evil nor good. It just is. Like a force of nature. Inescapable but not intentionally cruel. We will all grieve. We will all lose someone — usually more than one someone — we cannot live without. So how do we survive?

Sit with it. Stare at it. Find the deep scars it touches and trace your reactions back to their sources. Understand that this monster is now a part of you and therefore cannot be escaped. And find a way to live with it, because if push comes to shove, the only one moving is you.

And then learn how to really live.