grief-dreams

navigating the delicate tendrils of sadness

Grief and I have been playing a game of cat and mouse. It chases me through my days. 

I wake in the morning and it is there, pressing against my body like a weighted blanket. It is there in the inky blackness of my morning cup of coffee. I splash it with half and half cream, chasing the darkness away.

In the afternoons I make some effort to run but Grief is a lead weight around my ankles. I half-jog, then slow to a walk after a kilometer or so. By the time I reach the trail my feet drag through the dirt. Somewhere in my home there is a button I had meant to sew two inches to the left of the existing button on my favourite blue jeans. Grief has stolen my appetite. It has also stolen my ambition for home repair projects so the button sits abandoned on the teak sideboard in the tray of spare change, next to the burnt out lightbulbs, magic rocks, and drawings my children bring home from school.

I do not want them to see me not eating, and so Grief is not invited to dinner. Those children are my One Good Thing. I want them to have a normal, well-adjusted mother, and so I pick at a plate of rainbow trout and plain rice with butter even though Grief has rendered their flavour in notes of cardboard and kindergarten paste. After dinner we play Labyrinth. I let them stay up late, knowing Grief will leave me alone for as long as I can fill the room with the peel of their laughter.

Once they are asleep I watch This Is Us on continuous play, smashing the screen of the iPad the moment it asks “Are you still watching?,” before Grief has a chance to peek around the corner and ask if I am coming to bed, its black tendrils snaking out of my bedroom and down the hallway, reaching. It is always reaching for me. 

There is a name that has taken up residence on my tongue. I do my best not to speak the man’s name, but it dangles at the edge of my lips day and night. The radiator throws off a noise like the distant slam of a car door in the driveway and the name spills from the container where I had carefully tucked it away, filling the room. My heart speeds to three times its natural rhythm. Has he come? 

No, he has not, Grief whispers back. He will not come. 

Grief will be waiting when I go to bed. It does not care for books. It tugs at my eyelids, luring me into the darkness of sleep. It is there taking up two thirds of the king sized bed. It says, “Here, I’ve saved a place for you.” It is the cold in the blankets. It puffs up the pillow on the side of the bed where I do not sleep, taunting me. It is the too big mattress I purchased in a polyamorous fever dream. It was meant for three, but now it is only me. 

I pluck my four year old son from underneath his quilt in the lower bunk in the room he shares with his older brother. I place him in the very middle of my bed, chasing Grief away like dust from curtains. I tuck my hand underneath the shirt of his flannel dinosaur jammies, laying my palm against the warmth of his fast-beating heart. 

Grief whispers in my ear an updated account of all the people I’ve lost, those people who were my world. You were not what they desired, Grief offers. Too selfish, too complicated, loose-lipped in all the wrong places. You imposed yourself, it reads from a memory I have tried to forget. Like a sample from a hip-hop track, it repeats the phrase over and over. I squeeze my eyelids shut, setting up a barricade against those memories. I roll toward the outside of the bed and my son kicks a tiny set of warm little-boy legs over my back, draping them in the crook between my hips and rib cage, a crook steepened by Grief these last few months. I count his breaths, a shield against the onslaught of memories that begin to apparate out from my bomb shelter of a heart, wanting to make themselves seen, known and understood as I drift into sleep, unprotected and exposed to a sweeping cascade of regrets. 

I worry what will be waiting for me under the black cloak of sleep, sometimes jerking my eyes open with a gasp, catching myself in the instant before going under. Eventually it pulls me into that borderless blackness of grief-dreams. I dream of the man but he does not know me. He looks at me as though I am a stranger. “We are not currently admitting new guests,” he says, turning me away at the door of my own home. 

— a poem for grief-y people —

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. 

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. 

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. 

~ Matt Haig

— proof that grief does not make sense — 

1. In Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking she cannot throw away her deceased husband’s shoes. Because what will he wear when he comes back?

2. A friend told me that at his father’s funeral he could not stop talking about how much he regretted his most recent haircut. Overseas relatives whom he had not seen in a decade heard of nothing but his negligent hairdresser. 

3. I snuck out of a concert I paid $217 to attend, abandoning Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood to play a single round of Candy Crush in the ladies bathroom. 

— three books about grief —

Someday Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli (novel)

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (memoir)

The Comfort Book by Matt Haig (poetry I guess?)

— an excerpt from my son’s schoolwork —