The Soft T-shirt of grief

In just over a week, we’ll mark the 2 year anniversary of my mentor, Janne's seizure that redefined the rest of her life - and with it, mine. I had already been caring for my father - traveling half-way across the country to the east for doctors appointments and procedures, to settle him into his new apartment, or to sit bedside for days at the hospital when all signs pointed toward death sooner than later. But with Janne’s seizure, the cross-country travel took on a new dimension as now I went not just east, but west, grateful to be one part of a mighty team of friends and family who along with her mighty will to live, made the best year and a half of extra life possible for this dearest, and swearingist, of people. 

Lately, I’ve been sitting out on the back porch writing, or tending the mompost fueled vegetable garden. I’ve been watching old movies with my kids and going for long walks with the dog. I finished a record number of books this summer. I’ve been wondering why this all feels so luxurious, so new. 

And then I remember. I remember never feeling caught up anywhere. I remember crying quietly on the plane and in the airport. I remember cursing myself for booking the redeye flight, and then doing it again. I remember missing band concerts and cross country meets and circling up friends to get the kids to and from school and the orthodontist. I remember missing my bed and the front pocket of my backpack filled to overflowing with the essentials I might need if I had to leave on a moment’s notice: COVID vaccination cards, passport, credit cards, a key to my Dad’s place. Herbal tea, lip balm, phone charger, protein bars, squirreled away single packs of nuts from the plane, pens and passwords. A person could live for days in an emergency room with these things.

My backpack is lighter now, and my days off are mostly off. There’s a spaciousness to my life I don’t remember from before. I’m not sure I remember myself from before. The kids are two years older now, light years away from the babies (ok, younger teenagers) they where when all this began. In the span of this same time, my wife saw her mother through her final days, too. Each of us learning loss in new and deeper ways. 

The author Margaret Renkl, in her book, Late Migrations, states what should be obvious. As exhausting as caregiving is, and as hard as it is to watch someone you love suffer, “the end of caregiving isn’t freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.” (Renkl, Late Migrations, 189)

Here in this spaciousness, I am learning to live with grief. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and still, I can’t recommend it. With my Dad’s death and Janne’s death, with my mentor, Rob’s death, and the death of my mother-in-law all essentially in the last 2 years - grief has moved in close. I’ve given up on the idea of moving though it or finding an end to it. I know that the grief is more than sadness, it is connection. It is love. It is a life-line, a tether to those other times I can hardly remember, to the life I lived before this loss, and the lives they lived, too. 

Renkl goes on in her essay, “After the Fall,” to say this:

“Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.”

I remember the days and weeks and even years  after our house fire, how I’d take out one of the t-shirts that had been saved from the wreck and the rubble, and I’d wear it under my clothes. My go-to t-shirt was a supersoft Mickey Mouse shirt from our trip to Disney World. The soft shirt against my skin was a way to remember those easier times that did exist, that other self that knew a life and a world before house fires and kids without shoes pulled from their beds. The t-shirts were something more, too. Protection, shield, shelter - something soft over my too tender heart as I moved about in the world. 

Renkle continues: 

“It (grief) is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. IIt will change so slowly you won't even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones. 

You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. 

What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you.

You are both, and you will always be both.

There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.” (Renkl, Late Migrations, 218)

Soft t-shirt on, skin of grief stretching and loosening over my bones, I put myself out on the porch, out in the garden, out on a walk with the dog or off to the movies with my now nearly adult kids. I take in the gift of a slow dinner with my wife, and the miracle of the smokebush’s return in the backyard. I am this and that and whatever will be next - carrying their love here with me like a soft t-shirt over my achingly tender heart.