Sometimes the grief just wells up and I feel consumed by it. I call it “stepping into a hole.” In the mountain streams near my North Carolina home there are potholes. You might not see the bottom of the creek bed and if you step into a pothole you can find yourself suddenly immersed in freezing water. It can take your breath away. That’s what it’s like. Suddenly I am gasping for air.
“What’s going on?” Anne asks me. Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure. I can tell you what triggered it. But my reaction of grief is outsized, out of proportion and disconnected from the trigger. I can give you the data points. I can’t explain why they add up to so much more than the sum of the parts.

1. My birth mother is in hospice and in steady decline.
2. I still have bad dreams including one last night about being suddenly fired from a long term profession.
3. I hang out with recovering addicts who routinely relapse and die.

The grief rocks me. I don’t have time for this. I have work to do. I need to be earning money.
“Don’t you see that all your work has led up to this?” Anne says. “This is a gift. You need this.”
“It doesn’t feel like a gift,” I tell her over the 2500 mile phone connection. “I just thought you’d say something magical and make it go away.”
She laughs. No going over this. No going under it. No going around it. Gotta go through it.
Any adoptee who is “out of the fog” knows where the grief started - day one. The separation. I just don’t know where it ends. I don’t know IF it ends.
My birth mother will probably die this year. She and I had the best reunion I could ever hope for. We became very dear friends. Now I can’t see her, look in her eyes, or hug her goodbye. Another ambivalent loss, another death without a body.
I will never work in my profession again. I find my homeland to be profoundly broken. I grieve the loss of civility and community and connection.
As long as I remain on the front lines of the closely knit community of recovering people, I will see some people relapse and die. This is guaranteed. I cannot predict who will live and who will die and I cannot explain what allows some people to get it and others not to. I just accept it as the way things are. I try not to judge or condemn. I try to retain some measure of compassion without being burned alive.
I call friends like Anne - someone who understands. She asks me to write this down. It helps, somewhat.