Why I Love Grief

I have felt blown clean since my brother Sam died and my brother Jyre went into hospice. I finally took a shower after three days of not taking a shower, so now my outsides are as clean as my insides. What grief did was take away my ability to think about things that didn’t involve love. Someone stole the stuff out of my storage unit? Don’t really care. There the universe goes, helping me pare down. Lots of traffic in Santa Cruz? Look at all those people in the cars. Sam was hard to communicate with? So what. He was there. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for the rest of my life? Who cares. Seriously. What the hell does it matter?

Big picture, it seems to me we were created to help keep the planet alive. We are here to notice if something or someone is sick or dying and to be there to do what we can. It’s so simple. We are webbed with connection.

But clearly, consumerism and fear of not being special or better than fucks all this up. So there’s that. Whoever created us made this a multi-faceted game: stay alive but also be motivated to do really stupid things to put you and others in danger. Hahaha. That’ll be fun to watch. Then they’ll create reality shows and we can watch it all happening twice at once.

To be grieving and to not resist it is, in some ways, pure pleasure. The river of sadness has its way and floods my system and reprograms my brain. I’ve got you, the river says. I’m here to help. Just relax.

When culture or friends or family or yourself is afraid of your grief, the river turns into mud and the flow is impeded and all sorts of trouble follows. Grief isn’t scary, I don’t think. Resisting it is. Feeling grief and falling in love aren’t all that different. Flooded with emotion, you lose yourself for a while in the staggering amazement of how another being can affect your body and mind.

I have appreciated lying down for hours, watching the leaves move in the breeze. My bones feel made of air, and the one time I tried to do yoga, not much happened. My air arms had no interest in holding me up for down dog. They said, No. We are not doing this. You need to lie down.

Awesome.

I think my brother Sam died in part because he lived too fast. He tried to do too much. He drank a lot. He ate a lot. He did the best he could to take care of himself (not sure his self-care went much farther than take a vacation once a year and brush his teeth and drink whiskey the rest of the year) as he tried to do more than one person was meant to do. He wanted to retire to a warm place and relax. He died in the warm waters of Puerto Rico—maybe he knew what he was doing, but that is a story that grief creates for me—it’s easier to think of Sam dying in some sort of positive light. That guy pushed himself too hard. When your mother gives you up on your second birthday, a life of running from also seems potentially unavoidable without the proper support. How can you relax when at any minute everything you know might disappear?

Jyre’s still alive. I won’t tell you any of his underlife until he’s not here. (Just kidding, Jyre. I got it out of my system. Enjoy the morphine and know you are loved. I’m glad you have your person to lie next to you.)

I love my grief because it lets me know I am alive and fully functioning. I feel stunned, incapable of much. My daughter laughed when I told her I tried to order a burrito last night on DoorDash but could not do it because the process felt too complicated. I wasn’t sure if chips and salsa came with the burrito, and I was going to be sad if they didn’t, so I skipped the whole thing and made a grilled cheese. I love that my daughter saw my grief and how it affected my ability and that it made her laugh. I felt so connected to her.

Maybe I can do the burrito tonight.

But probably not.

Hello, grilled cheese.