Grief and Comfort

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

“Everything in the...world tries to keep us from the essential comfort of mourning. Even comfort has been diluted to mean coziness, rather than comfort, with strength.”

from The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle


The older I get and the more my children grow and change, the less I know about parenting them. I do know this: the constant transitions and transformations and losses of parenthood lead me to mourn, to grieve.

I was engaged in grief this summer. At the end of June, Zola wobbled on her bike, corrected herself, wobbled again and fell, breaking her fall with her four front teeth. It turns out a helmet doesn’t provide 100% protection from head injury. When it happened, I was sitting on a deck 70 miles away, sipping rosé with my high school friends before we headed out to an Indigo Girls’ nostalgia concert.

Zola lost two permanent teeth and two baby teeth and suffered a concussion, her second in two months. She remembers “waking up” on the kitchen counter as Philip examined her torn-up mouth. She was never unconscious. In fact, as Philip scooped her into his arms and ran up the hill to our house, she repeated over and over, “What happened? Daddy, what happened?” These minutes have been erased from her memory.

That night, Zola slept between us. Her face was sad and swollen. The next day she seemed a little more herself. We retold the stories of the rescue at the park. Opal’s refrain was, “Sumner came and got me and the bikes and he cried a little bit. There was a ball of blood on Zola’s mouth.” We retold the story of the emergency room: the last tooth falling out, the brain scan that confirmed she was not in mortal danger, the transfer to the oral surgeon’s office, the failed attempt to save one adult tooth. Philip went back to the park that evening and found the other adult tooth laying in the grass.

As the week went on, we reviewed our thoughts from the midst of the trauma: Will she be ok? Could this have been prevented? We catalogued our feelings--shock, panic, sadness, anger. Those emotions turned into pits in our stomachs, tightness in our chests, and headaches as we re-lived them. We voiced the the distortions we had entertained: “It is my fault. She’ll never be ‘normal’ if she has fake teeth. We are cursed.”

We answered for ourselves, over and over again, Zola’s question: What happened? And we began to build the narrative our family will carry with us about this event. This is how I grieve. I like to think of the stages of grief as waves of mourning.

With each wave, I tried to work out the new narrative of our summer and release my expectations of how our life would have developed without this event, this interruption. Knowing and repeating the story takes some of the sting out of trauma. It lessens the feelings rooting themselves in my body.

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My adult life has often felt like a series of events I must grieve. I have expectations and life diverges. More often than not, change brings grief and celebration, which confuses me. At twenty-four I chose to get married and have a baby, earlier than I planned. I was in love and motherhood suited me. I loved my teaching job. All of these were reasons to celebrate.

Still, I needed to mourn the single, childless twenties I anticipated. Grief felt like a betrayal of my good life. So, I kept really busy and smiled a lot and laughed loudly, but a part of me stayed sad, until the grief interfered, crippling me with feelings in my body, headaches and fatigue. So I dealt with it all the ways I knew--therapy, talking to the friends, gaining some weight, exercising to cope, journaling and praying--until I understood and accepted with joy and tears what was. What is.

There have been other griefs. They pile up. Never getting my second glass of rosé and missing the concert. Time lost to medical training and charter school teaching. A miscarriage. Dyslexia that shakes your child’s confidence. Relationships I wished were different and do not change. The ways my children are like me and not like me--I have to grieve both. Watching my children grow and reluctantly dump me. First they gave up the breast, then they went to school, and next thing I knew, a big part of our relationship is airport farewells and hellos.

My children’s health requires surgeries and therapies and medical interventions. While it is predictable and manageable, each appointment causes me to feel a small loss of perfect health.

When we lived in Boston, a social worker visited the house quarterly to help me arrange Ramona’s many medical appointments. The surgeries and appointments and physical therapy exercises and hearing tests and calls to the optician were limiting, an interruption, a burden, an unwelcome visitor. Again, headaches plagued me.

The social worker gently reminded me, “But this is your life. This will always be a part of your life. Make room for it.”

And so I made appointments part of life, left space in the calendar. I ended each appointment with a cookie for Sumner and Ramona and me in the lobby of Children’s Hospital. After our cookie, we stopped rushing back to school or onto gymnastics. We went home and rested.

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After the concussion, Zola was not herself. She laughed and cried easily, unable to monitor her emotions. Her attention span was short and she found it hard to focus, even on audiobooks or board games or art projects. Television was off limits, as the intense cognitive activity slows healing. For about ten days, she needed someone close to her, within several feet.

In a crisis, the first wave is for me is coping, summoning superhuman energy to just deal. I have to deny what is happening to be present.

Then there are moments when I need relief--a glass of wine, a meal out, venting to a friend, or binge-watching trash TV. I need more denial to escape. Then, I turn back to begin properly grieving. I make room to get angry and bargain.

I’m still doing that. So are the girls. Recently, out of the blue, Zola turned to Opal and said, “Was my nose bleeding? Was there blood coming out of my nose?”

“No, it was up to your nose, under your nose, but not coming out of your nose.”

The process of grieving continues: understanding what happened, accepting it, letting go of the summer we hoped for, and dwelling in the place we are, with gratitude. This wave of mourning exhausts me. Some call it depression.

My friend says she’s been tired since she turned 42. It was 40 for me. I don’t think it’s age, it’s the grief piling up.

On the Mayo Clinic’s website I read there are many causes for fatigue. When I studied the list, I wondered if I had cancer or diabetes or irritable bowel disease or anemia, all listed conveniently linked to other pages with information on these problems. Grief is also on the list, but they don’t provide a link detailing symptoms, causes, diagnosis, and treatment.

That’s ok. I know the waves of my grief. And I know that my body is tired, exhausted, even fatigued, because it wants me to slow down and deal. There is no way to caffeinate grief away. It is a wave in the process. I have to break out all my tools and tricks: journaling, exercise, maybe more talk therapy, extra cups of tea, prayer and friendship, time alone with Philip, more journaling, perhaps a blog or essay, and lots of good nights of sleep.

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Since Trump was elected, I’ve heard my fellow discontents go on and on about self-care, which is making room for grief. So often I get self-care wrong. I want to hide in what Madeleine L’Engle calls coziness and pretend it is self-care. But the escape of coziness has its limits; emotion still lingers in my body after a cozy time. I want L’Engle’s comfort that strengthens.

I need to get better at grieving. I am not seeking the happiest or most painless or most restful or busiest life. I want a life where I am engaged with my convictions and people and the communities I love. To do this I need to get used to grieving. Grieving, or mourning, is an active process. And I think Madeleine L’Engle names what I know: the process strengthens.

As Zola began to improve, we discovered that she and Opal and I had lice. As soon as the lice was eradicated, I came down with a stomach virus.

The griefs pile up. My life does not go as anticipated and I have to make room. Practicing this with concussions and lice and the stomach flu is important so I can embrace the bigger griefs.

I must mourn and be comforted so I can begin again, stronger.

I think L’Engle explains it well:

“It’s always pain, this letting go, and yet it leads to joy, and a kind of lightness which is almost physical.”

also from The Irrational Season