One of the things that comes up lately, like a wave in my psyche — crashing, surging forward, receding — is wanting to share about my life this past year, and then being completely dizzied by the prospect of making any kind of linear narrative sense of the beautiful crushing devastating stunning shattering heartbreak … and I stay quiet.
And then I hop on Twitter and I see people able to ***share*** about their ***lives*** and I feel envy. So I figure it’s me wanting to share.
I heard the stages of grief … ok look everyone’s heard them right? For me though it’s been something like:
Shock
Shock
Fog
Despair
Poignant Painful Aliveness
I laughed the hardest I think I’ve ever laughed since I was a little kid yesterday. I mean hard. Uncontrollable laughter. It went on for minutes and minutes and minutes. My friend and I were watching Bad Lieutant: Port of New Orleans and we both just lost it after this scene. The day before I was on the Oregon coast, staying with a friend. We’d taken what I thought was a microdose of mushrooms to boost a quiet nature walk, when the mushrooms opened into a full blown ayahuasca-grade trip for me — I went through powerful rounds of sobbing, of gasping for air, of rage at losing my dad, of feeling that unmistakable feeling of the world being pregnant with something so big and so heavy that just *existing* feels shaky, a moment by moment challenge, and knowing that something is going to have its way with you, and the best thing you can do is not resist it, however punishing it might be.
The big carnival of abandoment, and sorrow, and rage, and more rage, and then (of course) back to sorrow … into yesterday’s unbridled, uncontrolled, unresisted, laugh until your friend says he has to stop because he’s getting light headed and is going to pass out, that is the best way I can explain my grieving right now. The grief has a deep strain of unthinkable sorrow to it, a river running through my life, and somehow it has pried something open in me, an unresisted joy at the experience of life. Grieving is a total, complete bitch, and it’s an amazing, blindingly beautiful experience I can’t imagine not getting to have.
Ok … I have a lot more inside of me, but that’s a start.