Binders Full of Grief

 

 

I’ve been thinking about all the ways grief sneaks into our lives. How it isn’t just an emotion relegated to death of loved ones.

It’s easy to dismiss all the smaller moments of grief. Just like it’s easy to dismiss the calculated total of small traumas. And then you feel out of sorts for feeling out of sorts when the answer is staring you in the face; You’re sad because grief is sad.

Sometimes grief and gratefulness have to learn to co-exist, such as the grief of a pregnancy that didn’t go as planned or the grief that comes with a premature baby mixed with the gratitude that we all made it out alive.

The grief of the end of a marriage, even when you’re the one who ended it.

The grief of the things taken for granted and then taken by the pandemic.

The grief of the end of a romantic relationship. Or a friendship not working how you envisioned it.

The grief for your past self when a diagnosis comes late, and you realize how different things could have been.

And yes, of course, the grief of the death of my dad.

Then there’s the anticipatory grief — translucent and wispy as it coalesces into the grief that comes later.

That’s where I am right now, with only two more appointments with my current therapist.

I should start a collection…

Grief playing cards in a zippered binder — something you can go through later and say, “man, that sucked.” On bad days you might feel victimized by the contents, but on good days maybe it can be a source of grace as you say, “damn, I’ve been through a lot. No wonder I’m tired.”

The end of the therapeutic relationship will be a whole new sort of grief. A shiny new card to slide between the clear plastic windows.

When I walk out of her office for the last time, and the fresh grief hits me, I’m going to want to tell… her. I’m going to want to email her and tell her how hard it is and then downplay it in her office the following week.

I feel like I sound dramatic. But, you know, life is sort of dramatic sometimes.

I’ll be fine. I know that. But knowing that you’ll get through something doesn’t make the getting of the through much easier.

Soon enough, I’ll have a new therapist to tell. I’ve already made one appointment with a potential new therapist for next week. But they won’t have memorized all the other cards collected in that binder. They won’t know the players and the stats. They won’t have been there when everything was falling apart. They are not the ones who helped me file those cards away.

Come to think of it, a binder of grief playing cards I could pass across the space between couch and chair would be really handy. A sort of primer on the backstory of Rhiannon.