The Chasm
On grief, permission, and coming up for air.
My son Matthew and I are people who feel our emotions, who study our feelings, who excavate them carefully with trowels and brushes, lifting them away from the dirt and sludge and muck we’ve hidden them in, for careful study later.
April comes and brings this chasm that stretches across May and through June. The chasm holds my mom’s deathiversary. Matthew’s dad’s death, Matthew’s sober date, and what it took for him to get there. And the chasm is a Tracy-sized hole in our lives, a missing person — my husband and Matthew’s other dad — who left us a little bit at a time, and whose leaving required things of us that we were untrained for, that had no handbook, that ultimately left us capable at jobs no one wants and that surely no one wants to do.
And still. Every year the chasm waits. Yawning. Wide. Wondering how we will navigate it this year.
One of us will say to the other, “But I’m just so tired, and I’m tired of being tired,” and we will rant to each other about the circumstances of our days, our jobs, our bodies. Our hunger, our loneliness. The rants are subterfuge. Self-sabotage as costume. Masking what we know love is asking of us.
We will mention and long for simpler times—before the chasm, before the responsibility we reluctantly shifted into, out of normal and into what felt like splaying our hands together to support Tracy’s diminishing weight. To see his bones begin to appear under his skin. To watch the brilliant begin to dim, to flicker, to burn lower. And lower. To hear his laugh leave, to become a slurred, mumbled “thank you for taking care of me.” As if we would do differently.
The spring dig.
This year the chasm arrived when Matthew got a cold — a virus with a little fever and green snot. Then I got it. And it invited us, in a way the world approves, nods okay, to take time to isolate and get out the tools for our annual archaeological spring dig.
This is perhaps not the way others do it—it being the grief and mourning and learning that yet live in the chasm, this hole that is the experience of how life and death took their own sweet, slow, yet accelerated time carving us into new beings we are still trying to integrate, to know, to be with, to live in.
For us, it is impossible to fill in and pave over the chasm, to bury the unexcavated broken shards while we can still put them back together to make new shapes.
The world is filled with all kinds of people, and we are ones who look for—who want—the lines of gold we find in mining our grief and mourning our losses. And our wins.
Those who prefer their lives smooth, less examined, who would rather pave over their chasms, ask why we want to pick at our feelings, hold them under the magnifying glass they see as unnecessary. Perhaps retraumatizing. Perhaps self-indulgent. Yet none of that matters.
For us, the chasm opens every year. Stairs appearing. Beckoning. Reminding. That emotions are messengers. We choose what they mean. We choose what they teach us. We decide if we will be with them or bury them. That being present when life ends is exquisitely beautiful and horrible. That learning from it makes us more alive. That it changes us forever.
Matthew and I are not morose people. We are curious ones. We laugh a lot. We send each other memes of cows and birds and clips of clever and quite offensive comedians. We come up for air. We always come up for air.
Love and light. Life is now. We said it when Tracy was dying, to stay present inside something unbearable. We still say it. Both of us. Still.
And it’s okay. We’re okay. Even when we’re standing at the edge of the chasm thinking about jumping in.