One… Two… Three…

When I proposed writing an essay about grief to The Stranger, my editor said I could have a thousand words.

“…Not one single word more. Grief is boring,” he said. “No one can understand except for the person going through it, and talking about it is like telling somebody about a dream you had. No one else understands, no one else really cares, and talking it out makes you look weak, needy, and a little bit nuts.”

I don’t disagree.

Still, a thousand words. Sounds like a lot, but, as we all know, it equals no more than just one picture. And so that’s what I’ll try to give you. A picture. Just one.

118, 119, 120.

At the end of her life my mom insisted on home hospice, which was the teensiest bit ironic because she was homeless at the time. So, here’s the picture I want to offer you: my studio apartment, hospice bed crowded into it, my mom lying upon it and suffering, horribly. Also pushed into this cramped room, a double futon in the corner, where my boyfriend and I sleep.

Now picture that for three months.

195, 196, 197.

When she finally died, I wasn’t there, but my boyfriend was. He’s never forgiven me. He suspects my mom did it on purpose: one last twisted trick; one last assertion of will. It would certainly be like her to try and avoid sharing with me this ultimate moment of weakness, and instead inflict it on this boyish man whom she never really came to respect. Or that’s how my boyfriend sees it anyway. I suspect he might be right. (I keep calling him my boyfriend. He’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore. We broke up a few months after my mom passed. It was like she was the glue sticking us together, and she had evaporated.)

Grief is a mind fuck.

318, 319, 320.

Grief is psychotropic, sometimes even hallucinogenic. In its deepest throes, ghosts and other terrifying apparitions appear, though in fairness, these ghosts and apparitions aren’t always terrifying. Sometimes they are comforting, which triggers the terrifying realization that you have come to depend on them. There’s a derangement that occurs. It still feels insane that she’s not here, not reading this over my shoulder, and then of course, I get chills, because often it does feel exactly like she’s here, reading over my shoulder, whispering the words along with me as I read back through this. It feels insane. And it makes me happy. It’s sanity that feels sad. And I’m so goddammed sick of being so goddamned sad.

And now I hear my editor’s voice. “I told you this would be boring, Syd.”

453, 454, 455.

Grief is a necromancer. You can wind up romancing the dead so much that you lose touch with the living, who become shades, and everything tastes like ashes.

We eke out our living moments just like I’m stinting on these words in this parsimonious essay, when sometimes it’s far better to squander. For instance, in this case, even though I only have a few words left, it might be better to unroll a long quote from Ulysses:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

I no longer live in that studio. My “real job” here at The Stranger, allows me to “afford” a “real apartment”, with its own bedroom and bathtub. And I don’t share the place with anyone. And yet I think I would give just about anything to be crammed into that studio again, with my old boyfriend and dying mother, living with the terror of her someday being gone rather than living with… well, with whatever this is.

Why are the main characters in horror stories so often grieving? In that same vein, why do I feel frightened all the time? It’s like her death has torn some vital skin off me, which was protecting my sense of certainty and safety. My fear is not of death, but of living without her: of her both being here with me, and not with me, at the same time, if that makes sense.

It’s been nearly two years now since she left. I can still spend days lost staring at nothing. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to move forward? She took a hunk of me with her and I’m never getting it back.

I still write things thinking she will read them. (She was a journalist. They called her Girl Gonzo, and compared her to Hunter S. Thompson, though she hated the nickname, and believed Thompson was, ultimately, something of a coward.)

She still talks to me. She still edits my work. As I type this now, I hear her: “Maudlin”, “Personal without being intimate or evocative.”

So why is it that I know with a certainty that if someone gave me a pill and told me that it had the power to cure me somehow, maybe magically, of all my grief, I would take that pill and I would flush it down the toilet?

I’m broken by all this. Forever broken. And that’s a bummer. But everything’s broken. It’s the nature of all this. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that’s how the light gets in.

Is it getting better? I don’t know. It’s getting different. I think. Grief alters your mind.

999, 1,000…

One.