It Will Be Like This Forever: Grief's Snow Days and the Power of Art
Birthday cake protein bites, chickadees, naming my remaining neutrophils, chronic illness, and international law.
Spoiler alert, I will reveal yesterday’s wordle. It’s brief, not grief. It’s odd that I came up with grief first, having spent 20 years writing not very brief briefs.
But grief has been on my mind lately. Not as much in missing someone, aching for them like a superpower you’ve lost and are knocked down to mere mortal status, stuck feeling every small thing. But grief as in for a life you could have lived. Yesterday I was full of gratitude for finding a recipe for birthday cake protein bites that worked with all my symptoms. And then in a moment, I had a grief strike, it will be like this forever.
The symptoms I have may be manageable, but I live now with chronic swallowing difficulty (yet to be diagnosed). So too the dry mouth, dry eyes, dry everything. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a thirst that is so urgent it feels like a claw. Wait, most days I walk around with that, it’s just worse at night. Grief is like that too, a million tiny urgent claws.
I am not, as
has so eloquently named it, a grief girly. I don’t cogitate on grief and loss and how experiencing grief has a kaldescoping effect on life, shifting broken bits and stain-glass windowing our experience, one moment bright the next one bleak.But grief been popping all around me lately. Reddit posts about how to accept a diagnosis of rheumatic arthritis that makes hobbies into lost loves. How to work through the moments where the weight of the time it takes to handle all the food prep, the doctor’s visits, the med refills (which are on 30 day refill, which are on 90?) is too much.
It’s not lost on me that this is all rising while the U.S. manages storms across the entire country. Wind and tornadoes on the East Coast. Snow squalls here in the Mountain West. Hurricane force winds on the Pacific Coast. Severe weather can’t be “fixed.” There’s no amount of money we can throw at the wind to make it leave our houses upright. So too with grief.
I’m not convinced grief is an emotion, though people try to treat it that way. It seems more like the weather, something that comes on it’s own - occasionally with notice, often without.
The holiday season is a high tide for grief. It’s an occasion where if you’ve lost someone (or some part of you) it’s unavoidable that you will notice how traditions have changed. Sober folks for the first time see all their past Christmases where they were the ghost, there but not there. Haunting their families with pain. New sober Christmases might bring grief for the person they might have been. People who have lost a beloved stare at the mantle, seeing only the hole where the missing stocking should be.
The definition of emotion places it in in connection to a thing, less a person. “Emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.”1
Grief, on the other hand, is often given more complex treatment. “Grief is the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person. [It] includes physiological distress, separation anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, and apprehension about the future…. Grief may also take the form of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for a mishap to oneself.”2
Other definitions of grief make it clear; grief is a state not an emotion. “Grief is a process or journey that affects everyone differently…. Grief has no set pattern.”3 Yes, lots of footnotes. You thought I was kidding about those notsobrief briefs?
Even the average duration for emotions and grief are different. According to the Cleveland Clinic, “The American Psychological Association (APA) defines grief as lasting from six months to two years. Symptoms gradually improve as time passes.” Emotions, on the other hand are shorter, according to Psychology Today:
At the short end of the emotional race, we have disgust, shame, humiliation, fear, and compassion. Irritation is in a dead heat with compassion, which makes me a bit sad to learn. These emotions typically last a half-hour, give or take. On the long side, we have anxiety, hope, desperation, joy, hatred, and the winner by several lengths: sadness. Sadness is the outlier, lasting five days, or twice as long as the next closest entrant, hatred.
Our porch this week has been a dance floor for the local chickadees and nuthatches. I can tell even when they aren’t peeping back at me through the window. Apparently their tiny feet etched little patterns across my railing when, instead of waiting patiently in line, they hopped back and forth, chattering about our seed. True confession: my husband spoils them by getting the fancy kind, with bird friendly dried fruit in it. These dancing porch birds think it’s worth broadcasting to the birds across the street: “we got the good stuff!”
This week I also found myself wandering down a squirrel trail trying to figure out if there was a way to speed up the diagnosis of the swallowing issue - is it Chron’s or Achalasia? Neither is a great option, but pretending it will go away is a worse one. And my next available appointment with the relevant doc is still two months away, even though I made it three months ago. Our health care system, not to system-y, more like controlled chaos, yes?
And what I found was that one of the treatments for achalasia is a procedure called POEM. I need poems to help me digest, speak without fading in an out. Imagine that.
The question of what’s a poem, what’s prose, what’s a lyric essay also floated around in my brain space waiting to bump into a neuron that might fire. Look, it’s been snowing A LOT and I’ve already read 4 books this year. Yes 4 in 11 days and it looks like numbers 5 and 6 will be done this weekend.
When I’m not writing unusually long posts here on Substack, I tend towards the lyric essay. Some as short as 200 words. Others skate towards the second page of single spaced type. So what’s a poem and what’s prose is a teeter totter drill on my mental fields searching for oil. What’s “long” for me is an epic ballad for others. Briefs in federal court can extend beyond 30 pages. I once answered a 120 page complaint. It took forever. I think fast, I type fast. It’s a good marriage. I once banged out 16 pages on the U.N. charter’s Article 6 in three hours on an exam. When I asked why I’d gotten a better grade than expected (to me and everyone who studied with me as I can’t find most countries on a map), the professor responded: “You just hit all the points, I mean, you covered everything.” Rest in peace Professor Bederman. I wish we’d covered everything, especially international discovery issues; you were right, that ish is confusing.
“…we have the great gift of getting to pursue unexpected pathways.” - David Bederman
Loss, like the albatross of student loans from that law school experience, is forever. That’s the weight of it: Its permanence. So too with chronic illness. It’s forever. Maybe intermittent if you are lucky. Maybe manageable with meds and some lifestyle adaptations.
But you don’t “get better.” I fellow spoonie asked me over the holidays “how can I keep my head from exploding when my mother in law asks, for the 14th time, ‘Are you feeling better?"‘“ I have nothing. My MIL asks only how I am feeling, and makes sympathetic noises over the phone when she hears my husband say we have some challenges but are making progress. She’ll share how much her warm water aerobics help. Options, and optimism, are a buoy in a sea of pain, for sure.
The grief that spawns from this line of inquiry is what makes the question difficult, inappropriate even, regardless of the intent. Please don’t place me in such close proximity to the echo of “it will be like this forever.”
I have a new medicine that wipes out my immune system even further. Before I started on it I’d already had a punky system. Now I may be looking at a situation where I can give names to my neutrophils. Maybe even cheer them on: “you can do it Larry! Show that virus who’s boss!” This floppy immune system now requires mask wearing. I can put off the mask by saying, it is hard to breathe with it on, given the allergies, the already dry mouth. But in reality, the mask reminds me that I am now, and in the forgoing future, part of the “special individuals who are immune-compromised.” Was it a compromise? Did I give something away for to gain something else? I did, I guess. I did my own hostage exchange: neutrophils for less pain, functioning muscles. Searching for masks, I find myself flinching at the idea. Can I find a fancy one, really invest it in, since it will be like this forever?
We don’t wrestle with bad weather. We prepare for it. We purchase extra bags of pet friendly sidewalk salt. We remember “there is no bad weather only bad clothing.” I don’t wrestle with grief. When I buy the fancier mask, it comes. When I can’t schedule more, I do less more often as they say.4 And I do other things: I drink exquisite tea, buy pajamas for my giant dog, read really good poems, sidle into the art museum mask in hand, if not on face.
The poems and art are essential, even to people that don’t need a POEM. The art articulates the new pathway, something other than what will be with us forever.
Art is the articulation, not the stimulation or catharsis, of feeling; and the height of technique is simply the highest power of this sensuous revelation and wordless abstraction. - Susanne Langer
Importantly, on these snow days I ask for help. Not just with shoveling out the frustration of medical systems (and buildings with too many stairs and too few benches). But also with making a path back to the ordinary, to the lusciousness of the everyday, sprinkles on the birthday cake protein bite of my daily life. This is what art does: it says look here, it’s all so beautiful, so generous, so fleeting.
That’s why I call this Substack extra-ordinary. Because the highlights of an ordinary day are the things that heal grief’s wound. Art stamps it’s feet on the stone wall of my grief and calls to me. So too great writing will point to the good stuff, reminding me that those things it highlights will also be like this forever.
https://www.apa.org/topics/emotions#:~:text=Emotions%20are%20conscious%20mental%20reactions,Adapted%20from%20Merriam%2DWebster
https://www.apa.org/topics/grief#:~:text=Grief%20is%20the%20anguish%20experienced,and%20apprehension%20about%20the%20future.
https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/grief-loss#:~:text=Grief%20is%20the%20natural%20emotional,or%20even%20denial%20and%20anger.
I’ve lost the “they” in the they say here. If you find them, let me know because this is extra-ordinarily helpful.
This is such a lovely metaphor. I agree. There is little likelihood I would have made it out of the woods of auto-immune diagnosis without our creative community. ❤️
I recognize that my writing friends and I aren't just a community of people writing together and sharing craft, but also a community of people leaning into their grief and their hope. I find this to be tremendous in shutting down my own loneliness in living with chronic pain. And I thank you for being one of those people in my life.