The other evening I stood in my garden and I was watering the plants after a very hot day, a very hot several days actually. It was dusk, the time of the evening when people go outside to water their garden after a hot day, when the mosquitoes awaken in search of their victims, the air is thick with heat from the day but damp now too now that the sun is gone. The time of evening when the painting of the sunset has faded to the muted colors of deep purple, faint pink and encroaching darkness, when porch lights come on but house lights stay off so windows can be opened as the breeze comes slowly.
I stood alone in silence in this moment and heard the sounds from my neighbor’s garden which was hidden from my view by trees and tall bushes, directly behind our house. The sound I heard was the sound of an outdoor dinner party and the muffled sounds of people talking with the often gentle interruption of laughter.
Now I know it’s not uncommon to hear people in their backyards on weekend evenings enjoying dinner and drinks with friends on a summer’s evening, but what was uncommon, for me at least, was not the actual hearing of the sound of laughter and the gathering of friends but the feeling I instinctively had as it bottomed out my stomach. My absolute first thought to myself as I sighed slowly with a very familiar pain in my chest was, “I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that.” And I searched my memory and really, I couldn’t remember. I was going back days, weeks, months….it can’t be months? Could it? My sadness deepened. But it wasn’t months, it wasn’t even a year. My God, the last time my heart-felt happy enough to laugh like that was before my twin sister died….nearly three years now.
You know that feeling when someone tells you something that most certainly seems like a total fabrication and your first response is a call out the bullshit with an unmistakable look of skepticism with your expression. But then the person keeps at it and the furrow of your brow, your pursed lips, your squinted eyes of disbelief slowly give way to raised eyebrows and an open mouth and you are left speechless to the truth of what seemed like a total initial lie? Well, I had that feeling but it wasn’t about a story that I had a hard time believing to be true….it was about laughter. It was about happiness or maybe more specifically, my sadness. 3 years. 3 YEARS my heart hadn’t laughed and aside from several moments of joy I have felt watching my infant son discover the world and me, I felt in that moment, completely alone.
Before my sister died I had felt sadness before, painful sadness from experiences that come with regular life and I also felt grief too. The pain and grief from losing others close to me through the ending of friendships or because there was too great of a distance to remain close or in some cases death parted us. But the overwhelming grief that engulfed my life after my twin died was so deep and so powerful that it made all other pains in my memory pale in comparison, or at least it feels this way now in hindsight.
For someone like me who has a hard time talking about myself in any great length on true personal matters in my heart, except for conversations with the selected few souls who actually “get it”, the new state of emotions I found myself experiencing was, at the very least, overwhelming.
Grief leaves you with an incredible feeling of alienation, you don’t feel safe anywhere, you don’t feel comfortable anywhere, something always feels wrong, really really wrong. You are not just scared but terrified, of living, of dying, of being alone, of being with others. Your memory just loops the news of death over and over in your mind. You see it 1,000 times in your mind a day, maybe more. Each time you rest, close your eyes, open your eyes. In moments of quiet, especially quiet, even through the loudest sounds, your mind loops. Noise doesn’t drowned it out, quiet doesn’t drowned it out, alcohol doesn’t drowned it out, sleep doesn’t drowned it out, quiet doesn’t drowned it out, company doesn’t drowned it out. Nothing drowns it out. The scene, the call, how time stood still, the calls you had to make, you couldn’t breathe, or talk, only tears, crazy burning hot tears, an invisible faucet turned on and left open, you have no control over anything. Literally. And in that moment, you realize it. And it is terrifying. Zero control of what happens next, of the future and when you realize that, the pressure of the faucet increases and you are wobbly on your feet, arm extended behind you to locate the wall as you feel the collapse coming. Even if you fall, it won’t hurt though. You couldn’t feel more that what you are feeling in this moment, not one feeling more. Dizzying, nauseous, spinning, empty. This is how I felt every single day for months, literally.
Another thing I came to realize is that even though friends and family have the best of intentions, they don’t understand. With friends you expect this to some degree but your family, surely they understand you, at least, they lost a family member too, right? After all, it is the same family member so the loss should be felt on some sort of an equal plane, even if it is only marginally, right?…..this is not true. This is not only not true but the consequences of differences in grieving can and most likely will tear your remaining family apart.
Two things I didn’t know to expect: 1. that after the funeral and chaos, the silence is deafening and for some reason no one likes to talk or feels comfortable talking about the person who died or hearing about your grief and loss and 2. people who had a difficult relationship with the person who died, over time, tend to start bending memory and the past in a way that makes them look better, makes the past look better than it was, and in the oddest of ways, a new past is being created out of the guilt of those who cannot get closure any other way that to change the facts of the past. And if you don’t fight this memory change, it will become the new memory in time and the true old memory will be lost to time. So you fight to preserve the truth, to honor your loved one. But with caution, if you fight to preserve the actual memory of how things really happened, you will be alienating yourself and people will wonder why you can’t just “let things go”….which will make you even more upset so you will fight harder to preserve the truth and those who want to change it will do it anyway and then the gap will grow and grow and grow and one day you will either find yourself constantly fighting to preserve the past and your loved ones memory or you will find yourself alone, and in my case, you will find both, at least emotionally, that is.
It wasn’t only my sister that died 3 years ago but my family, the family I grew up with, my sisters and my mother. In 3 years I lost my twin, my two older sisters and my mother. I will not buy this new picture of the past that they paint so now I stand alone. I am now an orphan. But I am not just an orphan I am an orphan that also has become a mom for the first time. I have no mother to talk to for advice, no sisters to give me tricks to the trade. My son has no Aunts, no grandma on my side, my son has no memory of our old big family holidays surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins. There is no noise, no chaos, no huge family holiday meals. No group photos or stories or laughs to share together. For him, he doesn’t know any better but for me, this loss on top of the loss of my twin is nearly too much to carry. It leaves me wondering how something so empty can feel so heavy?
And if this is not the state of mind that I live in, the 2nd state of mind is living with the loss of my twin sister, my best friend, and what feels now like the best part of me. The 3rd state to live in is the world that still continues to go on regardless of me, my past, my losses, my grief. This is the world everyone else lives in. Three years in and I cannot balance these three states and I feel like I am failing in all of them. There is no way to live fully in one state, disregarding the other two. Growth comes from a fluidity of balance, to not stay in one too long so as not to create a new reality. I cannot manage this yet. I am overwhelmed with emotion when I stay in any state too long and trying to live in all three of these states simultaneously leaves me feeling vulnerable, overwhelmingly sad and unmotivated.
When my sister died my feeling of emotion went into overdrive and I have had to keep up a continuous process of dealing with these emotions and it is exhausting. Not like tired exhausting but like fatigue exhausting and fighting fatigue is ironic because you need energy to fight and the one thing you don’t have when you feel fatigue is energy, of any kind. I wake with this feeling most days. Imagine a battery that used to have 95% starting energy each day now is only 60% full on my best day. Losing my sister took 40% of my full battery away, without warning, 40% of me, of my life, of my happiness, was gone in an instant. I would love to optimally start and/or stay at 70% but it is not likely and most days I say I live at 45%, a bad day takes me lower, a good day up to 60, and very few days have taken me further. And the desire to exceed 60 is not only exhausting for me because I know how much energy it takes to get there, it is extremely sad to recognize this. My best is not good enough anymore, I lack the energy to give more, and I also fight to not just give in to all of it and say fuck it which also adds to my fatigue. I am running standing still, I am exhausted before beginning, I am sad in this state.
I read articles and stories here and there about others grief and how they dealt with it, what their advice is. If you are looking for advice, I don’t have any. I have no tricks, no compromise shortcuts, no quick ways to make things seem better. I write this for two reasons. The first one is for me because of all the things I have read about grief, I still never hear it described how I felt it, how I feel it, so for me to write this and re-read it makes me feel sane. The second reason is for the person who feels alone in their grief recovery or is new to this process. You are both absolutely alone and completely not. And it may or may not give you comfort for me to say this but know I know how you feel. Which isn’t saying much, I guess, other than it says you are not crazy. I get it. And believe it or not, there are others out there that get it too. Not a lot, but they are out there. Struggling alone, struggling alongside you. We are alone together.
I don’t know what tomorrow will bring but I made it through yesterday, today I am trying and I have to hope that tomorrow will be better than today.
The Memory Cellar 