Grief: 'A portrait of randomness'

I talked to my cousin MiniMimi today. She is the oldest daughter of my aunt and uncle, and she's about 12 or 13 years younger than me. I have known her since she was an infant.

When I was in college, we played ring-around-the-rosie. I let her do an 8-year-old's job on my nails. I tickled her and tackled her and let her tell me wild stories. Just like my cousin Spitfire, I found her amazingly precocious, delightful and charming.

As with my Aunt Liz, 14 years slipped by between when I last saw her and the spring of 2005. So when I laid eyes on MiniMimi as an adult, I smiled. She looked a lot like our grandmother did at her age (hence the psuedonym), but there was a scar there under one of her eyes. It seems a dog attacked her at a Rainbow Family gathering.

I have felt sometimes like a bit of an imposter in this part of the family. So much time passed between the summer of 1991 and when we finally reconnected. There was never any bad water under the bridge; there was just time and space. I had moved to California; they had sold their B&B in New Orleans and sailed off to South America and the Carribbean for three years. (My aunt has referred to that time as "ruining our daughters' lives.")

It was weird for me to return to the fold, so to speak. While my aunt and uncle understood our relationship of more than 30 years, my cousins seemed to regard me with a wary eye. They are both very protective of their parents, and I thought they did not remember enough of me to understand my intentions.

There has never been anything but love there. Unless, of course, you consider the way my spirit reveled in the freedom and sense of adventure I found in their presence.

So today, I called MiniMimi to offer my condolences. This is an odd thing for me, generally, because *I* am so personally devastated by LIz's death, yet I know there is a pain far greater in the hearts of my uncle and cousins. I cannot imagine how intense that must be. So while I stew in this loss myself, I want somehow to comfort them.

As the phone call unrolled, I realized I really do have some skill in this arena. I suspect it comes from the fact that I'm not uncomfortable with expressions of grief in others, no matter how random it might seem. When I first talked to my cousin, she was giddy. The word she used to describe herself was "manic."

Somewhere along the line, I reflected on a comment she made and told her what I *knew* Liz had to say on the matter because she had told me so. For whatever reason, my response seems to have cut through her "mania" and allowed her to release some of the emotion which I, myself, am still having difficulty accessing.

I sat silently and listened to her cry for a while. I envisioned the breaking white caps of waves in those thousands of miles between us, all that salt water mixing with her tears, and simply let her cry.

Someone very dear to me had, earlier this afternoon, let me vent an abundance of emotion without many words -- just the question of whether I was safe because I was driving my car and talking on the phone when it happened. And I knew from that, and from a few other cricial experiences in my life, that sometimes the best thing you can do is allow someone to be with their emotions. Without words. Without judgment. Without sighs or tongue clucking. And, most importantly, without unwarranted FEAR.

Especially in grief, we don't need other people trying to protect us from our emotions. Each experience of grief is unique not just to the individual but to the circumstances. It won't be the same every time. It has no roadmap. It has no "stages." It also has no ability to defy the moment-to-moment reality of what the heart feels. (Technically, it can "defy" that, but not without damage to the psyche.) It simply needs to be experienced and released before it will take its leave of us.

But it seems to me from this most recent loss -- of someone who was, without question, one of the most beloved figures in my life -- and from past ones (and there have been quite a few around these parts), that many people are very uncomfortable with the ways grief can present.

When I mentioned last week that I would be considering an internship with a hospice program, one of my classmates asked if the topic wasn't a little too close to home (on accounts of my brother's death five years ago, I gather). I'm not sure what she was implying at the time, but what I think right now is that it would be grossly inappropriate to be a counselor of grieving people if you yourself have not experienced profound grief. No two experiences are alike, but if you haven't had any significant experience with it yourself, I think you've got no business sitting with people (or their family members) who are facing the end of the lives.

If nothing else, you learn from experience that there are special forms of hell that exist only within the human heart that is facing or has experienced a significant loss. Then, you have to be prepared to sit and be present with someone as they explore that slice of hell within themselves. And rather than trying to distract them from it, you might be in the position to help them look at it a little more closely, to regard the depth of their pain and see its correlation to the power of their love or their life force. (Or, perhaps, to regard the absence of pain as a correlation to the power of their love, considering it in the light of things which are simply unbearable.)

For nearly three days, I was rendered emotionally numb by Liz's death. I lost my internal compass, and it was incredibly disorienting. My emotions finally returned in some ways today. Unfortunately, they did so with very poor timing, and one of my professors had an eagle's eye view to me "being in and out" of my body, as she put it. When I explained my situation, she shared with me one of her recent experiences with death but, mercifully, did so without drawing comparisons between her experience and mine.

Each experience is unique. So it's especially annoying to listen to people try to compare their experiences with grief with the aim of saying "how it goes." (And this happens a LOT, I can assure you.) But it's also maddening -- and terribly INSULTING -- to be questioned about how you are handling your grief. (Not to say we should ignore it when people are harming themselves, as in drinking too much or engaging in reckless behavior.)

MiniMimi commented several times on her "mania" with small shades of embarrassment, as if perhaps she was not acting properly in light of her mother's death. Don't let anyone dictate to you how it should go, I told her. Be how you need to be, but be safe about it. Grief doesn't follow a map.

"No kidding," she replied. "I keep thinking that if some tried to chart their grief on a grid -- this type of experience here, that type there; this timeline; that intensity -- and that if you connected all the dots, you would get a senseless scribble. You'd find Jackson Pollack in the details. It would be a portrait of randomness."

I suppose we will all be hoeing a long and tough row. No telling when or how it will get done. Perhaps, in some ways, it never will. But in the meantime, as one of my classmates said, allowing ourselves the grace to be OK with what's happening is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

Gift No. 2, I think, would be a good massage.