Status Updates From Sanctuary: A Memoir

It can happen anytime, anywhere, and unless you're constantly vigilant, which is no way to live, grief crashes into you when you least expect it. It kicks you awake and suddenly you feel like you have the heart flu, or that you've been crying for days even though your eyes are dry.

Just like turbulence, you never know when it wil hit you, make your thought luggage tumble from the overstuffed overhead bins of your mind. Reminders of who or what you've lost can be hidden in the unlikeliest of places, ready to puncture the thin veil that separates you from your grief, like the veil that separates your lived life from an imagined life or memories of the past.

Who can open that door?I think of the room as a hole.Thehole drops & drops,getting deeper and deeper,creating spaces and rooms a griever can drop into or explore,unwillingly,at any moment of any day.Andsometimes the whole isa crypt suddenly filled with light&fresh air,asif someone has thrown open a window on a summer morning before the beat of the day descends and all the curtains are closed to trap inthe cold air.

The unbearable pain of a particular traumatic event that went on for a few days was replaced by another sensation: something happened that I had observed in myself several times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. - Carl Jung

When Ronan was sick, the work was giving medicine, mashing food, checking machines, changing diapers, giving baths, and long moments of silence and dread. The list was the love; the list was the work; the list was the living, the proof of life.

I was resilient, yes; but because I was broken and morphing. I wish now that I had been more open about the true growing pain of that shift, even if it frightened people, even if it frightened me to be so unhinged.

Grief might be described as a specialized molt of emotion. All of us are required, at some point, to transform in some way (mentally, physically, emo-tionally) in order to live. It doesn't make us brave or special or worthy of being singled out. It makes us living creatures made of malleable, mortal, and, yes, resilient, stuff.