Growing up in Grief - Part 2: Fear, Freedom and Fromage

Today, cheese made me burst into tears.

Yes, cheese.

Medium cheddar, specifically.

There I was sitting at my desk in silence, minding my own business, eating my cheese (medium cheddar)… with big, hot, uncontrollable tears running down my cheeks. True story.

You must think I’ve lost my mind. To any passerby, it would seem your assessment may have been correct.

Was the cheese so awe inspiringly delicious that it reduced me to tears?! It was tasty, but, no.

Did something happen?! Nope.

“Rachel, are you ok?!”

“Oh yeah, having a great day!”

(Insert concerned pause here.)

“ …Yes, really!”

So, what gives?! Well, that is a loaded question.

Here’s the play-by-play:

Bought a Chef’s salad for lunch.

Sat at my desk.

Ate the ham.

Ate the hardboiled egg.

(Yes, I eat things one thing at a time.)

Then, the cheese.

(Nothing happened.)

Realized it tasted a lot like the cheese I had at home as a kid.

(Lightbulb has not yet turn on.)

I remembered how my mom used to pack four pieces of cheese in my lunch every day.

(Awww, that’s so nice.)

I then noticed that my salad had four pieces of cheese of relatively the same size

(… The switched has been flipped.)

At that moment, my memory made the sensory connection and for a brief moment, it felt like I was there sitting at my desk in grade one with the same piece of cheese in my hand.

Which led to remembering how other kids used to make fun of me for having cheese in my lunch and not Wagon Wheels (a chocolate covered miracle-of-a-cake-like-treat).

(… Oh no, don’t go there!…Too late.)

Then I remembered how I’d come home upset and my mom would try her best to soothe my feelings of childhood social inadequacy by telling me that cheese was the food of the Gods and that only the best kids were allowed to have it like I did.

I remembered how special she always made me feel and how sweet she was.

(There’s no stopping this train now…)

And suddenly, I was overwhelmed with feelings of nostalgia (or what the Portuguese refer to as sausade) and for a minute or so, I was inconsolable. I just missed her, so much.

And just like that, I was taken out by a single piece of medium cheddar.

Today wasn’t a day of significance and there wasn’t anything that could have predicted this. It was truly a random moment. In a split second, an arbitrarily indistinctive sequence of memories that I hadn’t thought about in over twenty years, surfaced out-of-nowhere with the vengeance of a F5 tornado. The moment came and went just as fast.

It was truly enlightening. I concluded that you’re never truly free from grief. It shows up uninvited, unannounced, when it pleases and in the strangest ways.

Triggers come in different shapes and sizes, most of which are commonplace in your life. For example, songs, objects, places, holidays or events that you shared with your loved one are the obvious ones. Even other people to whom you were mutually connected to can be difficult reminders of the person you lost. We tend to avoid these like the plague because the triggered feelings are uncomfortable and unpleasant. I know I sure did.

The opposite is true as well, they can bring back comfort and happy memories. What’s also true is what triggers happiness one day can easily have the opposite affect another day and vice versa. It really depends on a myriad of things; mood, weather, stress, etc… Who am I kidding? There isn’t rhyme or reason because sometimes, it’s literally just a piece of cheese that summons a whole subset of memories that happen to make you temporarily sad. This really speaks volumes of the unpredictability of grief.

I think it also sheds light on the intricacies of our humanity, our physiology and psychology. How easily our senses can elicit long forgotten memories that transport us back to moments in time with only the flicker of the right neuro-pathway. We are truly amazing machines. The complexities of human behaviour and emotion are mind-boggling. It’s no wonder traumatic events can rewire the fuse box that set off unpredictable and sometimes irreversible chain reactions.

Grief tends to combine multiple emotions and shakes them up like a martini; potentially one powerfully incapacitating cocktail. Overloading the senses all in one fell swoop. When grief arrives on your front step, you never really know how long its stay will be. It can be constant, instantaneous, sporadic or in short burst at various levels of intensity. You never really know what to expect except to expect it to happen, even twenty years later.

Another thing is for sure, with time, the frequency tends to diminish considerably. That in itself is comforting. That doesn’t mean it stops, though. The saying “time heals all things” is laced with inaccuracy – in that you never really heal, you just learn to cope better. Grief never goes away, it just doesn’t come back as often or for as long as it did in the beginning. Although, the intensity can vary depending on the trigger.

A deep cut will always leave a scar, but at least the bleeding will have stopped.

Regardless of time lapsed, losing someone will never become insignificant or unimportant. You will always miss that person. It will truly always be a loss that can’t be completely reconciled no matter how much you try because no one is the same. No one is replaceable.

The truth is, the more you avoid the triggers, the longer it will take to deal with the negative effects of grief. It took me a long time to realize that.

Celebrate your loved one by allowing yourself to remember them. It can be painful but by refocusing that pain can become a healing experience. Grief is your body’s way archiving the memory of a loved one into your mind, heart and soul so that you can take them everywhere you go in life. Ironically, engraving their significance permanently so that you don’t ever lose them… And sometimes when you least expect it, they come back to you in ways you’d never expect.

It’s Alan Jackson on the radio, red plaid shirts, wild yellow Lady Slippers, Matinée cigarettes, Old Vienna, pump organs, Red Skelton, and yellow Ski-Doo Safari 377s… It’s cubes of medium cheddar in the middle of my happy life on an unassuming Friday afternoon.

Little moments that remind me how much I will always miss and love her.

And so in the end, they’re never really gone. It would truly be sad if they were.