Grief is a Demolitions Expert; Death Does Not Knock When It Visits

These days, I just feel tired. Grief demands a lot of you—things that I don’t always have to give and would rather not relinquish anyway—and eventually it eats away at so much of your core you feel like a tree rotting from the inside out, ever in danger of succumbing to gravity’s call.

Sleep ceases to be an option and becomes the only course of action, but it’s not restorative nor is it entirely a reprieve, as every morning I seem to wake more wounded than the last. I wash my clothes constantly, my sheets have yellowed with sweat. I call out the names of the dead, who can rest when I cannot. Sleep was once asylum, now it is a holding cell.

I have lost people before, many people, in all sorts of violent ways, ways that scared me when all I knew of death was that it happens, eventually. Some were an explicit kind of violence, others quiet, a demolition done in silence, and all I could do was watch from just beyond the chainlink fence.

When I read about grief, or hear of it, helplessness is a common theme. It is a losing game of tug-o-war, in which you strain and strain against the rope but find yourself hopelessly sliding towards the dreaded median, even as your arms burn in protest and your jaw aches from the fierce gritting of your teeth. You can bare your teeth all you want. It won’t make the slightest difference. Once you’ve crossed the median, that line doesn’t exist anymore. There is no other side to return to.

Helplessness seems to have its own half-life, and if you aren’t careful it decays into self-destruction of the purest kind, because nothing is within your control but the damage you do to yourself—and well, I could do a lot of that. Somehow I metamorphosed from the observer at the fence to the operator of a wrecking ball. I float in the vaccuum of self-betrayal, but my mind is more than capable of filling in the lapses of sound.

If I had advice beyond reflection I would give it, but the truth is that I don’t. I light candles and weep until they burn down to the quick. I play songs that shatter me, and songs that piece me back together. I hide in the bathroom and smoke — I get the shakes now when I don’t. I let myself miss them. I let myself miss them, and wonder if somewhere far away, they are missing me too, or if they are beyond that now, beyond all of this entirely. I wonder if I will ever move beyond this. Grief has a habit of stretching itself out over lifetimes, occupying days that move too slowly and weeks that disappear, so when I flick through my calendar, every day is crossed out. I haven’t written in a planner in months. There’s no need to plan when you wake in the morning and know exactly what the day will hold.

And I know this is all very bleak and sullen, but that’s how grief has bound me, and it perpetuates its own survival by preventing a shapeless future from assuming any distinguishable form. Hope has become a butterfly just out of my reach, fluttering through a garden that is half-dead, paying one last visit to what will soon become a graveyard. I’m sure it will bloom again, with time—that’s what everyone says, it takes time—but time is all I have right now, and it is as immaterial and meaningless as the grief itself. It is not time that I am afraid of, but the vision that I will forever be an observer at that chain-link fence, watching my city fall without a word, watching buildings return to dust, knowing that my home is on the demolitions list (eventually, one day) and others will stand at the fence to see its demise. I hope that they can hear it, but I know, in my heart, that they won’t. No one can. Death does not even whisper when it opens the door.

I try to see myself with empathy, try to manifest some strength into the frailty, because I am an adult and have been here before, even lived to see the other side of longing. But in the end, all I see is a child who can’t see past their own grief, and I am shouting through the fence, but they don’t seem to hear me. I am just part of the noise, and they are living in silence.