“Lisa, remind me again what Laura’s son’s name was. I can’t remember in my fudge of a brain.”
My lovely, heartbroken friend who lost her beautiful grown son to cancer 6 years ago was asking me, another bereaved mother whose young adult son died from T-Cell Lymphoma two years before that, about the name of a third young male cancer victim who died 7 years ago. She said her brain is “fudge.” That’s on a good day.
Immediately, I thought I remembered the title of a book, The Brain of a Long Distance Runner, which turned out to be “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.” Not exactly what I thought I recalled in terms of the metaphor I was seeking, but just as apt, perhaps more so. In any case, where is the book, the article, the professional scholarly research on either--the loneliness of the long distance mother, or your brain on the long haul of grief? Because that is what we, the bereaved of many seasons, are doing-- running the longest distance, the rest of our lives--under the weightiest burden imaginable---surviving without our children. And over the extended course of this slog, our brains have become---other---altered, if you will. In the bright-sided lingo of the day, it is called “transformation.” I prefer the term devolution.
The early stages of this protracted process are forgiven--almost excitedly so--as if the act of showing kindness is something for which the outside world is to be congratulated.. It is expected that we will be unable to think clearly, make sound decisions, move into our new empty lives with determination---though it is not at all unusual that our so-called “bereavement leave” will amount to no more than 3 days--maybe a week or two if we work for a “compassionate” supervisor who “understands.” But, those early days, during which we have been begrudgingly given a time- stamped pass on our inability to function, come to a halting, often uncomfortable, (always to us, unbelievable) end. Death, after all is death. The living must continue to soldier on. And most of us do, regardless of the irrational shame, self-loathing, and the betrayal we are likely to feel as we engage in this forced march further and further along into a pointless future away from our beloved children.
With guns at our backs we learn to carry the weight of our loss, but our hearts are hobbled and our minds have shrunk. I believe this is true--perhaps literally--but certainly in a figurative sense that absolutely translates into the realities of our lives. We are no longer capable of either generating or sustaining the neurological synaptic energy required to function, feel, be, as we once were. It is gone. What does this mean? What does this, as the mental health professionals like to say in their oily psych-speak, “look like”?
I imagine how our brains begin the dissolution process is different for everyone, but I venture to say that perhaps one of the most unnerving aspects is the change in our perception of time. All time. Linear time, that concept upon which we base our entire lives, is shattered. The past and the present fuse into one and the same; the future, apart from the terror that accompanies even the thought, disappears entirely. A hallmark of trauma, we are stuck right here, right now, in a nightmare that will not end. This stasis wreaks havoc. We lose our place in the scheme of things; lose any autonomic physical or emotional stability that can be assumed from the simple movement and placement of ourselves in space. We are in a free-fall determined and represented by a catatonia of the soul.
Over time, this inner disappearance of a center is reflected externally in an overall inability to think, to act, to find any meaning, any purpose. We lose ourselves in this sorrow and the sorrow engulfs us. Without the active practice of thinking, acting, being, we become ghosts. To those around us we may appear to be present, but our presence is an illusion, a hologram…. we are long gone….. Then, even our own gone-ness becomes irrelevant, most poignantly perhaps, to ourselves. What happens to us no longer matters--not in any sense that those who have not been through this holocaust can even begin to understand.
There is, in all of this, an odd upside, or at least a lighter shade of black. Being a “shade” is not necessarily the worst thing that can occur (that, certainly, has already happened).. There is a definite, albeit disconcerting, freedom in living the invisible life. Freedom first from the expectations of others, then more significantly, from our own expectations of ourselves to remain in a world where we are not, cannot, will not, be seen.
And then, under the umbrella of absence, we are, truly, completely at liberty to forget….the names of other people’s children, the absurd demands of a supervisor, a distant relative’s birthday, where we dropped the car keys, laundry soap, to turn off the television, plug in our phones, to eat, sleep, laugh, breathe….and in the forgetting to become one with our loss. To disappear into the expansiveness of our broken hearts, to be defined, motivated, filled to the brim and pushed forward by that which has annihilated us.
