Enduring

A friend recently wrote to me:

"I feel as if I've hit a new bottom. After over four years, it doesn't seem possible that I can feel worse, but I do. This is unbearable."

Here are my thoughts on what is and is not unbearable, and though I too have uttered these same words, I have begun, of late, to alter my thinking about the definition of the word--unbearable.

I no longer believe there is such a thing as a "bottom." No "low as you can go."
Grief is a free fall. It is fairly constant, this sense of having slipped through space and time. Occasionally, for brief periods, one can feel as if held aloft on an invisible current of air floating without effort. Remembering how simple it was to simply "be"-- before the supreme effort of staying perched upright took every bit of resolve one could muster at any given moment. Soon enough I am sharply edged back into the awareness that I am unmoored, hurtling, struggling to reorient myself to myself. Finding my bearings in empty space, measuring my positioning against a vast nothingness. A ceaseless mind-numbing self-correcting wild gyration, not only to the facts of my life-- the day to day realities all of which include at every moment of every day, the brutal knowledge that my son is dead--but to the very core of who I thought I was--the now disappeared woman.

And what I used to believe was unendurable, unbearable is, sadly, quite "durable," and despite what we, the aggrieved say, how we will tirelessly describe our daily pained existence, actually quite bearable though not to be preferred in any sense. We are not only not dead (we endure), we are bearing our pain living in whatever way we can--upright, free-falling, crawling.

The hard reality, the simple almost revolting fact of the situation is that if it weren't bearable we would expire from the intensity of the sensation...yet we don't. We are living still, and by virtue of that physiological truth, we are bearing what feels impossible. Whatever the stories are that we have to tell ourselves not to die, most of us are doing it.

For my thinking, and this is not as implausible or unthinkable an alternative as any of us would like to believe, but when this deepening sorrow becomes truly unbearable, each of us will find a way to end what we can no longer endure. This should be stated and acknowledged. There is nothing here that cannot, should not, be said.

The horror of this grief for some of us is that we DO bear it; we DO endure. There is no escape. It is all around us, in us, all the time. And there is guilt in that. Another seemingly unbearable emotion. That we should live and they could not. Some of us will make it, others of us won't. But until we aren't here anymore, we are, in fact, bearing it. We do endure.