Tourette's

At one point in the last couple of weeks I noticed that I seemed to have found a place to settle. The clawing pain of grief diminished for some inexplicable reason. No, not diminished. That is not the right word. Nor is lessened. It has been reformatted. It is still the wound that it has been and will always be, but like a metamorphosis that occurs in nature when a bud becomes a flower, or more to the point, a maggot, a fly, the shape of that wound is changed into another form. I mean to imply no sense of growing beauty or the equivalent of a creative spiritual expansion. Growth, change, does not always mean something larger, more highly evolved in any spiritual sense. Depth perhaps, but not necessarily grandeur. If an explanation is necessary here, think of cancer. It grows. In fact, there is probably no better, more appropriate description of the power and force behind the concept of growth than this hideous disease. There is an amazing, breathtaking, horrifying expansion in that growth, literally and figuratively. But no one, other than perhaps a research scientist, would ever equate the cellular holocaust unparalleled in nature that is cancer with a divine largess.


What had happened to create this subtle shift in my interaction with my own pain? And more importantly, how is this shift manifested in a way that I was able to notice something different in my own locomotion?


Initially, though not exclusively, I recognize the change because I have become more engaged with certain circumstances at work. Not more interested necessarily, but more aware. I am feeling more irritation with various situations, roadblocks that I know my years of experience as a mid-level manager and an executive assistant can mitigate. What for four years has been the fulcrum of extreme anxiety and an overpowering need to escape was now a slow-churning axle forcing forward an urge to participate. To be sure, I had many times wanted to intercede in situations where I knew my knowledge would be of help, and on several occasions I had even made the attempt. But invariably those attempts fell short or were self-aborted. Nothing could matter, nothing could hold up as "worth" doing in the face of Maxx's death. And, let me be clear. The activity, the slow, agonizing self-initiated movement associated with "participating," even minimally, will never be the equivalent of a living son. I must qualify and hedge all around the kernel of absolute truth in any shift I am ever able or likely to make. Apart from my daughter's life, nothing in my existence, no creative spark, no desire to re-engage, no presence or activity of any kind, will ever be the equivalent of my son alive.


That said, there is ineffable change. And that shift is one that is growing, haltingly, from inside barren depths out and up, toward breath and a lighter dark.


And while I am sensing, and to some degree, acting upon this turning, I am not fully certain that work (a job) is where I want this growth to begin. On the other hand, where else(for most of us)does one first notice any subterranean movement? In dreams, I suppose. There is that. And I have had those lately. The specifics are gone, but I been left with fleeting feelings of having been with Maxx in happier times. More a visit, than the usual desperate efforts to save him. I don't explore these. There is not really enough to explore, rather it is like catching a scent on a breeze-- vaguely identifiable, then immediately vanished.


Still, where else can I begin to work joints and muscles stiffened by grief unused to the stretch of thought beyond the confines of loss? There must be a first place. A first door slowly cracked open through which the fetid, moldering air or sorrow is allowed to escape. But I am hesitant. Mistrustful. And there is a sense of betrayal that lingers, a bitter mist around anything I might explore. What does this mean for my grief, that which has been my connection to and expression of love for Maxx?


No answers. Just a form of ceaseless jerking. A kind of Tourette's of the heart.