by Maggie Russell
Yesterday, I found grief in the wordle. It was brief though. The wordle, that is. I guessed grief before I found the puzzle solution, brief. It’s odd that I produced grief first, having spent 20 years writing briefs.
Grief has been on my mind lately. Not as much in missing someone, but grief as in for a life you could have lived. Yesterday I was full of gratitude for finding a recipe that worked with all my symptoms. And then in a moment, I had a grief strike, it will be like this forever.
The symptoms I have may be manageable, but I live now with chronic swallowing difficulty (yet to be diagnosed). So too the dry mouth, dry eyes, dry everything. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a thirst that is so urgent it feels like a claw. Most days I walk around with that, it’s just worse at night. Grief is like that too, a million tiny urgent claws.
Grief has a kaleidoscopic effect on my life. It shifts the broken bits of my life and stain-glass windows my experience. One moment is bright, the next one is bleak. I’m not convinced grief is an emotion, though people try to treat it that way. It seems more like the weather, something that comes on its own – occasionally with notice, often without. This week, the U.S. has been subject to massive weather. Winds and tornadoes pound the East Coast. Snow squalls obliterate where I am, in the Mountain West. Hurricane force winds threaten the Pacific Coast. Severe weather can’t be “fixed.” There’s no amount of money we can throw at the wind to make it leave our houses upright. So too with grief.
The holiday season is a high tide for grief. If you’ve lost someone, or some part of you, it’s unavoidable that you will notice how traditions have changed. Sober folks for the first time see all their past Christmases where they were the ghost, there but not there. Haunting their families with pain. New sober Christmases might bring grief for the person they might have been. People who have lost a beloved stare at the mantle, seeing only the hole where the missing stocking should be.
The definition of emotion places it in connection to a thing, less a person. “Emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.”1
Grief is given more complex treatment. “Grief is the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person. [It] includes physiological distress, separation anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, and apprehension about the future…. Grief may also take the form of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for a mishap to oneself.”2 Other definitions of grief make it clear; grief is a state not an emotion. “Grief is a process or journey that affects everyone differently…. Grief has no set pattern.”3
Even the average duration for emotions and grief are different. According to the Cleveland Clinic, grief lasts from six months to two years.4 Emotions are shorter, though anxiety and hope last longer. None of the emotions last longer than sadness, though hatred comes close.5
Our porch this week has been a dance floor for the local chickadees and nuthatches. I can tell even when they aren’t peeping back at me through the window. Apparently, their tiny feet etched little patterns across my railing when, instead of waiting patiently in line, they hopped back and forth, chattering about our seed. True confession: my husband spoils them by getting the fancy kind, with bird friendly dried fruit in it. I like to think their dancing is a signal to other birds: “come get the good stuff!”
This week I also found myself wandering down a squirrel trail trying to figure out if there was a way to speed up the diagnosis of the swallowing issue – is it Chron’s or Achalasia or something else? Neither is a great option but pretending it will go away is a worse one. And my next available appointment with the relevant doc is still two months away, even though I made it three months ago. And what I found was that one of the treatments for achalasia is a procedure called POEM.6 I need poems to help me digest, to speak without fading in and out. Imagine that.
The question of what’s a poem and what’s prose drills like a teeter totter on my mental fields searching for oil. What’s “long” for me is an epic ballad for others. Briefs in federal court can extend beyond thirty pages. I once answered a 120-page complaint. It took forever. I think fast, I type fast. It’s a good marriage. I once banged out sixteen pages on the U.N. charter’s Article 6 in three hours on an exam. When I asked why I’d gotten a better grade than I’d expected (I can’t find most countries on a map), the professor responded: “I mean, you covered everything.”
Loss, like the albatross of student loans from that law school experience, is forever. That’s the weight of it: Its permanence. So too with chronic illness. It’s forever.
A friend asked me over the holidays “how can I keep my head from exploding when my mother-in-law asks, for the 14th time, ‘Are you feeling better?” I had nothing to share. My MIL asks only how I am feeling. She’ll share how much her warm water aerobics help. Options, and optimism, are a buoy in a sea of pain. The grief that spawns from this line of inquiry is what makes the question difficult, inappropriate even, regardless of the intent. Please don’t place me in such close proximity to the echo of “it will be like this forever.”
I have a new medicine that wipes out my immune system even further. Before I started on it, I’d already had a punky system that was low in neutrophils. Now I may be looking at a situation where I have so few I can give them names. I could cheer them on: “you can do it Larry! Show that virus who’s boss!” This floppy immune system now requires mask wearing. I can put off the mask by saying, it is hard to breathe with it on, given dry mouth. But in reality, the mask reminds me that I am now, and in the forgoing future, part of the “special individuals who are immune compromised.” Was it a compromise? Did I give something away to gain something else? I did my own hostage exchange: I gave away my neutrophils in exchange for less pain. Searching for masks, I find myself flinching at the idea. Can I find a fancy one, really invest it in, since it will be like this forever?
We don’t wrestle with severe weather. We prepare for it. We purchase extra bags of pet friendly sidewalk salt. We remember “there is no bad weather only bad clothing.” I don’t wrestle with grief. When I buy a fancier mask, it comes. When I can’t schedule more, I do less more often as they say.7 And I do other things: I drink exquisite tea, buy pajamas for my giant dog, read really good poems, sidle into the art museum mask in hand, if not on face.
Poems and art are essential, even to people that don’t need a POEM. The art articulates the new pathway, something other than what will be with us forever. This is what art does: it says look here, it’s all so beautiful, so generous, so fleeting. As philosopher Susanne Langer said: “[a]rt is the articulation, not the stimulation or catharsis, of feeling; and the height of technique is simply the highest power of this sensuous revelation and wordless abstraction.”
The highlights of an ordinary day are the things that heal grief’s wound. Art stamps its feet on the stone wall of my grief and calls to me, reminding me that those things it highlights will also be like this forever. “Come get the good stuff.”
Maggie Russell is a former attorney, writing tutor, essayist and poet who writes professionally about finance. In her creative nonfiction, she explores chronic illness and faith. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in Last Leaves, the anthology Write Where You Belong Anthology, and Elephant Journal. As a financial editor, she reports on legal developments for financial professionals. She volunteers with programs that teach poetry in prisons. Raised by the woods in Connecticut, she now lives in Nashville with her husband and pets.
- https://www.apa.org/topics/emotions#:~:text=Emotions%20are%20conscious%20mental%20reactions,Adapted%20from%20Merriam%2DWebster ↩︎
- https://www.apa.org/topics/grief#:~:text=Grief%20is%20the%20anguish%20experienced,and%20apprehension%20about%20the%20future ↩︎
- https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/grief-loss#:~:text=Grief%20is%20the%20natural%20emotional,or%20even%20denial%20and%20anger ↩︎
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24787-grief ↩︎
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/communications-that-matter/202309/how-long-do-emotions-last ↩︎
- https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/peroral-endoscopic-myotomy-poem#:~:text=Overview,other%20swallowing%20disorders%20as%20well. ↩︎
- I’ve lost the “they” in the they say here. If you find them, let me know because this is extraordinarily helpful. ↩︎
January House Literary Journal 
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