never-ending pain

I know why it’s called a broken heart. No, it’s not just the metaphor of the heart as the center of feeling. When grief is deep and relentless, you feel literal pain in your chest.

I felt it all the time in the beginning. Now it comes and goes, never offering warning before it pounces. Somehow grief feels like both a predator and a friend, a thief and a companion. That’s fitting, I suppose, because grief is all about the both/and realities.

I can both laugh about silly Christmas memories and hate that he will never be present in new ones. I’m glad I’m back in a liturgical tradition of faith, because my soul needs advent. It needs the both/and, the already but not yet. Jesus is coming, but he’s not here yet.

I believed in an afterlife in an intellectual sort of way before Lee died. Now all rational analysis is gone, because I can’t breathe without the hope that his life continues into eternity and mine will too. If I’m wrong, I don’t want to know any different, because surviving this depends on telling myself stories of heaven.

Imprecatory psalms are my jam right now too. While the language is more polished, David sounds a lot like he’s praying my common prayer of “what the actual fuck, God?” in most of those. When Christians get uncomfortable about how open I am with my pain or question my raw expressions of lament, I know they haven’t read their bibles. Some day I’ll make an assigned reading list for friends of grievers, a list to remind us that the cheerfulness of our cultural Christianity is more culture than Christianity.

Tonight is one of those nights when my chest literally hurts. I’ll take a Xanax soon, but right now I’m breathing through the pain and letting myself feel it all. I know the only way is through it.

I also know that there’s not going to be another side to reach in this life. There isn’t an overcoming of his death. No light at the end of the tunnel offers the reward we want most. We’re running the race, but we know it’s one with no finish line.

Living with Lee gave me a safety net. I could fall into his arms, fall into the security of his income, fall into the love we shared. Now, I’m still on this tightrope of life, but without the comfort of knowing who I call if my car breaks down and who I list as my emergency contacts. Friends are intermittently spotting me, but they can’t be everywhere. Some nights I have to journey in the dark on my own.

I’m mixing so many metaphors in this post, but I’m not sorry. I just answered a call from my daughter’s Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and I realized I didn’t have it in me to carry on the conversation. I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this right now. My husband died four months ago, and it’s Christmas. I don’t know when a good time will be, but I know it isn’t one right now.” Some weeks it feels like there isn’t going to be a good time ever again.

It’s awkward to say that I can’t talk right now because 150ish days ago, a wave knocked my husband to the ground with enough force to break his neck, immediately paralyzing him and severing the nerves that control major bodily functions like breathing and blood flow. He wouldn’t be declared dead until 24 hours later, but he was already mostly gone when I got to him on the beach. So, no, right now isn’t the best time to talk.

When people ask what I need, my mind goes blank except for this: I need him back. But no one can give that, so I don’t say the words I think.

I’m crying more nowadays. I don’t know it that’s good or not. I think it just is.

It feels like gravity disappeared July 19 when he died. I was at home in him. We all were. And now all the properties of the world as we knew it are gone. We have to learn how to not float away from everything without his grounding force.

Typical metaphors fail. How do you express that you feel like you’re drowning when your husband actually did? How do you talk about waves of grief knocking you down unexpectedly when literal waves doing that were the cause of death? How do you ever look at the beach or water the same way ever again?

I can’t even consider wearing a bathing suit yet, maybe ever. I grew up in Florida, the beach a second home of sorts, my backyard pool my first home. I swam competitively in high school and was goalie for Carolina’s water polo team in college. I’m a water girl.

Correction: I was a water girl.

I don’t know who or what I am anymore. I hurt. The heart pain reminds me I’m alive and he’s not.

That’s all I know for sure.