Grief Is A Memory That Holds My Hand

There is an unspoken kind of grief, completely estranged from death. You are now its grave. It completely rhymes with abandonment. You are now the punchline.

I miss a time when I didn’t know grief like the back of my hand. It used to be vacant spaces left after the death of a loved one, or at least some relative I know twice removed. It used to be something buried and left to be taken by the earth. It used to be something I had to say prayers over and leave condolences for the bereaved. It was a distant shadow gone over time, 40 days or a year after, followed by peace and silence. Maybe in my delinquent years, grief is trivial. I seem to have had a knowledge of how things work and easily come to accept things as they are, they all pass eventually—children after all are untainted, capable of seeing the world as it is without the chastened hindsight of adulthood, and the harrowing dread that follows every paycheck. I miss being 9, I was the visionary in the family.

Now it’s a memory that holds my hand, like a child with an ice cream cone in one hand, the other tugging me for attention. Fictional Marvel character Vision, in the miniseries Wandavision, once told the grieving Wanda Maximoff, about the stripped definition of grief dressed in a profound assertion of “What is grief if not love persevering?”—the very essence of the word. The internet further capitalizes grief as “love with no place to go”. I have known love but I may seem to have been putting it in the wrong places.

Love is a piano I play by ear, but I think I may have been outdated—they seem to have changed the rules last year. The year of abandonment, and short-lived fickle connections. Had I known I would lose like that I would have dealt my cards in a less nonsensical way. I would love to blame my hypomania, lost in the thick of it all but I am the architect of my demise. You know this story.

I keep thinking, and I still think of him softly from time to time, a boy I met in the embers of January cooling down after the winter fire of yet another depressive year. Joshua was supposed to be a passing crush, a hopeless pining, nothing more. He was not the type to have feelings for. A detached boy lost in time, lost in his mind, a struggling survivor of life. Believe me, my darling boy, I know. We were building our bodies to be a refuge for a darkness were turning blind from. Yet, his warmth and kindness were something I was weak for. My psychotic mind took the reins and I was running wild in a field I was not meant to be in. I guess you could say I loved him, but not in the way one with a fractured mind should. I was limerent. He was just a boy who wanted to be friends. And the more I was gripping the thought of him, the faster he was gradually slipping away. He started appearing less and less in person, and more and more in my dreams. I last saw him on a Wednesday night in April, we were saying goodbyes and see you soon. But he was the type to leave. His “see you soon” could mean “never again”, and later that week I realized he meant “never again”. I had felt the pain of abandonment like the time when my mother told me to make myself little to be seen less. I am sorry, my darling boy, I didn’t mean for my heart to turn out this way, but my mind had other plans. I still think of you as a friend, softly from time to time. I still miss you. But you will never know.

Memory is a funny thing, it was supposed to be soft, but it breaks. It breaks you. It breaks everything you’ve built after the ruin. Then takes the shape of grief, and that grief takes on the form of a person who isn’t there anymore. Not dead, very much alive, and that’s where all trouble begins.

At the foot of the last year, was an unexpected turn of the screw. I remember Cerisa. A woman of age but quite less than her years. A child-like wonder, and a grit of a scorned woman, hell hath no rage like that after all. A paradox of a woman. She fit my life like custom-made gloves, just perfectly splendid. She showed me tenderness that felt foreign—which is to say that it is something I did not get from my mother, so I called Cerisa “mother”. A safe place. But that too did not hold for long, because, she too, left. A bit like how Joshua did, unceremoniously, nonchalantly, silent, no nothing, not ever. But worse than he ever did, because she was worth more than several men. Friendships like that could start civilizations, but you know how empires fall eventually. But there is trouble in the exaggeration of your place in people’s lives. A deception of some kind, love is a business transaction these days, a fluctuating currency exchange. I somehow find my place in people’s lives in how they leave. But I wouldn’t vilify her leaving, nor I would with Joshua or with many of the old ghosts of my past. I guess I also took part in the fall of it all—bridges break in the middle.

There is an unspoken kind of grief, one where everyone writes songs for, or poems for, or drinks for, or distracts themselves from. There is an unspoken kind of grief, completely estranged from death. You can never bury it because you are the hole in the ground from which it lays. I have known this kind of grief since I was 15. I never talked about it until I was 28 and bleeding from my wrists. I still cannot grasp a proper discourse of all the grief I did not ask for.

I guess all this fear of abandonment and the grief that follows came from a time when I was a little younger than 15 when I realized I was not the son my parents asked for. If they had, I wouldn’t have to feel so alone in a house of four. I wasn’t seen and I wasn’t heard, I was made small and so I felt less and less of a person but a shell of where a person should be. I remember walking on glass inside a house I grew up in. I remember to try and disappear so that my mother could afford peace, and my father could remain at peace. To be seen in a house of matchsticks is to be burned alive. I was charred and half-burnt. All this pointless grief, all these abandonment issues was just the looking glass of how I am just the same ugly half-burnt child in that house by the Indian Tree of my old neighborhood. But I wouldn’t assign my parents some sort of monstrous quality, for they have been abandoned themselves, by their parents, by life. Trauma like that can be passed on to generations. I seem to be part of the third generation carrying a curse of some sort.

Now, grief takes the form of a more sinister kind. For being left by the ones you so religiously hoped would stay is a different kind of story altogether. It's the leaving that scars. It’s the living that scars. I guess the abandonment seemed to me a justification for how I was burned as a child in that home by the Indian Tree of my old neighborhood—a heartbreak that keeps breaking. It validates why my mother left me at times when I needed her most. It validates why my father sees me as a helpless little thing. It validates this ugly, vile, writhing thing that is the pit of my heart—that in the end, I am not lovable, redeemable in any way whatsoever. I guess you could say I take every leaving personally. It is all I have ever known.

But, believe me, my love, I would love to dismiss this narrative, I am writing it now. All this pointless grief for the living that left, all those that love so little. But with a deceptive ease of a sigh, I take part in its glorious chaos. It’s about time that I think about growing beyond the pit of my grief. Fortunately, in the narrative of the grieving, there is always hope. The antithesis of anguish. The Tonkin Model of Grief stipulates that while grief stays and is perennial, life if you move forward often with grit and hope, grows around it. It is perhaps the best kind of hope and healing I could avail. Grief remains the same size forever, the same pain the day they leave may come and go, and it could seem like you never have moved on at all. However, our life grows around it over time as we move forward. It will hurt less and less, eventually. I still think about all that I’ve lost in the last year, and the years preceding that. I still think about all the ones that left. I still think about how my mother could have offered me tenderness instead of knives for words. I still think of Joshua and his boyish smile. I still think of Cerisa and the softness of her love. I still think of the versions of myself that died to make way for the new. I don’t want to look at grief and see it as this dread. I want to see it as a token of the past that doesn't want to be forgotten. I am tired of mourning over the living. I want to look at grief and how it all just becomes a memory that holds my hand. It is a child that never grows, but it is a child that walks with me for a long time. I only have to be gentle to him. Feed him a well-deserved ice cream cone from time to time.