To be special

It’s difficult to be present with grief, our own or someone else’s.

When my Uncle Bill died, Aunt Margie’s grief compressed the atmosphere. They were truly in love and best friends for close to 60 years. Then he left her. We feared she would die, too. I called often to make sure she was eating. I visited more than usual—I lived half a continent away. But I could barely be present with her grief, much less mine. Uncle Bill was the kindest soul I ever knew. I may have survived my suicidal years because of the absolute mercy I experienced with my aunt and uncle during an otherwise merciless time.

Even in the deepest grief I’ve ever witnessed in a human being, Aunt Margie remained absolutely merciful. She was not angry with him for rejecting chemotherapy, or leaving her alone not knowing how to drive a car. She did not travel, renovate her house or take up bridge. She stayed fully present with her grief for as long as that grief needed her presence.

I’ve seen people jump out of airplanes. I’ve seen them dangle from ropes over raging waters to save someone else. A man here in Washington walked out on an unevenly frozen river to pull others from the wreckage of a plane. I’ve heard the stories about battlefields. Jim Brady jumped in front of a bullet. These are unquestionably brave things, but I have never heard about nor seen a greater act of courage than my Aunt Margie’s surrender to grief.

She is my Buddha as I grieve now. I could compare the weight of my grief with hers, but that would be useless. It would be a way to deny my grief, which would just create more grief. Our feelings are genuinely what they are. Judgment creates more suffering.

It’s taken me nearly 45 years to accept that teaching, because I was taught to deny and judge everything I felt, including the self-judgment. Thus the richness in those moments and the opportunity to learn was overlooked. As I allow myself to be present with my grief now, I discover new depths within. I encounter the self-judgment without judgment. Why, it asks, would I grieve the loss of a partner who lied so easily and so often that his words turned into empty sounds? Why would I grieve for someone already making a life with a new partner that he more than likely had the entire time we were together? What exactly am I grieving?

In the presence of my grief, I see it is not at all him, per se, but the illusion that I was special to someone. That even though he lied compulsively about every other aspect of his life, and adamantly believed himself, I wanted that part to be true. Inside me the child who knew so little mercy wanted so desperately to really be special to someone. To just once be accepted and loved as I am. He created that illusion, and it was very intoxicating before I peeked behind the curtain.

It is my need to be special that must be let go of, because as long as it remains I do not accept myself as I am. And the way that I am, a fragment of divinity, could not possibly be more special than it already is. I now see I’ve gradually let go of the special myth in other parts of my life—at work, in my writing—and they’ve become easier and more pleasant. The last frontier is intimacy.

Without this grief, I would never have known.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.