Lost in grief

Last summer I worked in a refugee camp in the remote mountains of Thailand. The goal of the research project I was running was to understand mental health and coping strategies of the refugee population and ultimately to deliver a tidy report to those paying my salary. 

In the process of wandering around and discussing mental health with the population there, I was brought to a small bamboo shack deep in the isolated jungly part of the camps. There was a woman sitting on her platform made of bamboo. There were no walls and only a roof made from thatching large leaves together. This was her home. She was wearing a beautiful handmade skirt in bold black, red and white that she had made with her own two hands. She didn't speak but sat and rocked, not even looking up when we joined her. I was told by my translators that she had lost all of her family during the terror inflicted on those in Burma. She had experienced so much pain that she was a frozen person. She could no longer move or even just be, she could only rock. 

If she had yarn, she would weave colors together to make a pattern. She lamented in barely audible burmese that the weaving was her only comfort in life but she had no yarn. I imagined the extreme predictabiliry and control involved in taking each string and putting it in its place. Making sense in an otherwise senseless world. I sat there aware that this was what extreme emotional pain looked like. Embodied. I arranged to have yarn sent to her. I did this because intelectually I knew it was the right thing to do. I however could not deeply empathise. At the time I had never experienced emotional pain that was anything more than a surface wound. 

For the past four months, I have become my own version of this rocking woman. I am aware that divorce and the pain of watching the man that I spent my whole life with starting a new life with someone else compares little to loosing your whole family. But for me this is the pinacle of my own personal emotional threshold. 

I am not lost to the jungle, not totally consumed by it and my own grief like this woman. I still go about my day. 

But last week while buying shampoo in the super market I suddenly felt seering pain in my chest and broke down with tears flowing freely. My ten year old son comforted me and said "let's just get home mom." 

The loss of my family as a whole complete unit, the loss of someone that knows me and loves me anyway, who accepts me after everything. This loss does impobilise me for long moments in my day. It stops me in my tracks. It inflicts real physical pain. It takes away my ability to breath. 

Four months have passed since I floated down that jungle river in Borneo crying uncontolbly as I sat company with fresh loss my broken family still in tow. Since then the tears and pain has been unquantifiable. Deeper and greater than I thought possible. After years of no emotion and no tears this grief feels like an infected pimple that burst letting out all of the built up puss of the past. In this way the pain hurts, but also has no choice but to come out. 

Grief is something that you can either let pass thru you or consume you. The burmese woman I met had long ago been consumed. Like a stone statue that had been overgrown she was lost to this grief.

I now have to find a way to let the grief go. Let it pass theu me. I have to find a way to not be lost in this grief stricken jungle. I have to walk out of the forest and look at the sunshine. 

Liminal Space

Liminal Space is a concept often used in Anthropology to describe the grey areas of life. The space between two things, where one ends and before the other begins. This term was originally  introduced by a well-known representative of French positive anthropology Arnold van Gennep. He describes it as a threshold, boundary, passage between two different places. 
 This is the space I find my self in now, in this passage between. At the end of an 18 year marriage, searching for life's edges to gently trace with my hands until some solid form emerges. Looking for footholds to snag a new path, a new way forward. The world has become this grey space, this in-between space, this liminal space. It is appealing to make things black and white, grey is hard. loving someone or not loving someone. Wanting someone or not wanting them. keeping something sacred or smashing the whole thing to the ground to break. In between this is never clear. This in-between space is which I am lost.

Last night I went to a party, the first for me in some while. People were dancing and drinking and smoking. I expected that I may see my partner/lover/baby's daddy/best friend of 18 years there with his new girlfriend/lover/fling standing in a dark smoky crowd, seen only from a distance. I chose to go anyway. I decided to dive into that darkness and let it all sink in. This is all still fresh, I am still wounded by the knowledge that what was, is now not. I almost wanted to see them there, to feel the pain burn, to let it sear the grey space into something more black and defined. I didn't see them. Instead, I danced with strangers, watched people much younger, go through courting rituals of drinking and flirting that seem more foreign than the rituals of animal sacrifice all around me here in this foreign land. I watched and observed and wondered if there would be an after to what feels now like only a before.

There is the before I realized that he was sharing a bed with a woman that I can only see or know  in facebook posts, learning only that she both teaches yoga and smokes. A dichotomy that in the abstract I find both respectful in its duality and pitiful in its contradiction.

There was before I ran off to Paris to cope with my new choice to throw out the person I shared all of my adult life with.  Walking bundled in heavy coats and boots borrowed and scavenged to protect my thin tropical skin. Walking arm in arm in the company and solace of the only person I new who could accept my grief as she had her own. We walked thru grief filled graveyards and wandered the halls of the Louvre witnessing the paintings that kept company with mona lisa. We ignored it all and only wept and walked.

There is before I threw him out of our house and told him that he needed to find a life for himself beyond sitting and drinking and not doing, so I could grow to love and respect him. He wept daily and pleaded for a return to our version of normal, vowing that an absence of a life purpose his only crime could be redeemed. But I punished him with dis-missle to an abandoned building in mid town that once carried a vision of reconstruction that was ours to make together. There he slept alone amid rubble in the dark, trying to piece together a life.

There was the before I spent months contemplating if love could be shared among many, if I could love her and him, if love was big enough for us all. Before the night that she sweetly invited me to sleep all three of us together in their marital bed sideways in a row like children as if nothing could happen that would cause any future damage. Him cleanly showered, eyes sparkling, her soft and sweet and sincere. I wanted to see what it was like to love the two people who had become my family, Love them both at the same time, both together, all abandon to the wind. I wanted this. I declined and instead let her wrap me in his raincoat and drive home on my motorbike in the rain. I did this not for lack of want but because I imagined the grief and anguish I would cause the man sleeping at home in my bed, our bed of 18 years.

There was the before I spent months contemplating if what I had was enough, if there could be more, if love was something beyond shared space, if it had anything in common with sparks and fireworks or if like an old red wine it was content to sit. That man sitting on my couch, sharing space with me, was he happy? Did diving into the sea of chemicals that are created when two new souls who have never met play with pheromones be worthy of some trial in life's long list of experiences? Is there any real harm in letting someone play with my pheromones from across the room? These were questions that ate at my day, and slowly unraveled me and what remained of my relationship. Was anyone responsible for this unraveling? Should I place blame? 

These questions that now seem akin to wondering if trying that first sip of whisky as a teenager might be a good idea or have some larger context in all the experiences in life. In the morning when the dark lifts you realize the whisky just made you drunk and you now have a headache. There is nothing important or meaningful to have come of it.

Before all of this there was just us, together. Together in everything. Together feeling trapped in what must be, enjoying the bland taste of comfort. Not appreciating the simple gift of a warm body that would accept you and hold you and take you every night as the cold set in. Not acknowledging that there is nothing more beautiful or important than ears over coffee that know you and and understood that your words were just theirs to hold and keep and not judge or diminish with opinions. These simple gifts became unappreciated with time and tarnished by the daily wear of life.

I am not yet to after. I am stuck. I am in this liminal space. lost in each of the things that came before. wondering if any of them can be erased. As there is no after,  I left the stable structure of before and I am still not yet to the transformed. I only take solace in the fact that this means the story is not over.