This will be an unusual blog post for me. It has nothing to do with horses or endurance or riding.
It has everything to do with families and grieving and loss and the life lesson having to do with learning to deal with the cards you’re dealt regardless of how fervently you wish you’d gotten an entirely different hand.
I’ve had plenty of death in my life, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve counseled friends and family, perhaps having the good fortune of having dealt with less of it, this simple fact: People deal wildly differently with grief. And that it pays to give the grieving a wide berth and to learn that their function (or dysfunction) has little to do with you, the other poor fool grieving somewhere adjacent to them.
Yes, well, as oft is the case with glibly handed-out advice, it’s a lesson the deliverer is still in the process of learning.
I hesitate to write about this lesson publicly, but then realize that those who have handed out the hurt are unlikely to be aware of it, so far am I from their radar screen, a limb neatly trimmed off the family tree by virtue of my mother’s death.
My mother’s death when I was seven left me with a chasm in my psyche. A hunger, of sorts, to fill my heart with the essence of her, to KNOW her in the only way I could figure out how. Through those who knew her and loved her. Simple, right?
Not so much. When an exceptional woman and mother and teacher and friend is snatched from this life unexpectedly, the emotional shrapnel is deep and scattered and leaves the victims who surrounded her with a variety of symptoms and scars. For many of those who loved my mother, the answer was to close down, not speak of her, leave the scars and wounds untouched for fear of opening them again. And who am I to judge that response?
But it left this person yearning. Clinging to words and memories and little glimpses casually dropped as though they were pearls. Little pieces of the mother that I had never had the privilege of coming to know as so many daughters know their mothers, the very essence of what makes their mother the woman, the wife, the friend, the artist, the teacher, the daughter or sister that she is. And far too afraid to beg those who loved her to share that.
I am sure that I acted out in a million different ways, all of them unpleasant at best. Angry? You bet. I’m still pissed to have been robbed of that person in my life.
So when someone would offer me a peek, I would listen earnestly, but not too earnestly, not wishing to upset the applecart, not wanting to pry, not caring to open a wound that was perhaps on the verge of healing. Almost.
And oh, but I wanted to know her. Wanted to know her and imagine her as she aged, wondering what she would have been like as a fixture in my life as I grew older, and with her two sisters, who physically resemble her so closely, it was as if she were almost there. Almost. The pain and pleasure it would give me to see my mother’s sisters, the very definition of bittersweet.
But that was me, and that was my way of coping. Clinging to my relationship with my mother’s family, hoping and praying that they would want to keep me close in the same way I wanted to keep them close; to hold my mother’s memory alive, to see her and feel her and know her through our intrinsic similarity.
Wanting them to grieve and handle the loss in the same way that I did.
Ah, but that life lesson, the one so casually imparted to others about the vast differences in how others grieve. About our need to respect that and understand it, and most critically, to not take it personally in the least, lest it tear your heart apart.
For my mother’s sisters, I think I am a painful reminder of their profound loss. I can see in our shared features the passing look of pain when they see me. I know it too well. But for them, and I can only guess this to be true, the pain outweighs the yearning, the need to know, the desire to remember.
And so, slowly over the years they’ve severed the branch from this part of their family tree. I search in my heart for the thing that I did, the hurt that I caused, the extended hand that I did not take, or the hand that I did not offer, but in the end, it’s not about me at all.
It is about them, and their own pain and loss, and their need to heal those wounds in the way that causes the least suffering in their heart, free from the reminder of the sister they might have had if the driver of a car had not failed to stop at a stop sign that night.
In my less emotional moments, I actually have the clarity to see these things for what they are, and to cherish, in the oddest possible way, the gifts that these losses afford me.
I am blessed to cherish life, every minute of it, to know in the most profound way that there are no guarantees of a tomorrow. I’m gifted to realize that it is profoundly critical to love those whom you love, to tell them you love them and to keep them close to your heart. That we are blessed with the gift of choosing our friends, and how doubly blessed we are when those whom we dearly like and love and know and share our daily struggles with are also those to whom we are related.
Life is so very, very short.
And as my brother, years ahead of me on the way to learning this life lesson said to me yesterday, “you know, Patti, it’s not being related to someone that makes them family.”
Almost thirty-seven years from that car accident, and I think I am finally catching on.