Some Thoughts on Mourning

It is a little over two months now since Mark left this world and I have learned a lot about human nature in that time --- some good, some not so good. Some I wish I hadn't learned. But one thing I know for sure is that there are an awful lot of people in this world who are scared witless of uncomfortable feelings. Mourning and all that goes with it --- tears, regrets, longing, memories, dreams and the loss of them --- is not fun. And people who are going through those emotions and experiences may not be fun to be around. But if I have learned anything in these weeks it is, please God, that I will be more aware and sensitive in the future to those who mourn.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by much of this but, naive as I tend to be, I am. Among the unfathomable things I have been told are:
• "Just don't think about it." Okay. How?
• "What can we do to cheer you up?" Are you serious?
• "You can't go on like this! You have to get over it." First of all, it is barely two months. Secondly, there is no getting over the loss of someone dear. Gradually, you learn to live with it but you never get over it.
• "Have you seen your doctor? Maybe you need some medication." There is a medication for grieving? Look, if I medicate the feelings away they'll just lie in wait and show up in another form. The only way out is through.
• "Maybe you'd feel better if we change the subject." I won't feel better --- but it sounds like you will.
• "Well, you didn't really know him that long, did you?" No, only four years --- so what is the alloted span of mourning for a four year relationship?
• "Geez, I didn't think you even cared for him that much." --- .
• "Seems like you need space. I'll leave you alone." Well, seems like one of us needs space anyway...

One of the things that I've decided is that those ancient cultures where people keened and covered themselves in ashes and threw themselves on funeral pyres made a lot of sense. There is this longing for a release that is so intense, so violent that it frightens me sometimes. It's not that I haven't lost loved ones before. My mother died a long time ago. I lost my brother a few years back and that was really hard. My Dad just died last year. But this is different. Gloucester was so full of Mark. It seems every time I left the house I'd see him. Now every time I get in my car it is with the aching awareness that it will not happen. My stomach clenches every time I see a silver Toyota truck. My head hurts every time I drive by our "meeting" places... I wish we hadn't fought, I wish I had been more patient, I wish...

Creativity helps. The playwrite/therapist Otto Rank once said, "I must give birth every day or perish." Boy, has that come to be meaningful! I have been writing a lot. I don't know what I will do with it but thank God I have it to do. I made a little video for his tribute page.

But more than anything there is this sweet, aching, heartbreaking awareness that I would not feel this broken had I not known someone so special. When my brother died I wrote, Accepting Jack’s death - the death of someone so incredible - has been a gut-wrenching process. It’s not fair. It’s not right. It is an outrage against the passion by which we humans are made so beautiful. I don’t know if it is possible to accept such a thing. But in my heart I also understand that if there is anything to grasp through all this pain, the meaning of Jack’s life and death is NOT the tragedy of his loss - but the indescribable miracle that such a glorious man ever lived at all.

Shortly after I met Mark I shared that essay with him and he told me he got tears in his eyes when he read that line. He said he thought that was the most awesome thing he had ever read about a man's life. It takes an extraordinary person to inspire words like that and, through all the pain and all the longing and all the sadness, there is one thing that sustains me --- that in my life I have been blessed by knowing not one, but two, such glorious men.

Thanks for reading.