I’m sorry to inflict this photo on you but I thought it was hilarious — a lone duck standing on the wall, with the lights across the way on it, looking for all the world like a scene in a movie where someone is silhouetted by police spotlights. Is it an evil mastermind duck? Is it the underdog hero, framed by the villain? Is it just a duck standing there in the lamplight? WHO KNOWS!!?!?!
Clearly I wasn’t too awake this morning.
After Mandarin practice I listed to Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid, featuring his interview with a rabbi who has written about death, grief, and mourning. It was nothing new to me, honestly, but I liked the way the rabbi framed some of the issues, especially his comparing grief to ocean waves. At first they large and relentless, knocking you down every minute of the day, and eventually they become intermittent. But every once in a while, a rogue wave crashes to shore and takes you out at your knees.
Yes, that is definitely my experience of grief, even after all these years.
It caused me to mull on something I told some friends over the weekend, that after my parents died I did not suffer survivor’s guilt but rather felt like I had not survived, at all. I did not deal with my PTSD because I did not feel like I existed. I was a ghost in my own life.
But I was alive, anyway, and eventually the pressure of not being someone crushed me and I broke. I went to therapy, and changed my life, but the irony is that I am still not sure who was (re)born in the ashes of my parents’ deaths. Like a ghost, I’ve simply been whatever I am in the present moment. Which sounds like the Buddhist ideal but really, really wasn’t because also like a ghost I was not at peace in my world.
I’m still picking apart the question of, “who am I now?”