A Raw Grief

I have been watching Deep Space Nine, perhaps more accurately, listening to it as I cook and do housework. Today an episode came up where Jake Sisko was an old man, a writer who had given up his writing to do research. The plot revolved around Jake's father, Benjamin, being caught in a time anomaly. Every few years he would pop back into normal time and briefly reveal himself to Jake.

It reminded me of some of the vivid dreams I had after Tom died. I had one recurring dream where we would be walking around on a beautiful day, doing the things we normally did, seeing the people we normally saw. And only he and I knew that he would die at the end of the day. It was an excruciating metaphor for the tension between ordinary life and the extraordinary grief that had come crashing into mine. 

Someone in my twitter feed lost her teenage son in a tragic accident last week. When I saw her post about being unable to sleep, my body remembered those awful months after Tom's death. I also had trouble sleeping, and so, so many dreams. She wrote, too, of the need to get back to work, what else are you going to do? I remember people wanting to relieve me of the ordinary chores, but there were no extraordinary chores that I had to tend to, other than the grief. And this was something I couldn't face all day every day. So I went back to work.

I realize now that the ordinary was not so much a salve for my grief, but a way to titrate it. I was grateful for work that required as much of my attention as I could give it, that gave me a few minutes respite from the all too raw reality.