Mind, the gap

Grief makes you unknowable. That's the worst part.

I cannot name one person my age or older who has not experienced grief in some form.

Some of us experience it far younger than we should, or to a significantly greater degree. But I can say with almost absolute certainty that by the age of thirty, or near that number, you have done enough in this world—and this world has done enough to you—that you’ve been forced to mourn something substantial. You have lost something you couldn’t have fathomed losing. You have weathered an impossible storm.

I have friends who have lost brothers, parents, babies. I have friends who have been betrayed, assaulted, who have gone broke, who have lost their homes or the abilities of their body, who have battled illness or addiction or abuse. No one is untouched by life, and life is—amongst many things—one long sequence of trials.

I have been lucky; my trials have been swift, and mostly gentle. And yet even I have grieved.

Now, on the other side of that terrible quest, there is a strange new reality: I am no longer completely knowable. For the first time in my life, I have an unseen depth. Something has occurred inside of me that I cannot express to others because words cannot convey it. This is its own form of grief, a compounded one—the way we lose each other to the murky waters of pain and trauma. I sit in front of you, but only most of me is here; some part of me is now inaccessible to you.

I am never again fully present. I am never again in complete community with someone; and therefore, I am, in a way, always alone. A fragment of my soul has been rendered invisible, deemed unsuitable for public consumption.

I reach out, but hold back. I smile, but taste blood.

For so much of our youth, we are desperate for others to know us, to see us. Late night sleepovers and long calls on the family landline and notes passed in class. Secrets shared, pillows inched closer together, eyebrows waggled across a busy room. We expose ourselves so as to avoid being trapped alone in our bodies. When a friend turns away, a distant look on their face, we urge: what it is? What are you thinking? Where did you go? Tell me everything.

Long past grade school, through college, into my mid-twenties, the phrase attached at the hip was said often of me and my friends. We knew everything of each other. I lived in their skin and they lived in mine, and we liked it that way.

But all at once, we were grown. All at once, we had separate lives, and in those lives, we began losing things we never planned to lose, bargaining bits of ourselves to survive. And that connection was severed.

Because once you have experienced tragedy—whatever its shape and scent—you are no longer knowable. Even if you try to expose yourself, empty yourself out to someone you trust, there is always more. Every day you accumulate more loss, and lose the time you would need to explain that loss to someone dear.

Once you have spent days in the dark, screamed until hoarse, lost twenty pounds, shivered in blasting heat, dug your nails into your palms to the point of wounding, bawled to the point of sickness, stood at a funeral that shouldn’t have happened, contemplated the knife or the long drop, clawed your way through the hours, liquidated your last reserves of strength and patience and then somehow found more and cashed that out, too… you are changed. (These are not prescriptive measures of grief; you know if you have felt it.)

Grief is an irreversible process, an uncrossable chasm. It is the loss after loss, the lingering distance. I am healed, but I am out of arm’s reach. I am the person you love, but I will never be that person again, and I cannot explain to you the difference.

There are moments from my divorce and all that followed that I cannot share. Conversations endured. Midnight negotiations with myself. Moments of desperation, in which self-harm became a tangible thing. And even in this, I know: I carry less than most of my loved ones.

That is unacceptable to me, that they must bear these burdens and I cannot help. My parents, my siblings, my best friends—I would die for them, and yet they each carry some leaden weight inside themselves too heavy, too big, too uniquely theirs to be carried by anyone else. Memories replay over and over again in the back of their mind, a film only they will ever see.

I wish I could sit all of my people down and give them the days, the weeks, the years they would need to share these dark corners of their psyches with me. But something will always remain in shadow. I get that now, because I have shadows of my own.

All I want is closeness with the people I love. That gap is intolerable to me. And yet, in adulthood, I see: it is inevitable.

But perhaps the only way across the gap is to accept the gap itself. To recognize that, in those moments in which they look away, their eyes clouded, their voice quiet— they are going to that room we cannot visit, that place we cannot touch. We must not take it personally. We must not burden them with the retelling of horrors. We must only believe that they have endured them.

Perhaps the only boon we can offer each other is to release the need to understand. To look across the chasm and say, with a different type of knowing: you have been hurt by this life, your hurt is a shade I cannot see, a texture I cannot feel, a face I cannot name, but I acknowledge it in you. You have a depth I will never reach, secrets you will never share, but I am here for the ones that you will. And I will hold space for the ones you cannot.

Perhaps if we do this, and we look again between us… somehow, as if by magic, that gap will be a fraction smaller.

And if we do this enough, over and over again, painstakingly consistent in our care—perhaps we may finally reach each other.