It's only natural, maestro
Twenty two significant losses in just eight years.
I took inventory today. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm getting ready to try to leave it behind me. Maybe because I can hear the part of me that absorbed my mother and father saying I'm overly dramatic.
I wanted proof maybe. So twenty two. Eight years. Some violent and sudden and witnessed. And a lifetime of caregiving that flipped back on after hiatus, eight years ago.
I wanted to know, is this a comparable experience? Who else has loved and lived like me?
There's a name for this: bereavement overload. Multiple losses occur, back to back without time to process normal grief in between. Cumulative losses mean longer phases in grief.
Gay men who endured through the '80s AIDS epidemic experienced it. Sometimes people in their 60s and up experience it as their spouses and peers die more frequently.
Grief just continues. Instead of an intense and sad blip, it lives on like inclement weather that just never breaks. I feel behind all of the time. Life on hold.
All the losses begin to fuse together so a death or a breakup aren't just the single event. Each carries the load of the others behind it, all the way up to the front of the line again, maybe just with a new face.
The ruminating hurts but it's part of the reaction in grief, love with nowhere to go. At this point, I must have two doctorates in grief and a Nobel Prize on the way.
Earlier when I was inventorying, I literally stopped being able to keep my eyes open and fell asleep. But I fought to wake up. Over and over.
That's a fun dissociative reaction. When you have PTSD. I didn't mean to trigger it. I was simply trying to assess. So I pressed on.
In the liminal space, between sleep and wake, I saw a crow fly across my vision from my third eye and to the left. I saw the broad antlers of a giant elk before me, glistening with dew, in the light of dusk in a forest somewhere.
And then I heard a man inside of my head.
"It's natural, it's only natural. So don't feel bad about yourself."
And you know what, I don't feel bad about myself. This exercise seems obvious but it helped me really verify that I am not overdramatic. My losses have been overly dramatic.
My reactions have been sound. And I may hate my reactions and despise how long the rumination and the pain stay around.
But I am not ashamed anymore. I don't feel bad for my grief taking up space in my life as an embarrassment. I have struggled very much with that. As it's taken all of my energy for living to continue coping and processing. I've become a goddamn maestro of it I guess.