I have avoided using the word “recover” in this book, for several reasons. First, I do not want to present grief as some sort of temporary illness that will eventually go away with no lasting effects. Second, recovery in common usage is often linked to illnesses like addiction and eating disorders, and I think it is false advertising to place grief into that category (even if parallels can be drawn, and even if such an illness can be linked to a person’s grief). Third, recovery always implies that the afflicted will “get back to normal”.
Grief will never go away, it is not a mental illness, and it is a guarantee that you will never “get back to normal.” Yet, it is true that over time the emotional extremes decrease in frequency and even intensity, and there is a point where most mourners turn that corner of “this is hell” to “I’m doing okay.” So, I feel a better term is recuperate, which is honestly a synonym of recover with an almost identical dictionary definition but is subtly different in its implication that the effects of the damages are not quite going away even if they mend. You recover from a common cold; you recuperate from trauma.
For me, recuperation began when I finally hit system meltdown, and I hope no one else ever has to go through the years of self-imposed stalling tactics I employed that lead to that catastrophe. My father died in 1996; my slow-motion collapse began in late 2007. I find that ten-year gap enormously frustrating, but then I suspect it would be just as frustrating at 20 years or two years. I still sometimes view it as a personal failure that I did not “bounce back” after my parents died, and my therapist has to constantly remind me to be reasonable with myself.
It happened like this: I saw the movie Hot Fuzz in late 2007, and the realization hit me that had my life gone any differently, it was exactly the kind of movie I would have made. That is discounting a variety of factors, of course – the point is not that I easily dodged a lifetime directing movies, but that my life was so far off course from anything I had ever dreamed about or hoped for or even planned that I did not recognize it. I was a stranger in my own life.
Nonetheless, using tried-and-true tactics of avoidance, I kept the wheels turning in my life up until April 2008, when I was going through a box of my father’s belongings. There was one small wooden lockbox that was, surprisingly, locked and I knew I did not have the key, if I ever had. I unscrewed the base of the box and out fell a lifetime of mementos and keepsakes, the small detritus of my father’s life that he found so precious and rare that he had to lock them away. I will never know why he did that, nor what the majority of the little trinkets meant to him (e.g. a name plate badge; a set of USAF wings which were clearly off his uniform but not visibly different than the other twenty I have; pieces of jewelry). I broke down, completely and unfathomably, going to bed and crying for 24 hours straight.
From that point on I could not avoid the fact that I was in crisis, but I had no way of dealing with it. I simply did not know how. All through that summer I trudged along, terrified and uncertain, until I tried calling Lee’s Place Grief Counseling Center. I say “tried calling” because the first two times I called, I hung up on whoever answered the phone (I am sure I sounded like a prank call. I would like to take this moment to apologize for that). I do not understand why it was so scary, but it was, and on the third try I finally kept myself on the phone although I was reduced to crying hiccups. Somehow the secretary managed to make my appointment anyway.
All of which proves that I am stubbornly slow to change. It took several cracks in my amour and a year of blinking at the world in shock before I sought the help I needed. It is no lie to say that after that, things got really difficult, but it is no less true that they also got better. I worked at it because I knew I was at a point of “make or break”, even if I was doing it in slow motion.
Therapy is not for everyone, but it worked for me. There are, I am sure, as many different ways to recuperate as there are people in mourning, and I know I do not have all the answers. What seems universally true is that you know what you able to deal with, and when. I hate the ten years I “lost” to doing nothing more than mere survival, but it is quite probable that I needed that much time just to recover from the extensive system shocks I experienced.
The thing I hammer home with anyone I know who is in mourning is to not set expectations (or levy judgments against) their recuperation process. It is wise to keep a weather eye out for self-destructive behaviors, of course, but never ever forget that losing a parent is nothing less than a form of personal apocalypse. Own your recuperation, and respect that process.
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