Grief

 I've been crying every day for a month.

This is neither to be alarming or an alarmist. I am, for the most part, doing quite well. In many ways I've actually been incredibly happy, which has made this daily crying thing all the more vexing. I've been trying to figure it out - I've thought of so many reasons, all of them valid, but it's been very hard to pin down. It is, to put it bluntly, annoying as hell.

I've been doing so many good things. I've begun working out nearly every day, treadmill and strength training. I'm writing, some of it passable, and I'm eating, some of it healthy. I've been spending precious time with my husband, talking and holding and supporting. I've been able to see some friends, albeit at a distance, and have phone calls with others. I've been reveling in love, familiar and new. 

But I've also been feeling a profound and unrelenting grief, and it is so hard to bear. 

I don't know how much grief I have actually experienced in my life. I don't have a lot of practice, and sometimes I'm not sure if I am fully capable. I mourned and continue to mourn the passing of my grandpa last year, and I miss him a lot. I have felt grief for him, I think, and for our family, for the time we won't get. 

I've experienced other deaths and felt many strong feelings but I'm not sure - I don't know if those deaths inspired grief. Sometimes death is just the next step. Sometimes illness is so substantial that death is the best path forward.  

I think there's a page missing in the book of Alice, maybe, which gives the instructions on how to grieve. There are things like that, normal human responses, which don't always make sense to me. I need the step-by-step; I need directions. There's a disconnect between my intellect and my body - I feel pain but I'm practiced at putting it away. And, though I am intimately familiar with my emotions, there are times when I don't really have the words to process what they are or where they've come from. 

So I've been crying for a month and I don't really know why, but it was my husband - not an overly emotional fella himself - who reminded me, Alice, there's still a pandemic on.

Oh. Right.

And it's not just COVID, is it? Our country is a mess. It's horrible. It feels impossible to keep moving through the avalanche of cruelty, impossible to look towards the future with hope when our present threatens to end that future entirely. As I have written before, it's just too big. It's all the time. It's relentless.

I've been doing so many wonderful things in this messed up, in-between time, and as such, I have so much more to lose. And I think I am truly experiencing grief, preemptive, because I'm looking at my life and seeing all the things with which I am unwilling to part. Disaster seems too close, maybe the end of the whole darn world, and I'm thinking about my loved ones and my writing and my treadmill, for goodness sake, and I'm thinking that being so happy hurts.    

Maybe grief can only exist when you know how good life can be. When you are happy - all the way happy. 

I think that grief is probably not an uncommon emotion right now. We're all missing things, silly things like coffee at our favorite cafes, big things like birthdays and anniversaries, routine and delicious things like the Renaissance festival (that would be me) or a family vacation. And in that missing, in that lack, we might be realizing how beautiful life really is. Really should be. It's hard to notice the good stuff when we are living it, and we are - or at least I am - discovering how hard it is to live without it.   

I just don't know how to do this, and I'm not sure if any of us do. It's so prolonged, and it's the world we have to live in every day. It doesn't stop and we cannot stop it. And I - I need directions. I need to know how to make do. Crying every day is just rotten and useless and I hate it and -

Is this what it means to grieve? Does it really feel like this - a pain so deep you can feel it down to your fingertips? Like a bad breakup, like a diagnosis, like a death?

I'm so happy in so many ways, given gifts I never would have imagined pre-pandemic. God, I am so darn lucky. But it seems that one of those gifts is a bitter one, and undesired. Because the pandemic is teaching me, maybe teaching all of us, about loss. About waking up with loss every day, about trying to fall asleep as we long for so many things which are out of reach or gone entirely.

I'm so happy. I'm so impossibly sad. 

And I don't know how to live with that.