9.9

By Sherrie Ann Cassel

For Simone Biles

I am in awe of young Simone Biles. Not just because she is a champion for mental health, but because her athleticism is magnificent. Watching her command the air in The Biles’ Triple is without a doubt, one of the wonders of the world. As Simone has shared about the rigor of her training, the stress she was under to perform optimally for America, and with her own blend of mental health issues, still she is heralded as the greatest gymnast of all time. Her success can be a monumental inspiration to those of us who find that grief is most often an uphill battle. When I talk about working your process, I never mean to suggest it is an easy process. Much like Miss Biles, the amount of work it takes to get to the other side of grief, is substantial, and very often grueling.

The longstanding Kubler-Ross model of grieving certainly scratches the surface of the initial grief experience with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as our dance partners for as long as it takes for us to get to the graceful twirl of acceptance, where, as David Kessler, in his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage says, we begin to find purpose and meaning in life again. I haven’t achieved the Simone Biles’ Triple in my own grief process, but I am in love with life again, and even though I have lost the flesh of my flesh, my only child, I am grateful for my life.

I tried to leap through the air before I learned that it would be necessary to be a hot mess for a long time. The first year I sobbed convulsively every single day. Everything hurt. The emotional pain felt so physical I thought I was having a heart attack and went to the emergency room, where I was told that I needed to find a way to deal with my grief. Well, no shit. But the fact remained, I didn’t know how.

Healthy death rituals might not have been modeled for us as children. In my Mexican American family, for example, there was a clear division between adult themes and what was meted out to the children as reasonable burdens for us to carry. Some parents don’t want to burden their children with things like disease, social ills, factual history, and the very profound and inevitable grief that follows the loss of someone or something holy in your life.

I had thought I wouldn’t be able to maintain this site once I began my seminary journey, but like a hardworking gymnast, I wrestled with grief until I was no longer its captive and have made the choice to continue blogging as time allows. I don’t know that grief has an end point. My eyes still get misty when I hear I Will Never Be the Same by Melissa Etheridge. I don’t have meltdowns anymore, but I do have brief flashes of pain from time to time, but they’re manageable now.

Dr. Eugen Kogon, in his The Theory and Practice of Hell, attempts to normalize the horrors of Nazi Germany. I shuddered as I read through the book, and I have not been able to finish it because reading about those horrors proved to be too much for me. I know when I’ve had enough now, and I can control what I allow into my head and heart spaces.

So, how do you normalize pain? As I’ve said many times since that earth-shattering day nearly six years ago, I couldn’t even manage personal hygiene after my son died. My husband took over all my responsibilities while I adjusted, through hell fire, to the loss of my amazing and beautifully tortured son.

Grief. I would write a book about it, but there are so many good ones out there. Educating myself about grief, and tears, lots and lots of tears, are why I was able to find myself and a life purpose. During the grief process … in spite of the pain … we are given the opportunity to be absolutely selfish in our quest for self-preservation and self-examination. I had 32 years of love, devotion, and dysfunction with my son. I remember in early psych classes, the image of Freud’s model of the mind as the iceberg submerged in water, with just its tip exposed. I thought it was an apropos image back then, but I had no idea how deep my iceberg went until after my son died. I’ve been in and out of therapy for over 30 years. I know when I need an emotional tune-up and I check into services for a while. Learning to take care of myself is a gift from the grief process. Grief isn’t just about the loss itself. In my opinion, the grief journey lasts as deep as your iceberg is. Does that make sense?

If emotional scarcity was prevalent in our lives before our loss, every single thing in life will be perceived through the lens of that scarcity. If we haven’t dealt with our own shit prior to the loss, navigating grief in an emotionally healthy way is impossible. Trust me. I know.  I thought I’d had enough therapy to have crystal clarity about everything in G_d’s green earth. If you want to make the gods laugh, right? My grief process was a harrowing experience because ghosts demand attention until you lay them, consciously, to rest.

I’ve had a strong, pathologically so, work ethic. I’m driven and have perseverance in the same way Miss Biles does in the way she practices her skill/physical artistry. Those who find their way through the grief process, those who find themselves, and those who recreate themselves through their grief processes win the gold: a life full of meaning and purpose.

I’m nearly six years into the grieving process. I’ve sobbed until I hyperventilated. I isolated myself. I did all the things people do when they grieve; it’s a process. My son died from complications of substance use disorder. I started the grieving process before he died, and I’ve carried it with me since his death. I come from many permutations of religious practices; religiously, I’m a mutt, but in the Hebrew Bible there is a story about Jacob wrestling with an angel and he won’t let go until the angel blesses him. We wrestle with grief until we tame it, until it no longer commands us. No, we don’t walk away unscathed; Jacob had a limp for the rest of his life.

I dance with grief now; but I’m the one who leads, and my limp is getting increasingly less noticeable.