crying

you may not even recognize yourself these days. your numbness might come and go. tears may push through when you are driving or when you wake in the middle of the night or when you go to the bathroom at work. you may cry so hard that tears and snot and spit just spill from your face onto the ground and there is nothing you can do to stop it until it is good and done and over. you may not be eating what you should. or you may be eating more than you did before, trying to fill up the hole that sits raw edged and throbbing in the center of your chest.

you may not be able to be with other people without them bringing it up, or pointedly not, you may not know what to say, or know if it is ok to laugh. or what happens if you start to cry?

about crying, if you breathe out, a forceful breath blown through your mouth like you are exasperated.... and if you look up without moving your head and blink a lot-- you can sometimes push through the immediate need to cry. sometimes. tell yourself you will let yourself cry as soon as you can. but the blowing, and the looking up and blinking saved me a million times, even if it only bought me the 30 seconds i needed to turn away, or close the door, or to pull off the road.

crying comes and goes. times it will flood in and pin you down and other times days will pass. as times goes on, this pattern will repeat- times of big grief, and times of relative calm. things will remind you of her, things you may not expect. with jeff, it is a tractor for sale by the side of the road. or a trout stream running high in spring time. or any dodge power wagon.

sometimes so innocently you'll catch yourself thinking there is something you want to tell her, or something you'll show her next time you drive by... and then you'll realize, re-realize, and you need to be gentle with yourself with what happens next. it may be laughter. or crying. or fury. or disbelief as you rediscover your circumstances. you may feel like an idiot for forgetting-- how can you possibly forget? but remember, this may be huge, the most huge thing ever, but it is not who you are. it is just one big honking piece of your experience. however big, it is not everything and will not be everything. and in any given moment, the thing that we are doing is surviving. that is what we do. we survive. we drive our cars carefully. we go to work. we eat. we sleep. we dream. we see a hawk overhead and think of the person we have lost, tell ourselves we will tell them when we get home. and then we realize that it is not going to happen like that.