Not having lost anyone truly dear to me before now, I would have thought that grieving would have some pattern to it. To borrow math graphs, it might have been a linear function with a negative slope, or exponential decay. It isn't. It's a random step function. August was terrible. September was better. October was bad. Thus far, November has been truly gutting. I will have my first holiday season without my mom or my brother, and I am ambushed by tiny little things at every turn that leave me leaking tears.
We got our Christmas tree, and as we finished putting up the plain baubles, I found the wooden Charlie Brown ornaments that my mother painted when I was three. The hands that painted them are gone forever.
I was reading an article about key changes in pop songs, thinking I would discuss it with my musical kids, and the last thought in the article was this:
"You want to know why Motown was such an incredible font of composition? Three words: Detroit Public Schools."
Mom loved Motown and she went to Detroit public schools. She would have loved that. And I can't text it to her.
And I can't call my brother to share that grief because he is gone too. The one person who should have been the lasting link to my childhood is also gone forever.
And I find myself here in the middle of The Two Towers, the slowest, most boring of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where nothing is happening and there is only the overwhelming sense of the End of Things approaching, and I can't share a sardonic giggle with either of them about that analogy.
I imagine that there will come a time when this doesn't hurt so much, when I no longer find myself crying over throwaway lines in NPR articles, when I no longer reflexively reach for my phone to share a silly thought or a story about my kids, only to remember that there is no one on the other end to answer. But there is no telling when that might be because grief has its own winding timeline.
