Custodian of Grief

Greif has no expiration date. No finish line. No off switch.

Everyone carries grief in their own way, on their own timeline. For most people who have suffered a loss, it hits in waves at first, waves that knock you down, until you feel like you’re drowning. With time, the waves recede, until eventually, they diminish to swells that may jostle you around, but don’t knock you off your feet anymore.

Grief becomes the wallpaper of your life, the ambient background sound that’s ever present, but doesn’t paralyze you. You keep on going, and the grief comes in wisps made of memories, melancholy, and the occasional smile – a postcard to your lost loved one that says “doing OK, but wish you were here.” It shows up in a chuckle when you know what he’d say if he could see you know, and part of you knows, he does see you, and he’s chuckling, too. So you get on with things, but you’re never really all there again. Part of you is still submerged, not under a wave but under a veil, a light grey mist that doesn’t lift, but wafts along with you wherever you go, whoever you meet, whatever you do.

There isn’t really any such thing as “shared grief.” Someone who has died might have been the most important person in the world to more than one person, but the grief those multiple people feel is never identical: it is specific to the particular things those people miss, which are things the deceased shared only with them, individually.

A house of grief has as many timelines as the people living in it, doing the best they can, in the presence of the absence they feel every minute of every day. The waves don’t come at the same time for each of them, nor do they recede in unison. This grief that’s shared, but out of sync, compounds itself, when one person is experiencing the melancholy smiles and the “doing ok” postcards, while the other is still struggling to come up from waves that haven’t yet diminished into swells.

You don’t expect to suffer a new round of grief because of another’s grieving, but if you’re out of sync, that’s what happens. The pain becomes less the pain of missing your loved one and more the pain of your inability to reduce the pain of another. It’s a new cycle, with a different timeline, and no obvious end date.

You become the custodian of another’s grief.

Merriam Webster defines “custodian” as “one that guards and protects.” The word has unfortunately become synonymous with “janitor,” but that’s incorrect. Janitors clean, but custodians care. A janitor’s shift is over for the day (or night) when everything is tidied, all the spills are mopped up, the mirrors and windows are free of streaks, the wastebaskets have been emptied, the paper goods replenished, and the office, or the building, or the school, is ready for the next day.

Custodians are stewards. They care for a person or a place 24/7. Their shift is never over. And when you’re the custodian of another’s grief, your own is both rekindled and amplified. There is no comfort you can offer that will reduce another’s grief, or accelerate it’s timeline, or change the past. You have to watch someone you love in pain because you both lost someone you love, and seeing their pain is like looking back in time to when your own was nearly unbearable. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. You can provide hugs, share tears, offer distractions, and keep promising that it will get better with time. But you can’t say how much time, or when, or pinpoint the date that the sadness fades into misty memory.

And you worry that time won’t make it better enough before you yourself run out of time, and by getting older you’ll make it worse, and you know it will happen all over again. Who will be the custodian of grief when you’re not there to do it anymore?

You must finish the jigsaw puzzle of rebuilding another person’s life while the clock is ticking, before the bell rings and time’s up. And you have to do it while holding that person’s grief in your hands, like a flightless baby bird, without prematurely forcing that fragile creature out of the nest to face an impatient, unforgiving world that doesn’t understand, and doesn’t care, the way you do.

Intensifying efforts to slow the clock and trust the process, I remain,

your worried, diminished, trying-to-cherish-every-moment-because-you-never-know-how-many-you-have-left-and-you-have-to-make-it-better-without-rushing-it,

Ridiculouswoman