When Sadness is Really Grief

I woke up this morning in a bubble of sadness. Most things seem quotidian-- my dog licked and snuffled me before I got out of bed and the cat accompanied me for morning chores as usual. After reading the morning news and having a cup of coffee, I went on my morning walk. Every morning walk is an opportunity to turn my mind’s eye to dreams, prayers, visions or topics that I “chew on” as I’m meandering through the neighborhood. But this morning, I had sadness as an accompaniment.

This has happened before so I was not in unfamiliar territory. This was no stranger but an “elemental” I have been visited by for my entire life. The conversations we have always starts out with confusion and discomfort. And sometimes, the awkwardness of sadness is with me for days, but there are times where I can pinpoint the reason sadness bloomed. It doesn’t always go away or become resolved quickly but I can sometimes connect the dots to understanding where it’s coming from. Sometimes it comes from a ‘yesterday’ problem and occasionally it is a long ago story. Sadness is like a periodical cicada: underground for seventeen years and then emerges to start a new cycle of life.

An aspect of my personal story is that I grew up with a sibling who was disabled and for my entire formative life, her health issues and welfare were the priority in my family’s life. We often had to contain our lives after a surgery or treatment because she was more vulnerable to infections. This meant that we didn’t have many people around. My father was very keen on keeping the household virus free and thus, no community, save the minister from our church, was allowed in the house.

I felt sadness then, but my parents would become angry if I became mopey and distant so feelings had to be locked in tight and obscured. I suspect I got the blues around my birthday, which is in January and it often happened that my sister would become ill in December, and then spend a few weeks leading up to my birthday in the hospital. Because of this, I missed many birthdays or watched as tired and overwhelmed parents just did the minimum to make it through the time. And yet, feeling sad wasn’t allowed.

This morning, as I ambled along, listening to flickers tap on neighbor’s chimneys and red tipped blackbirds chortle in glee I wondered about my sadness. I was struck by the possibility that this sadness was due to an invisible loss. My daughter is also disabled and a great deal of my life is now very similar to my formative years with my sister. There are times when all we can do is hunker down and stay still while my daughter suffers pain from the trifecta of having EDS, MCASS and POTS. I grieve the loss of health and normalcy for my daughter. It’s very difficult to have an invisible disability and few in the community understand what it is that we go through behind closed doors. There are days when she has flare ups and has difficulty walking or becomes too overheated for simply climbing the stairs. We live in a disabled household and I feel grief.

As a culture we are somewhat generous with people after the physical death of a loved one and I know, to discuss grieving a life that was not to be had feels like wanting a pity party. How can we hold space for the grief that is unspoken, the grief based on the shame of not being able to hold it together. Where do we find our people when we say, I am grieving having a disabled daughter? I wonder about the families with children in prison or family members who are addicts and can’t make it home. Where do we offer a space to grieve for what they had hoped for, the chance at a ‘normal’ life with healthy kids.

On our podcast, we host a great number of people who share about their grief after a loss of someone. We bear witness to the loss of children, elders, neighbors, pets and friends. We recognize that a death opens the channels for the work of grieving--crying, resting, sitting with friends, being quiet, becoming a recluse and generally the world looks different for a while in order to absorb the death that has transpired. Wakil and I often say that we can name other occurrences as small deaths, e.g. the loss of a friendship, the loss of a vision that can no longer be sustained, a marriage, the loss of a neighborhood or the loss of open space. We use the same language to normalize grief in all these other instances but this morning, as I was walking and talking to what I thought was sadness, I realized it was actually grief.

After I recognized grief that had sidled up, I decided to do what I would tell others to do in a moment of loss--take a moment, feel into what is coming up, move slowly, drink water, take a nap and be alright with whatever the day looks like. It’s been a sad sort of day, but it has also been a clear day, filled with intention to what is transpiring in me today. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I am clear about what has created this feeling of loss and I can talk about it.

This is a short missive to anyone out there who is feeling sad right now. I’m here to let you know that it might be grief and if you can stay with the feeling and look at where it came from, it might be better in the long run. If someone asks you, “what’s going on?” you can honestly tell them that you are in a grief cycle and if you know why it’s happening and the person is the right person to discuss this with, go ahead and tell them. Fold yourself over in their arms and cry if you must, but let yourself grieve for something that may only be a thought that you held and now it is no longer with you.