When Grief Comes to Visit

When Grief Comes to Visit

I’ve always struggled with hospitality. Not hospitality, itself, actually, but the prospective judgment of letting someone ‘in’. What if the house isn’t clean enough, the décor isn’t pretty enough, the furniture not nice enough, the ‘x’ not ‘y’ enough. It’s an equation for stress. The stress is exponentially greater when the guest comes unannounced and stays for an ambiguous amount of time. When are they coming? More importantly, when are they leaving? But, what do you do when it’s Grief that comes to visit?

At first, you try to keep the door shut and the windows locked, but it can overwhelm even the strongest of efforts to avoid it. When you finally let it in, you sit with it for a time, but soon (very soon) the world expects that grief has moved on and you’ve put the house back in order. Your emotions are expected to be neat and tidy on the shelf and the ungrieved have an absurd presumption that you, the owner of the house, get to choose when to invite Grief over again. That you have a choice about how or if it will upend your life again.

And it does. As an unexpected visitor, she arrives and moves in. Might be for a month or two at first, might be every other weekend at first, might be once a month, might be twice a year. And then – when you haven’t entertained her for a time, you’ll find yourself in the midst of a lovely day, a beautiful new thing, an exciting life event and suddenly you are accosted by her presence. She has come for a visit and she didn’t even call first. She just showed up and overtook the moment.

You might begrudge her intrusion at first. You might hate her and wish her to never come, but the more she shows up and the more used to her you become, you realize that actually she has moved in and it’s only that she leaves for a time. The life has grown around her and has encompassed her. She’s always with you, living and breathing the days with you…it’s just sometimes your paths cross and you realize you’re like two school children trying to occupy the same chair at the same time. Who was there first? It doesn’t matter – you both live there…you just don’t often overlap space anymore. When you do, it feels like the first time she came and you might resent her and wish her to leave, but over time, you also might come to love her and welcome her, make her a spot of tea, even - as she is a reminder of the love you still hold and the memories that you cherish.

She’s a strange little cuss, like a bothersome younger cousin that suddenly becomes your greatest ally. You can’t stand her and you can’t live without her and you realize it all started when Grief came to visit and she never actually left.