Grief; Unpeopled Spaces by Irene Gentle

      Danielle Henry CC



Grief; Unpeopled Spaces


I read up on grief long before anyone close to me died. I wanted to prepare. Then they died and I was not prepared. 

I was lucky to live quite a while before death came knocking. When it did, it came in packs. My father-in-law, who I was close to. My dog. My brother. My mother. My job. But this is mostly about my brother and mother.

All my life I loved my brother unreasonably. We left home at about the same time, me the youngest at 17, my sister at 22 and Jim in the middle. By the time he died we had not lived under the same roof for decades. 

​He was complicated even as a child, shouldering an old-fashioned man of the house role before puberty, an awkward fit for a scrawny, freckled kid but he had my mother’s unwavering devotion and glowing charisma. People of all ages were drawn to him, bestowing in him the hubris of someone widely adored without trying. The only person I’m sure he loved is his son, who arrived many years later. To this day I don’t know if he loved me back. Nor do I care. With or without love he took what he saw as his responsibilities seriously and I was among them. 

A series of knocks kicked his hubris down. He became ill. His death was neither operatically prolonged nor sudden. There was indication of illness, six weeks in the hospital, then death. I spent those weeks with him, watching him want to live for his son. His valour rocked even his hospital doctor. It ennobled him, and awed and brutalized me. 

He died and grief began.

It’s idiotic to compare the love of people and a dog but my dog is one of the few things I also loved unreasonably and without need for reciprocity. She was with us almost 18 years. As she declined, unable to walk, skin and bones, a slip of herself, I pre-mourned. She had a heroic will, a stubbornness of self even as her body melted. I grieved alongside her while she diminished. I feel the loss of her to this day. Her absence is like an extra part of me. An addition, not a subtraction.

I could not pre-grieve my brother. He did not intend to die when he entered that hospital and I did not intend to lose him. Hours of quiet watchfulness, observing every breath or sign of discomfort or want, laced with adrenaline. There was sleep but no rest. Quiet but no calm. Six weeks of the eternal moment before the finger pulls the trigger. Adrenaline with no outlet erodes you from inside.

It was just the two of us when he died. In my mind it felt like the depth of night but in fact it was 10:30 p.m. My husband picked me up from the hospital where they’d placed a white dove on his door, their signal the patient is no more. We stopped for takeout before returning to the room we’d rented for the last months to be by my brother’s side. This the first of a new landscape, eating when he is dead.

Adrenaline that wears off leaves an emptiness. To sleep I picture myself fading into a black river, thick and viscous. I carry the image with me through the day. My only comfort is submerging into this thick black river. It works for a bit until the river wants me out; I can lower onto it but not inside it. So I float along it instead like an Ophelia. I dream of obsidian without knowing what obsidian in. When I learn it’s smooth, glossy blackness is cooled lava I picture melting into a wall of it, becoming invisible. Grief is different for everyone. Some want the world to stop but I wanted it to flow on without me. Let me melt into darkness, alive but unbidden, unneeded, unseen, unbothered, untethered, unavailable. Let me watch from the shadow with my eyes closed. Let me be still while time moves. Eventually that ejects me too. 

Until it happened I did not realize the physicality of grief. It manifests in me like an illness, ever-present nausea, a swallower of breath. Movement is effort, any movement. But the helpful guides say it is necessary so I move. I walk, I do yoga, light weights. I meditate. I spend hours trying not to get worse. There is so much work to be at this level of nonfunction. 

My mother loved many in her life, her parents, her brother, her children. Her former husband (our father), banded with hurt even decades after the divorce. But mostly she loved her son. They were a unit that could not be severed. 

In the months between his death and her turn in the hospital he died in, we grew closer. The relationship between she and Jim an invisible wall the rest of us couldn’t breach and because they had each other, we didn’t try too hard. With his physical absence the wall came down and small communications flowed, emails of beautiful things, photos of flowers or birds or trees taken on those daily walks to stay in place. She was an immensely practical person with a whimsy, a poetry, a love of joy and things that shimmer and glint in the light. I found in her someone I could share those things with. It was a walk through grief but also a walk closer to each other. 

From the window of her crowded hospital room less than five months later she can see the ward where her son lived his last weeks. She tells nurses and doctors about it. My son was here too. 

Her illness, a small stroke, reveals the surprise of a well-developed cancer. A naturally curious person with an intellect and interest that in a different time would have led to a different life made her view her condition with a kind of surprised awe. She chose no treatment including food, a route that should have seen her wither in a matter of double-digit days. But she died after one. 
Grief doubled. Grief complicated, they call it. A complicated grief. 

The helpful guides say to keep the deaths separated, to mourn them individually. But it can be hard to untwine. The nausea, barely diminished in those five months, slams back. The heaviness. The impossibility of movement. 

It’s approaching a year now since my mother died, almost 18 months since my brother did. I grieve them entwined and separately. I miss her every day, I want to tell her something I saw or did or talk to her of baseball or current events. My brother is less often but is disembowelling when present. Like a movie in which the character is thrust through the gut with a sword and when the blade is pulled out blood jets out. There is no softening it. When I don’t think of his death, the blade remains in me. When I do, it withdraws and blood tumbles like a river. 

Every grief is different. My dog’s absence is like an extra part of me. My brother’s is flesh hacked out of me, a void with no hope of closing, like a cartoon character with a big round hole where the cannon blew through. My mother’s absence is a shimmer of undelivered thoughts and messages, a conversation with no one at the other end. This may be why my readings on grief were futile, no grief is the same. There’s a loneliness even talking with my sister, her experience of our brother and mother is not the same as mine, her grief s as real and as different as those perceptions. 

Grief reveals contours you didn’t know existed. At a small but significant moment of my brother’s estate, by no means the end of this harrowing and repellant process in which the person dies again and again and again with each account to close, bill to pay, passport to destroy, I was overcome. Tears in the bank where his account was closed, on the street, down the sidewalks leading home. So this is sorrow, I thought. This is the difference between sorrow and sadness. I looked it up after and there is a difference, like between pond and ocean. I had known sadness but not sorrow. And now I do.

Helpful guides suggest leaning on faith. Afterlife, reincarnation, the presence of ancestors, angels or god, I was willing to accept any of the possibilities most my life. But an openness to all, I learn, is a belief in none. Maybe they’re in heaven also means maybe there’s no heaven. Maybe they’ll come back in a different life means maybe they won’t. Maybe they’re a presence around us means maybe they’re not. I want to think of them happy somewhere. Of course I do. But I find no solace in what I don’t feel. There is no ritual or path to follow. 

That finality, I learn, is an agony. Living is an endless stream of chances to fix things, change things, have another go, make another start, see the sun, feel the breeze, hear the call of a cardinal, recover from that blunder, get over that slight, make up for that hurt. I yearn for my brother and mother to have the chance for mundane happiness, moments of warmth, love, even a good cup of coffee.  If afterlives and reincarnation are man-made fantasies, this is why. It’s the redemptive necessity after a life of hardship to receive contentment, a life of worry to know ease. Grief is not just the loss of them but the loss for them. What they lose in not being able to try again. Grief jolts you with an electric awareness of the importance of being happy at the time when happiness is most out of reach. 

Helpful guides say you are changed by grief. You will never be who you were before. This in my experience is entirely true. It has changed me fundamentally. My fairly deep sense of self and belief in my core competency evaporated. Sometimes I still speak with authority or find myself taking charge like I used to but it’s muscle memory. The ache of a phantom limb. 
Words I used to live by, like truth, justice, good are like spilled jars. I don’t know what they mean. In this is opportunity, to redefine. If I don’t know anything anymore including myself, my job is to find out. 

I’ve written all my life. I’ve been a journalist and editor my entire career. But words dried up the first year of loss. They’ve returned but with a different purpose. The statue of justice, blindfolded with sword and scales, is tattooed on my arm. The words often used in the act of journalism are martial. Journalists are frontline. The pursuit of attention is a battlefield. News is breaking. Editing is cutting. Change happens when those in power have their back to the wall. The arena of journalism was my fight, my sword, for many years, and it’s impossible for me to think of it as anything but a battle. Journalism needs to evolve, and is, and so do I. 

​Today my sword is put away, I think forever. I’m taking up the slower tools of planting and building. I won’t extract but will look for ways to add. I won’t appeal to the intellect but to our humanity, the one thing that may still pull us back from this brink. I lost faith not only in myself but also in the human mind, I’ve seen where that takes us. I hope to find some faith again in a common heart. I’m starting from nothing, but I’m starting. If there is a gift of grief I haven’t found it but through grief is a glimpse of the gift of life. In pure stubborn existence there is the chance to redo, reassess, reorder, retreat, regroup, restart. Another word for life is again. The sun rises again, you breathe again. Again is the burden and gift of living, unbearable, amazing. 

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Irene Gentle is a writer, editor and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. Former editor in chief of the Toronto Star, words of a different kind currently in The Eunoia Review, The Hooghly Review, Litro Magazine and JAKE.

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