My heart is a glass jar
March 25, 2020 As I write tonight, my heart feels like a glass jar that fills up every day with grief.
I sit with a client, watch her face move on the computer monitor—all those glowing pixels organized into the likeness of someone I know about as well as I know anyone in my life. I talk to a brother, feel everything that is unsaid beneath the words. Listen to Tom’s breathing at night, regular and soft on the pillow next to me, a sound I have woken up to for almost 32 years.
I’m thinking tonight of all the things human beings do together. Before—meaning four weeks ago—I used to feel like I had to protect myself from the amount of activity in the world, all the things demanding my attention. Now all that has slowed to a trickle and been replaced by endlessly scrolling information about the virus. (Our “invisible friend”, the Desert Oracle calls it, which I like because his wry humor helps me to relax.) Gone is the opening of Sounder's soccer season; the entire run of our friend’s theater company’s one-production-a-year, just ready for opening night. I think of the marathon I happened upon just shortly before the virus was reported in Seattle. The Aurora Street Bridge was closed northbound and the lanes were filled with people shoulder to shoulder, running and walking together. Not possible now. Not for awhile anyway.
I am a glass jar that fills up every day with grief. My jar is full tonight; I pour it out onto the ground, onto the dry dusty dirt, onto the little seeds there pulled in tight—waiting.
Karla McLaren teaches that emotions are essential, and that each emotion has a specific job. Grief, she says, “transports you to the deepest places when you have no choice but to let go.” It is our response to absolute loss, and it helps us survive by dropping us down into the deep river that flows underneath all life. To respond to grief, she talks about slowing down, and about the importance of ritual. I think this is why I started writing again here last week—this is my ritual, the place where I can stop and see what is in my heart.
I pour my glass jar into the river; I am waiting for the clouds to break, the storm to begin.
I call a friend who has recently returned from a year in Malawi, and is in 14-day quarantine in a room in a friend's house. She says to me: It’s the little things that matter, our attention to what is right in front of us. Then we are silent for a long moment. Together. Separated by half a continent and a locked-down national border. But the power of her inner stillness in that moment reaches all the way to me here in the desert.
Right now, Tom is washing the dishes in our trailer after dinner. It smells like sausage. Behind me the sun has set, and orange and blue bands stretch across the western horizon, the narrow heads of the scattered saguaros black silhouettes on the hill. The gravel path stretches pale back down toward the empty road. A black-throated sparrow rolls his liquid crystal call out of a dark mesquite.
Everything feels all mixed up together. Our greed and stupidity and thoughtlessness and our raw beauty and our grace.
I pour my glass jar out onto the ground, bend down to give thanks. Tomorrow it will be filled all over again. But for tonight I feel better.
-------------
I wrote this last night, then a friend sent this article today—“That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.” I especially appreciated his discussion of “anticipatory grief” which I think names much of what I am feeling these days. He says:
“Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. ... There’s a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new.”
He also talks about how to handle anticipatory grief. Worth reading.