Grieving without something to numb it

Something real has been taken and there is nothing standing between you and the size of it. That is new. For years anything this big got a cigarette put in front of it within about ten minutes, and it never removed the grief, but it did take the edge off the first hour, every time, without you ever having to decide. Tonight the edge is not off. The loss is arriving at full size, in whatever order it wants, and you have no way to turn the volume down. Of course this is unbearable.

So let us not pretend grief is a malfunction. It is not a symptom and you are not doing it wrong. Grief is what love does when the person is gone, and it is supposed to be enormous, in exact proportion to what was there. The old habit never treated any of it. It postponed pieces, an hour at a time, and every postponed piece stayed precisely where it was, waiting, collecting nothing but time. Numbing does not shrink a loss by a single ounce. It changes the delivery schedule, and the total never comes down.

That is worth knowing tonight, when blunting this seems less like escape and more like mercy. A loss carried whole moves through. A loss postponed waits. People who felt it when it came grieve hard, and then, over a long stretch, grieve differently. People who kept turning it down are still meeting the same untouched thing years later, in supermarkets, with no warning at all. What you are doing right now, sitting in it with nothing laid over the top, is not extra suffering. It is the shorter road, and it does not feel like one.

You do not have to process anything tonight. The whole ambition is to reach morning held rather than numbed. Call the person who will not try to fix it. Eat something even if it is wrong. Leave the lights on. Cry at whatever sets it off, including something stupid on television. And say the raw version out loud, with no arrangement to it at all: God, this is too heavy, stay here. That is a complete prayer. He has never needed it tidy, and He is nearest on exactly the kind of night you are having.