In October of 2022, my best friend died by suicide.
The moments after receiving the news, the world fell into a single point of silence, breath held, rushing emptiness in my ears, my entire body contracting. Then the explosion – a bestial grief wail from a place I didn’t know existed. I don’t remember driving the block home but when I jerked into park by my front gate, the wail spilled from the car and followed me as I stumbled into the house. It engulfed my frightened husband who ran to the door. It brought wide eyed tears from my daughter who had followed behind him. The wail crushed me as I fell into the living room, knees on the floor, my body folded over the couch, wishing I hadn’t answered the phone. The violence of the news left me disembodied and when I recovered, I didn’t recognize myself. I had become an island of grief in a world I no longer understood.
Over time, I have had to learn how to live alongside this reality, to adjust to this new life. But I still find myself falling apart. And when the tears slip past the lump in my throat, when I am no longer able to hold back the torrent of sadness, I start to cry – the tears squeezing past my shut lids, holding my hand to my mouth as if I could stop the flow of despair. And then the inevitable, “Sorry.” Sorry for the inconvenience. Sorry for making you uncomfortable, sorry for taking up space at this unscheduled time to stand fully in my loss and that you, without your permission, have been forced into witnessing.
Perhaps that is the origin of this “sorry” – that it seems too much to ask of a person – anyone – close friends and family members, but especially the stranger on the street, the Trader Joe’s cashier’s happy hello or the Starbucks barista with her wish for a great day. I have been cultured to not cause discomfort, to not put anyone out, to not bother. As women, we have been programmed to create space, not claim it.
In all the surreal swirl of those early weeks and months after my friend’s suicide, the howling grief animal lived inside of me, wild, ferocious and unpredictable. It would escape without warning and at inopportune times – released by the few notes of a song, a glimpse of a tall woman in the grocery store, the calendaring of an event that would no longer include my friend. I wanted to mace that grief, run away and hide from it, even, honestly, destroy it. I wanted desperately to escape the vortex of un-control that was not, and had never been, me. But that relentless beast stalked me everywhere until eventually I stopped resisting. I let grief be, allowed it to roar and tamed the wildness into submission – not with force or violence but through patient compassion and surrender.
In the process, I have claimed my space to be human – to reveal the many facets of grief, how it erupts unbidden from the depths of the soul and how that is true of everyone in time of loss. There is no need to hide it or shame it into the shadows to fester in isolated loneliness.
When we open ourselves wide to love, the potential for grief sneaks in. Ever present, it lurks, waiting. We attempt to ignore it, deny its existence and ask others, for whom grief has already emerged, to not expose the lie by spilling their own sorrow at our feet. But grief is the undercurrent flowing beneath our love, the depth of what it means to embrace another in their humanness, their frailty, their transient existence in this life. Inviting grief in, yielding and not resisting, cleared a path forward that had been invisible. It allowed me to crack open, to let light into areas that had never been illuminated. Everything is different. The crusty, hard-baked parts of myself have been burned away.
I no longer apologize for having loved someone so much that I am rendered by the grief of their loss. Instead I say, “Thank you.” Thank you for holding space, for not averting your eyes, or clearing your throat or changing the subject. For not saying you have something to do, or someplace to be, but choosing to remain in a moment of sacred human connection, in a shared acknowledgement that grief is the sometime partner of love.
Author: Lisa Falco
