Grief: Expressing It Beats Repressing It

Each weekday morning, my wife Adrianne and I get up at 5:45 and go our separate ways. Briefly.

Adrianne’s typical path takes her to the shower first, then to the dim light of the kitchen and a quiet breakfast-and-a-book all alone — which is by design as she prepares to teach wiggly first-graders all day long.

My road, on the other hand, leads to the darkened living room couch, where I usually just lie down and doze a bit before Adrianne and I reunite for coffee-and-hand-holding at 6:15.

This morning, though, my mind has been racing from the start. No snoozing today. My heart is too heavy.

Our four kids are still out cold at this ungodly hour, and that’s also by design. But as I look across the room at the bookshelf where their school pictures from last year reside, it occurs to me that I won’t be sending any new school pictures to my dad this year. He died a few months ago of a heart attack while he was driving. One moment he’s here, the next moment he’s gone forever.

I could give pictures to my mom, I think to myself, and I will. But it’s unclear whether she’ll enjoy them or even recognize who’s in them. She has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in a nursing facility in my hometown, about 45 miles from here. She’s gone forever too, in many ways at least.

And so, out of nowhere it seems, I am teary-eyed inside. I’m grieving. Again. Just when I thought it may have stopped. Again.

I fight it at first, thinking I don’t want it to own me for the day. But I know from experience that if I keep fighting it, it will own me for the day.

I fight it some more anyway (slow learner), thinking I don’t want it to come back another day. But I know from experience that if I keep fighting it, it will come back another day. No matter what I do it will come back another day. It’s bound to.

Fighting, it turns out, is a fruitless strategy where grief is concerned; you just end up losing again.

So no more fighting. Today, instead, I turn to my trusted old friend: writing. I choose to write about my grief instead of fighting it. (A tip of my hat to Adrianne, who suggested the idea just moments ago.) I choose to express it instead of repressing it. I’m not conceding to it; I won’t give it the satisfaction. I’m just acknowledging it and letting it come out, which beats the hell out of holding it in and letting it erode my soul.

It hurts, this grief thing. Grief hurts.

I miss my dad. And my mom, even though it seems wrong to say such a thing while she’s still alive.

I miss phone calls the most, oddly enough. Whenever I would call my dad (he never called me, or any of my siblings … unless there was a death to report), he would screen the call as he always did, letting the answering machine pick up. “I know you’re there, Dad,” I would tease. “You can run but you can’t hide.”

“Hoy, Pete” I’d then hear on the other end. Dad’s “hi” always sounded like “hoy” on the phone for some reason.

Then we’d chat uneasily about the weather for a few minutes — Dad wasn’t a phone person, and I’m not much of one either — before finally hitting our stride and talking about something more substantive.

My mom, meanwhile, always called me before she got sick. “Hi, Pete” she’d say, her “hi” sounding the way it’s supposed to. I didn’t really need to talk when Mom called. She talked enough for the both of us. She’d rattle on about all kinds of things for 20 minutes, 40, 60, as though she was being chased by a lion that would eat her if she stopped. She always had something or someone to talk about.

Now she never calls me. She can’t. And so she won’t, ever again.

It hurts, this grief thing. Grief hurts.

And it hurts even more when I think about Lois, the wife I lost to cancer in May 2012. And it hurts even more when I think about Greg, the husband Adrianne lost to suicide in December 2012. They won’t be getting any school pictures this year either. Again.

And it hurts even more to think about the stars of those pictures, our kids. They’re constantly surrounded by all of this loss. They’re still young, still enamored with cartoons and Cocoa Puffs.

And yet, I remind myself, they’re doing remarkably well.

And so is Adrianne.

And so am I.

Just saying all of this, “out loud” here on the page, is already helping me. I’m turning my day around — I can feel it emotionally and physically — and it’s not even 9 a.m. yet. Writing has been, once again, the bridge that transports me from Griefville to Gratitude City … when I let it. Writing helps me get the pain out of my gut and into the open so that it can no longer beat up my spirit.

Writing — like all forms of expression — helps me until the next time grief visits, when, in my enlightenment, I’ll probably … fight it. Again (yup, slow learner). Old habits really do die hard.

But at least I won’t miss them when they’re gone forever.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.