Grief You Can't Show Up For

I missed our friend's celebration of life last Sunday.

B passed suddenly from a heart attack in July. He had a brightness that came naturally to him. Lightened a room without trying, laughed easily and fully without holding back.

When we lived together in the early 90s, he'd ask me to make tomato soup. Nothing complicated, just an old standard I'd dressed up a little. After he got his own place, he'd still ask if I was bringing "the soup" to his gatherings. He loved it every time, like it was the first time.

He'd finally landed in a good place in life, a real partner, and looking forward. Then no more chapters. A lot came up in the suddenness that I'm still unpacking.

Not being with our people on Sunday broke something in me.

How do you explain what it means when chronic illness and the perpetual loss of capacity takes away your ability to grieve for and with other people?

I missed it because I couldn't sit upright, stand, or tolerate the hour drive to Petaluma. I'd known for over a week I probably wasn't going to make it. So it wasn't a surprise when Sunday came and I was still home.

Knowing that didn't make it hurt any less.

Decades of injury and illness stacked on each other, plus a life spent in extreme sports and trades that weren't exactly gentle on a body.

But none of that is really the point.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been locked in a brutal C-spine flare. By last Sunday, leaving the house wasn’t an option. The pain and mechanics matter, obviously. But they’re almost incidental here.

Someone I cared about died. Our people were gathering. And my body took my ability to be there. That’s a different kind of loss.

There’s a certain shape that grief usually takes. Someone dies, people gather and stories get told. You sit with the people who knew them. You hug somebody. For a few hours, the loss becomes something you’re all carrying together.

What happens when you can’t show up?

You still lose the person. Then you lose the chance to be with everyone else who is losing them too.

I’m not sure most people understand how much the second loss matters. When capacity makes the call, there’s no negotiation; the choice has already been made for you.

And that’s where grief and chronic illness get tangled together.

You spend years learning to work around limitations. Using what capacity exists, knowing everything is conditional and plans might disappear. You get good at adapting. The alternative is waiting for your old life to come back.

I’d already learned the hard way that sometimes you don’t get the chance to say the thing, show up, or close the distance.

Grief doesn’t care how well you’ve learned to adapt.

Losses need somewhere to go, and illness often takes away the things that help: driving to see people, sitting at the table for three hours, being held by the people who know you. Sometimes you can’t even get off the floor long enough to participate in rituals that give grief a shape.

The loss is still there.

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to hold yourself together while something like this is happening. Grief is a disruption. So is chronic illness. And when capacity drops, the things that help you reconnect can become physically inaccessible.

There’s a kind of unmoored feeling when grief needs somewhere to land and your body won’t let you get there.

Some of this is grief for him. Some for what illness keeps taking. I doubt I’m the only one who can’t always tell where one ends and the other begins.

So what are we supposed to do with that?

Maybe there isn’t an answer. Maybe part of adapting to chronic illness is learning that grief has to be adapted too. Sometimes you don’t get the gathering or the goodbye. Or sitting around with your people, telling stories about someone you all miss.

Sometimes all you get is your own space, your own company, and whatever connection you can make from there.

That’s not at all the same thing. But maybe it can still be something.

I missed B’s celebration of life.

I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.

If your body has ever made the choice for you...

You're not the only one who's had to carry that alone.

→ Share this if you've missed something you couldn't afford to, or carried grief with no way to show up for it. Someone else may be sitting with that too.

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Connective Tissue:

→ Brothers, Sisters
→ Stone and Weather

Related:

→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation
→ Oh, theWater

Also:

→ It Comes Due Either Way
→ And It Stoned Me

← Back to Inner Trailcraft

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *