Grief is funny. It smacks us in the face when we least expect it. This man’s death messed with me before it even happened - I bumped into a former classmate in the grocery store, and she told me that he was in hospice care. Since that time, I have been grappling with the imminent mortality of this man who was such an integral part of my undergraduate education, and it has messed with me without me being able to pinpoint why. Ever the lover of puzzles, I avoided this one for reasons I couldn’t understand. I knew he was sick, I knew it was serious, and yet...
Today it hit me.
Our relationship was complicated. Is still, I suppose. There was a lot left unsaid, a lot left unaddressed, and I will never get resolution, ever. Our relationship was complicated. He was such an important part of my education, and I really valued him as a mentor. He was also, at times, borderline verbally abusive in the interest of and under the guise of helping me grow as a leader. Shooting people down was not his strategy with everyone I’m sure, but it was with me. There are things that he has said to me that I still hang on to nearly 20 years later, that have stuck all this time. This is not a good thing and I acknowledge that, but some of the lessons that have stuck are good ones.
I was talking to a colleague about it earlier today and she outright said to me, “it sounds like there’s some trauma there.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had literally never put this time in the context of my traumatic history but it makes so much sense that I can’t ignore it.
Undergrad was traumatic. It remains, some 20 years later, one of the worst periods of my life. I suffered through four losses, three of which were pretty traumatic, I struggled to find my way through the utter mess that was my life at the time, and I did it all under the constant gauntlet of being a music student and the constant judgment, criticism, and self-doubt that this brings.
I say gauntlet like I could see what was coming, because you usually can and that’s half the torture of it - knowing what is coming. I couldn’t.
So I came to the realization that I absolutely do not have to go if it’s not what I can do and how I want to honor this man’s memory for myself. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to go, I was driving up here, and I just let it go. I let go of the idea of needing to grieve in a way that didn’t resonate with me. I let go of the idea that I have to show my face or people would be angry. I just let that shit go. Did it feel good? Not really in the moment. But, I was allowing my own process, and that ain’t nothing. And it certainly took the pressure off to put on a face and pretend that our relationship was awesome, because it, at times, was colossally not and I couldn’t pretend with this one, for my own sake.
So now I sit near my campus BFF Robert Frost, I drink an iced coffee, and I toast in my own way the lessons in our crossed paths. For better or for worse, I am different because of him.
No comments:
Post a Comment