The “Static” of Grief
One mom’s wandering toward connection
I used to be all cut and dried in my mind about death. That we had these human souls that were just our same selves that would fly up to heaven and exist in some similar form and look down at those we left behind protectively and lovingly while also living a new better reality with God and all our family who’d gone ahead. Somewhere was a big banquet, and most certainly music and light and no pain or infirmities or bullies or anything we needed to leave behind on Earth.
That was before my son died. His death was like the needle abruptly scratching across the familiar album I’d been listening to all my life and leaving me in silence. If you are around my age or older you know that sound, how the turntable keeps going on but all you hear is static.
In quiet moments, particularly when I’m alone, I find myself trying to break through the static that exists now between me and my son. I want there to be a connection that makes sense, a vision of him smiling at me through dappled sunlight in the trees or kissing my cheek by way of a soft breeze or gentle rain; me touching my face in recognition somehow like in a film where the protagonist realizes everything is going to be alright and is awash in peace. But the static remains.
I grew up in the Catholic faith and I am still waiting for that belief system to wrap me in it’s predictive and steadying embrace, erasing my uncertainty and allowing me to replace the static with hymns about looking upon the face of Jesus in joyful reunion. But that eludes me now also. My child is supposed to be here with me — vibrant, corporeal, his pulse matching the beat of our shared reality. His reality escapes me now. There’s no hymn or quote or passage that makes sense of his absence.
I was walking in a natural area recently and other than the crunch of my shoes on the frozen ground, there was silence. It was beautiful, and also fertile ground for my mind to wander around in the where is Mekbul headspace. Could he see me now? Was he trying sometimes to tell me he was ok, peaceful, happy? Had the heaven I grew up with welcomed him and I just couldn’t see it because picturing him there was accepting that he was gone? Maybe, but if that’s true I can’t tell.
Out of nowhere I had this weird thought of him being the cold breath filling my lungs as I walked along, part of me, propelling me forward. I don’t know why. I’ve heard many clichés about the dead never leaving us, always being a part of us, but I more pictured it like Patrick Swayze sitting next to and trying to touch Demi Moore. I’d never imagined him becoming the oxygen she can’t survive without. But couldn’t he be?
I re-live the darkest moment of my life over and over when I return to the night of my darling boy’s death, where within my screaming my mind was already forming around the thought of just lying down with him, going with him wherever he’d gone. Survival for me, in my deafening despair was in leaving, not in staying. That’s as hard to type as it is to read, but it’s what my panicked brain offered in those moments and I can’t unremember it.
I don’t know how, but I did survive. My heart broke but it didn’t stop. The cold air still penetrates my lungs and I still walk on, still feel. Still hear static, but also music, too. My search for some kind of peace continues but the survival part already happened.
I thought living in a world where he isn’t was more than I could do and it occurs to me that it IS more than I could do, so that has to mean he remains with me. How I understand that, picture it or put words to it is beside the point. He is here because I survived. It’s the closest I’ve got to softening the static so far. I of course wish for a better answer but something tells me that isn’t up to me. He’ll help me, as my ability to accept something I hadn’t thought of grows and takes shape. It’s what he did for me in life — changed everything I thought I knew. Why should that be different now?
