Greiving – Now That You Know

The medicine finally arrived. Duly marked with labels indicating the radioactivity and biohazard contained within, with warnings proclaiming, “Chemotherapy Drug.” It’s a jarring image, a far cry from the friendly paper bag that our neighborhood pharmacy places my statin drug in once a month. Once you open the box and encounter that label, even before you get to the bottle with the medicine, it’s as if the universe is giving you one last warning: do you want to live or die? Do you want to ingest this distilled form of chemical or radioactive poison into your body to kill cancer cells or boost your red blood count? You have one more opportunity, and this is it. You can’t say we didn’t warn you. That’s what a label like this is trying to tell you. If you go down this road, this dance you’re doing with death is about to become more intimate. The label asks, “are you ready for that degree of mortal intimacy?” If you are and you trust your doctor, it’s time to move past the label and live life on a delicately balanced, biologically hazardous chemical edge.

He may have the medicine in hand, but I’m still scared. When will the side effects start to kick in? Will he tell me? I doubt it. I offered to come and sit with him for the first 48 hours. He wouldn’t hear of it. His support network there would look after him. Now, I will have to look on from a distance, at scary drug labels, and listen for subtle, desperate changes in his mood, voice, and tone. Or I can roll the dice and show up at this front door bearing groceries and love. I can say, “I’m staying for a few days, and I don’t give a damn what you think.” I do have options. I can be the answer to my prayers.

There are practicalities. We may have won the battle, but the war is not over. The medicine took too long to arrive, and it’s only approved until the end of the calendar year. We’ll have to go through this same struggle with the insurance company, the doctors, and maybe the VA once again in a matter of days.

Days are all we have.

–Richard Bryant

To grieve with any level of authenticity, we must not be selective in who (or how) we mourn. To name a loss worthy of memory, sorrow, and joy (in a life well lived) is an act of supreme defiance in a world where we store our wealth in a currency named for the Greek word “hidden” or “secret.” We live hidden and transient lives. Everything we value about life, even its inevitable ending, is obscured with each new mass shooting, virus, disease, and missile attack. Those who die remain unseen, off-camera, and hidden beyond well-word catchphrases and slick camera angles. Even before the pandemic, the affluent west invested heavily in crypto-mourning. This is the process of continually moving our thoughts, prayers, and concerns from one tragedy to another (as one would move money to offshore accounts) but never asking, “Do these prayers have any real value unless we transfer them as hard spiritual currency into our lives and act upon them?”

While all death is death, the world values the memories of some deceased differently. Thus, we grieve some victims longer and more viscerally than others. We invest in acts of community and corporate sorrow. Candlelight vigils and community gatherings have done what I once thought impossible: made grief cliché, predictable, and ephemeral. Our grief becomes public, or so we claim, and then we move on. We wait for the next tragedy, and the cycle repeats. The problem isn’t too many people sending meaningless thoughts and prayers. Instead, we’ve made grieving a public media-driven production. Persons whose trauma and grief are too immense to step into this spotlight are largely forgotten. For so many, the vast majority of those in hospitals and homes worldwide, there are no witnesses to the realities of grief preparing to be confronted at this time we force each other to call “joyful.” Their grief isn’t sensational, but it is real.

–Richard Bryant

Tag: Greiving

Days Are All We Have

Crypto-Mourning

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: