Sudden Death: Wayfinding through Grief

Into every life a little rain must fall, but some of us get hit by a thunderbolt from the clear blue sky.  No warning, no preparation, sudden death with a traumatic twist strikes with a clap of searing light and sound. You’ve become a conduit for terrible, life-altering news.   

One — Your head lifts off your shoulders with the force of impact, there is no room inside to hold the news.  All senses dilate then constrict to numb, your heart is in the hands of an icy cold compression, breaking. Shock arrives to hold you still, hold you writhing, a grip, a force, a penetration of heightened sensation and no sensation at all. Shock is your friend, it wraps around you in heavy layers, a shawl woven for protection, a thick, supple insulating layer that holds you tight in its embrace. It is here to build up the boundary walls that comprehension will slowly, slowly sink through. This is the wise pacing of shock, it allows a measured integration of news that cannot be held. 

Two — Collapse, crumple, fall, the body cannot hold against the force of gravity and brings you closer to the ground.  Go there, stay there.   Stay flat, let the horizontal plane carry you, hold on to the spinning earth with all four limbs wrapped and burrowed.  Outside if you can stand the light, inside if you crave the dark, piles of laundry, mounds of blankets, crawl into them and hold on. Stay warm. You are entering a state called torpor, a metabolic hibernation, a deep stillness and withdrawal essential for survival.  

Three — Food is not welcome, the systems are busy, a new internal engine has taken over your inner spaces, one that will modulate the swells and vibrations.  The system cannot be bothered with the mundane act of digestion, it is assimilating much larger realms and needs peace and serenity and should be respected.  Three crackers, a bite of banana, a small yogurt. And lots of water sipped very slowly.  You will eat again when you are ready, allow the body its wisdom. 

Four — There is no right way to grieve.  Maybe you didn’t fall to the ground, maybe you stayed upright and manic through the dissonance. Maybe you devoured the banquet of consoling casseroles and strange urgencies sent you on a spending spree. Shock manifests in many ways, and all of it makes the people around you nervous. They will suggest you are doing this too fast, too slow, not enough, too much.   This is when we want them to know: “There is no right or wrong way to grieve.  Shock is my friend, it is protecting me. Every cell in my body is recapitulating and reconstructing and renegotiating, this process will take years, years, and I will never be ready, I will never be the same.”

Five — Your friendships change, all of your relationships change. There’s a charge and current pulsing through you and rolling out in waves, the reverberations are being absorbed throughout the community.  Some will say hurtful words without intention, a few will say words just right, most will say nothing at all and stay far away.  Give them all grace. “There are no words” is a phrase on a constant loop of condolences, as it should be. Words, they don’t stand a chance in this maelstrom. 

We don’t know how to do this, but we used to, not so long ago.  We had black clothing and veils and armbands, black crepe to hang on the front door, a wordless communication of deep mourning and bereavement. The recently widowed were served first at the bakery, no matter how long the line. It was understood she didn’t need to be in casual conversation with the curious and confused. She was allowed to gather her things and slide out the door in a silent slip lane of respect and reverence. Now we only have bumbling, obtuse reflexes without governance and wise council, just fellow quaking souls trying to offer a sliver of connection through the shock waves. 

Six — Brief good moments and many bad days.  Wisps of peace may breeze through you, you may be able to brush your hair without weeping, gaze out the window and see through the blindness, cycle through half a day without the weight crushing your chest. But it’s not here to stay, the heavy swirl will return and the sucking center will pull you in again.  You will wake up with terror and realize, it’s another bad day, I’m having another bad day. This is the slow unwinding and rewinding of shock, thread by thread, layer by layer, as the news bounces against and settles into your being. 

Seven — Grief is hard, hard work. It is exhausting.  Stone pounding on stone,  grinding, like a pestle into a mortar.  It is carving out a hollow for the news to fit within.  That’s why tears are essential, lubricating with a chemical alchemy to speed the work.  Be the leaky faucet, in the car, in the grocery aisle, at every turn let them flow.  Know that with each passing moon, the space inside is wider, and the news settles just a little deeper. The tears show up with purpose, they have a job to do, they are carving tools, stand aside and let them flow.

Eight — If it’s been a while since you’ve reached out to one who listens deeply, one who knows, or to a support group, now is the time. They will hold steady through the swirl, they know how to step wide and gird, they’ve seen the towering twenty-foot wave climb higher and block the light from the sun, they aren’t scared of the power you hold, let them see it. It is sacred.

Nine — Take it to a graveyard, the older the better.  Where the stones are carved with willows and urns and angels by an artist’s steady hand, the town witness. See the headstones of babies and mothers, sons killed in war, so many children, leaning into the moss and tumbling down into the dissolving earth. Here grief is known, understood, welcomed. Step through the swinging gate and the ground thrums with recognition. The graveyard knows you are doing this just right, not too fast or too slow, and nods as you course through the images and names, seeking and sensing through recrystallized layers. 

Ten — The first year is a cycle of feelings and sensations that will recede, soften, and quiet, then rush in and run you over with the clanging bells of memory.  The middle of the first year is a pause and then a harrowing ride back up to the day it happened.  The angle of light, the smell of the earth, your body remembers the moment of the first concussive wave and the calendar clicks closer every day.  Prepare for this, make way, give space, do not deny the invitation to plunge to those depths again.  After this first anniversary, life will slowly re-enter and re-center.  The peak intensity is now, allow it to be honored. 

Eleven — The first year is the worst, there is no path, only stumbles and lurches and long rests between moments of stability.  The first three years will find you stretching with longer strides and making your way while clinging to the edge and gasping for breath. Sucker waves rear up during the holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, school plays. Any tender moment where family is gathered and celebration is the occasion can summon the upwelling.  Now you know how to step wide and gird, open your palms and let the salt stream through.  No shame, let the sadness be seen, it is a gift for those who are able to lift the layer and open. 

Twelve  — Light a candle and say a prayer for the first three years, you made it. Blow a kiss to your friend shock for rushing in to wrap you up snug, safe in a leaden shawl of protection. You found a way through the unwinding, blinded, numb, and wretched at first, now standing with a face in the sun and a breath that rises and falls without a catch.  The ten-year anniversary may offer a rise in the landscape like a watershed, where all things now roll away from the grief and towards something new.  The shift is a revelation, a birthday without pangs, a happy occasion where only the slightest riffle is sensed in the distance.  You can see farther, the view is wider, the horizon holds you in the circle of mystery.  

Now you know.  And when the shock of sudden death lands for one in your circle, you’ll give a wide berth when it’s needed, sense the opening, then step quietly up to the side and say, I know.  Hold my hand, breathe, here is a sip of water, no words, breathe.  

Suddenly Sick Kitty

And just like that we have a sick kitty.  At twelve, we’d begun to see small signs that maybe a slow down was near, and although she crunched living mouse heads through the summer, audible crackings of skull and spine a daily patter at the top of the basement stairs, we could see that maybe something was just starting to be a bit off with our Coco. 

A petite tortoiseshell with golden patches on her toes, she came from a wild beginning, rescued with her tiny sibling kittens from a building that was about to be demolished.  Her hunting skills had a long line of refinement behind her, generations of wild urban kitty DNA and feral cat ancestry. Supremely comfortable in our home, she reigned like a princess, sniffing and swiping at the dog, stretching out for deep heat soakings in front of the woodstove.  In spring, summer, and fall, Coco heads out on regular, rhythmic rounds into the meadows with the eye of Artemis the celestial hunter, her tall ears tuned to the ground, reading the invisible highways, capturing the witless moles and crafty mice with alacrity. 

She trots back with her stunned dangling prey, to the porch if we are sitting there, or into the house if that’s where we are,  and performs the act of eating the still-living rodent, crunching into the skull like a piece of candy, a sound we can hear all too clearly.  From the underground tunnels and soft meadows straight into the jaws of death, it was a swift, precise transition between worlds.

Her hunting season slowed down in the winter and so did she. This winter was a little different though, it was subtle, but we all remarked that Coco was beginning to look old - a little thinner, a little more sleep. She spent more time at the water bowl, long sessions of a delicate paw-dipping routine, dip dip dip, lick.  We bought her a new kitty bed, a small rounded vessel of comfort, and were delighted when she took to it for long perfectly nestled naps. A few months ago, I bought a small can of wet food, her first, to hide in the cupboard, for when the time came.  

The time came quickly and all at once.  One day she is sitting like a  goddess in the sunbeam, fanned by houseplants, the next she’s too weak to move and gets accidentally stepped on in the mudroom, a dark tortoiseshell kitty hidden among the boots.  I thought I’d broken her, as she slept in her chair in my quiet office, nestled into an old sweater, and didn’t move for a long day.  She slept through my work sessions and phone calls, and by sundown, I finally tuned in and saw how unwell she was.  

Unable to stand, she adjusted herself bit by bit and slept some more.  I wrapped her in woolen layers, filled a dropper with water, and tried to get her to drink - not intereted, and so fatigued by my efforts, her head lay heavy on my arm with the stillness of finality. With growing concern, I found and opened the can of wet food,  a sound and smell never before known,  and no response. 

I stroked her and tucked her in, left a nightlight on in the room, and counted on insomnia to rouse me at 3 am for a check-in.   When I entered the midnight office, I expected to find a cold, stiff kitty.  Instead, her head was up, her eyes were bright, and she blinked with satisfaction that her nurse had arrived.  I offered a small bowl of water, and she drank.  I offered a tiny quarter teaspoon of wet food, and she licked.  

Revived and ready to stretch, she stood up, arched, and moved toward the wide arm of the chair.  She climbed up on it, sat like a queen, and while wrapping her tail neatly around her tiny twinkle toes, she swayed and fell sideways to the floor.  I caught her before she hit the ground. 

Once down on the ground, she drank some more water, had a few more licks of the wet food, and was soon out in the hall, listing to the side, but ready to go down the stairs.  Down she went, and then all the way down another flight into the basement, where she spent a long moment scratching around in her little box. 

Concerned she was stuck and couldn’t get out, I knickered at the top of the stairs, and she came bolting up like the fast kitty she’d always been.  It was a wet food miracle, the life-giving gravy charging her with new life.   

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An excerpt from a longer piece about Coco’s passing and the questions it awakened around dying, death, and beyond.

Confluence I

You would think that the place where two massive rivers meet would be a wild swirl of water.  Leaping brown rollers, frothing with sediment, rising up in the middle where the continent braids.   Whirlpools, sucking eddies, currents and deep forces clashing, disintegrating, bubbling in chaos before a new rhythm sets in. 

The navel of the North American continent, like a bowl between two rising edges, gathers every drop that falls from the sky and rolls it towards the center, streams to creeks to rivers. From the wide curve of rising lands stretching west and east, all water pours inward towards two massive channels, the Missouri River and the Mississippi.  You would think that the spot where these channels meet and merge would be a lively, jumping, rumbling piece of land.  I expected the ground to shake with the collision.  

But no.  I stood on the soft, quiet bank in disbelief, looking up and down the flat flow for any sign of chaos.  Slight riffles were on the surface, boils of underwater swirls could be seen, but it was minor, not major.  I was standing at the spot of confluence and the continental waters slid in together with a sigh, a wide, brown, gentle smoosh from one momentum to the next. 

Loads of sediment were shifting energies in silence and simplicity, like a business deal between two greased palms.  The banks were gentle, smooth and moist, yet the evidence of much higher, wilder waters could be seen in the branches of the tall trees, like teeth of a comb filled with dander, nests of flotsam twenty feet high.  

On the day I asked my father to take me to this place on the great rivers, all was serene. Long barges of commerce, low, slim, and sealed,  lined up in lanes in the gentle flow, waiting their turn to join the traffic and deliver  loads of goods.  So many barges were on the river that day, silent capsules without a captain, commerce and confluence as smooth as could be. 

We had reached the spot from a long, bumpy dirt road, a public access that felt private with neglect.  It ended right on the river’s edge where there was a monument — not to the geological wonder of the meeting waterways, but to the Corps of Discovery, the group who gathered with Lewis and Clark to set out in wooden boats, from this very spot of soft earth, to reach the limits of the western flow of water.  On the eastern bank of the Mississippi, we looked right up into the mouth of the Missouri River, and we were standing on the very camping spot where they made final preparations in the days before they pushed off and headed upstream to the west.  

The concrete monument on the spot was humble and old, set close to the water where it had stood through high pulsing floods, then dried out again, lifted and altered.  The slabs were buckled and angled, and I read the dark bronze plaques covered in words and that were once under water. 

The Lewis and Clark story is one we are thoroughly sick of celebrating. If your fifth grade teacher didn’t kill it for you, “Undaunted Courage” might have, or that Sacagawea coin.  But it remains one of our most vivid images of the human need to push into the unknown, to explore, document, dominate, and claim. Small wooden boats, pressed down in the waters with boxes of supplies, the two captains, the young crew, the teenage mother with a baby on her back. Phallic boats pushing into the folds of soft waters, pushed into the opposite flow and the unknown by the ink of Thomas Jefferson’s pen and the impulse of manifest destiny. From this actual bank of earth, they went upstream and over mountains and found the outer edge of the land. 

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Confluence II

The waters of the great continental rivers are solid and opaque, the fine sediment rides near the surface and absorbs all light.  There are no dancing diamonds of sunlight in these streams,  the sky is muted with clouds of silt and ashes of people, the mud glazes lightly on the edges. There are few stones or boulders here in the heartland, just solid soil suspended in the flow, delivered to the banks along its way to the deep Gulf of Mexico. Delivered, the silt swirls with the gulf coast fishes and comes to rest on the dark ocean floor while the light sparks high above with blue to the sky.

Yet few stones are there in the rivers, small stones are riding the deepest channels of these large, wide rivers, deep in the hydrodynamic equations under the surface. The stones are lifted from their source, suspended for miles of steady rate, and they drop from the flow according to formulas of speed, decent, and curve.  There are few gravel bars along the river’s edge, and one is just north of the confluence on the Mississippi, filled with the small tumbled stones of the continent. 

It is called the Chain of Rocks, and it’s a long, gentle bar of small stones along the river. Fishermen fish, a grandfather and his boy, sitting on overturned buckets in the shade. Household trash and a porcelain toilet are dumped in the rutted parking lot. But rock hunters know this is the spot, one of the few where stones gather from the muddy stream. 

When I went there with my father,  I gathered handfuls of shiny, milky stones, knicks out of time from a thousand eras of geology, plucked from the strata and brought along for the ride. Each stone is different,  a medley of origins, each can be traced to a hundred different locations on the massive continent this river drains. These are not local rocks, these are rocks from the journey, mementos of passing scenes.

While scanning and sorting the way rock hunters do, I found a prize, a large fossilized vertebra — a bone that had turned to stone, a huge old mammal with a large spine made with three wings and a hole in the center.  The hole was now crammed with mud and rocks, and the creature once walked the continent long before the humans, for to be fossilized means to be very, very old.  

Maybe this beast walked and grazed upon the high north of the Canadian shield, in between the ages of ice, along the shield where the earth's oldest stone is exposed.  The animal died, it was picked clean and scattered, the bones weathered and washed away to be buried so deeply for so long that the minerals of bone could be exchanged with the minerals of stone. It rose to the surface again and has been moving slowly downstream, resting and rising and settling and tumbling with the sediment loads until it landed there in a moment of rest in the Chain of Rocks.  

Confluence VII

There are three places to view the confluence between the Mississippi and the Missouri.  One is the place on the eastern bank where I had been with my father long before, when it was a wild and forlorn place.  The second place is the very tippy tip of the delta of land between the rivers, the vulvic endpoint where two become one.   The third place to view the confluence is on the western bank of their meeting, on the Missouri River side, and that’s where I wanted to go.  

On the map, I find a road that leads to what looks like a park north of the city of St. Louis, a small road with a roundabout that seemed to lead directly to the place I wanted to be. I regard the confluence as holy ground, a national treasure, a wonder of nature - but this is not a shared feeling, not by the country, and not by the county. That road could lead to a trash heap fifty yards from the riverbank, another neglected and forlorn spot in the dust. I set out early in the sunny morning, hoping I could get close to the actual river, close enough to get my toes in the mud and let the braids of the story flow.  

Driving along the river roads to get there, it was all factories and wastewater plants and industrial emptiness. Burned-out buildings and abandoned train tracks next to massive manufacturing facilities with fleets of idling semi-trucks. Then I turned through the entrance of the park.  The road I saw on the map became a beautifully designed and maintained place, the road curved through flat fields and past marshes with tall grasses, there were signs along the way saying “Confluence Three Miles” and my hope was rising. The road ended in a cool, shadowed parking lot.  I was the only car in the entire place, I hadn’t seen a human for half an hour.

When I parked, I could see a walkway leading into the bushes, and I lept out of the car and jogged down the path and I was there with tears of gratitude, standing in a perfect circle of honoring stones, smack on the river’s edge, with the tip of the confluence point directly in front of my eyes. The center point was right here and I was standing on it, holy ground.

The water from two rivers stretched far across to the other shore, they were smooth and wide and colossal but flowing fast. I could hear the sound of the flow, a gentle sucking, splashing sound like waves on a beach was coming from my right.  A foot path led into the cottonwood grove, a sandy path where copperheads are curled under fallen trunks.  I followed the path with caution and found the source of the sounds, and it looked like this — the water about twenty feet out in the stream was moving smoothly, and then a great boil from below would rise up break through the surface, a blossom from underneath bloomed with a splash and whirlpool and eddy and suck.  

I could hear and see the hydrodynamics at work in front of me as the two continental flows met and reconfigured their calculus.  One river was moving faster than the other, you could follow the meeting line in the far out in the middle of the stream and see the differential.   The shoreline is also a drag on momentum, so this Missouri River in front of me, with all the power of the Bitterroot Mountains behind it, was snagging on two different speeds deep below. The snag delivered up to the surface a great release of tension, waves coming from within, rising from deep conflicts and releasing on the surface.  Like grief.

The bushes rattled with grasshoppers alarmed by my walk, the birds of the marshland were calling and flying, and I got my toes and hands into that cool silken mud, that sticky with clay jet black silt from the ashes of life.  Soft and deep like a pudding, millions of the smallest particles of earth, just a few elemental atoms bonded with clasped hands layered together like a gossamer mud.  Like the lining of the womb, deep and cush, plumped like a pillow, a fertile nest of nutrients ready to give rise to fields of life. My hands and feet sank into the cold softness and the slit of the world slid on like a glove. The dark atoms clung to my skin in a lightless layer. 

I wondered where the grains of my father might be by now, still settled deeply into the rivers edge, covered and tucked into the sediments and seasonal flows, carried upwards by a flood and spread across the flat fields where he drove the tractor in the sun. I turned to face upriver and imagined the spot where we released his remains into the stream. Then I turned my back to the flow and felt the two great wings of watershed, branches and dendrites, smaller and smaller still, covering every hill and dale of a massive landscape, braiding together right here behind me, flowing through and past, and on the way down to the ocean bowl in the south. 

If I didn’t have a plane to catch, I might have painted my skin with the Missouri Mississippi mud from crown to root and worn it for days. But it was time to fly. By the time I kicked off my sandals at security, the mud was safely tucked between my toes and the mica made my skin glimmer.  

In the airport, I began to see men like my father, same age, same shirts, same white mustache on a mid-western farmer’s frame.  They walked past me, stood in line in front of me, joined me on the airplane.  I walked to the back where the seats were clear and I could choose a window with a clear view.  I tried to calculate the route the plane might take, how it would bank through the sky while heading east, and which side I should be on to see the rivers below.  As the plane backed up, I realized my luck, all three seats were mine, a private row for a private journey.  

We taxied and bumped across the sunbaked concrete, and when we swung onto the runway, the pilot swung us like a smooth masterful ballroom turn right into full acceleration, no pause or nod, just a turn and whoosh and lift. As I leaned back into his momentum I thought, I like this pilot, yes please, take me. 

This pilot knew where I had been, and he took me there again.  We crested and banked and sailed in the vectors of the sky that led to the confluence, and soon it was there sailing below me, at the perfect angle for observation. I pressed my head against the plastic window and drank the perfect view of the meeting rivers, the spot where I stood in the mud hours before, where the mud was still damp between my toes. There was the loop of road through the marshland and the parking lot, still empty. There was the circle of stone, and there was the point of land diminishing between the two rivers until they became one.  I scanned the islands in the Mississippi, the ones above the Chain of Rocks, and wondered, which one. 

The airplane cruised by like a log in the center flow, steady, even, stately, reverent.  The sun hit the twin river water in bright blinding flashes, mud mirrors bouncing light from space and right back into my eyes. I cried. I wept. I sobbed.  The salt stung my cheeks.  What beautiful luck, to be on this side of the plane and not the other, to have arc’d to the north and not the south, to make a loop between earth and sky, to be in the river, then above it, holding the braids of memory and mourning, flowing through the continental push and up into the clouds with tender propulsion, saying goodbye, father, goodbye.