I’ve been challenged over the past few months to confront fear and anxiety. I have had the pleasure of unexpected visits from hope, signing off my last blog with this apt description of my current state – finitely human and infinitely hopeful. But, the journey continues. In a recent appointment, my therapist brought up a new aspect. She asked, “What does grief look like to you?”

I responded with a helpful distant stare, while thinking, “It looks like something I don’t want to talk about.” Needless to say, I have more appointments scheduled.

Since then, I have been trying to mold a blog post for practically a month now, using this medium as a way of untangling what grief looks like to me (thank you for indulging my cathartic exploration). Usually, I sit down, vomit on the screen, then walk away for a day or two before returning to refine the words and then post. But grief…I’m painfully wrestling with this one. So, I turned to a familiar friend of mine in times of uncertainty – research. I asked Dr. Google. One of the first suggestions came from the esteemed Mayo Clinic. Their experts describe grief as “…a strong, sometimes overwhelming emotion.”

Again, a distant stare. Um, doesn’t that seem a bit vague?

More research quickly uncovered the revered “stages” of grief (post to follow on how certain words trigger – spoiler alert, “stages” is one of them). As a math person, I get the trend and desire toward the measurement and application of patterns to our existence. Civilization is replete with such utilizations from our literal measuring systems (plural because for some reason America prefers a system based on random numbers instead of a base 10 model, but whatever), to our calendar, and the way we proportion our presence on this planet in reference to celestial bodies. Humans need to measure things.

Grief feels similar, measured somehow. I have lost people I love, but I have never lost a child, or a spouse, or a best friend. My tangible existence has never been consumed by fire or whisked away in a tornado. I feel like I’ve been a mere spectator to those levels of loss. More measurement, accompanied by the realization, I don’t feel adequate to write about grief, coupled with the challenge of dealing with something I cannot name or define. (I may have mentioned this before).

Grief feels like the giant elephant in the room that appears when someone looks at you and declares you are now a cancer patient. Maybe dealing with the smaller pieces feels like a tangible way to address the elephant. After all, that’s the best way to eat it right? One bite at a time? And maybe I currently only have the capacity to deal with the “smaller” things? (More topics for upcoming therapy appointments).

While we seem to accept the idea that some things are just spectrumie (definition “somewhere on the spectrum”), like light for example, we struggle in that space between things that can be measured and things that have span – beginnings and endings beyond what we can see or define.

Maybe that’s grief? 

At the risk of sounding flippant, I think grief is like that horse in “The Wizard of Oz”. You know the one that changes color? Sometimes it’s green, then it changes to yellow and then blue, without measure or pattern. A spectrum of color that represents how quickly we move from one feeling to another. But like light, there are some pieces that feel invisible, outside the realm of the seen – felt deeply but challenging to define or describe.

Maybe grief isn’t even an emotion?

I realized recently cancer is not actually my teacher. Prof C simply opened a door in my being to a room full of mirrors that provide opportunity to look at myself in ways I would never have chosen. A sort of House of Mirrors, but in this case, the distortion is the reality. I get to see how short and squatty my love can be, or how twisted and grotesque my anxiety is.

Maybe grief is like more like a door?

A door that propels you into a room of emotion and sadness and loss that cannot be experienced any other way. But honestly, I don’t know. And based on the definition provided by the Mayo Clinic, maybe it’s beyond easy definition.

We measure our lives by counting the boxes on a calendar. Some are filled with appointments, errands, meetings, chemo chairs – moments that gauge the productivity of our days and our accomplishments. In that frame of measurement, it’s easy to lose sight of the experience – the small spectrum of visible life we can see in the greater vastness of existence that begins and ends in the unknown.

I’ve committed to stand in this room, opened by Prof C, eyes open, looking at the iterations of myself I’ve created or allowed. Maybe I can change some of them, but maybe that isn’t the point either. Maybe this is a chance for me to experience and embrace the finiteness of my specific flavor of humanity. To learn to practice measuring days in things not tangible – the more spectrumie bits like joy and love and presence in between the measured notches on my calendar.

And maybe grief is giving myself permission and space to feel the losses, to wrestle, and hopefully, at the end of it all, accept what I cannot define. Maybe.