There is so much we don’t know about grief before losing a loved one. Like that feeling inside when you pass a familiar place and know that the last time you were there, you were together. Alive. Laughing, arguing, silent, it doesn’t matter. Or not even together. Just that your world hadn’t yet been shaken to its very core. Without even a hint of what was to come.
If loss of a child– against the natural order– intensifies that feeling, their sudden loss smashes it into smithereens. It’s a punch in the stomach every time. I’ll be driving on a road or passing a landmark–nothing memorable, nothing of importance, it could be the tilt of a mailbox, the slow curve or climb of a hill, a splash of color–and I will know in my bones that the last time I passed that way, my son was alive. The stomach tells me. Then the heart; finally the brain catches up.
As I was driving in a nearby neighborhood a while back, on my way to buy a mirror I found on Craigslist, my body told me. I felt a deepening dread, a hollowness. I was thinking everyday thoughts: Would the mirror match my dresser? Had I paid my water bill? Why do those palm trees look so great while mine are yellowed? My mind was following the GPS, looking for the next turn. My body screamed “you have been here before”. Nothing LOOKED familiar. But the ever-so-slight rise of the terrain, as I passed over a speed bump, jolted me into awareness. I peeled away the recesses of time and remembered that I had commissioned a birthday cake from a home baker, and picked it up in this very same neighborhood. I believe it was his 13th. A soccer cake. Green–the soccer field–with yellow, maybe a touch of orange, frosting. A tribute to Brazil, whose official jersey he wore? That was his soccer phase. By 10th grade he had moved on to basketball. The dribbling sound etched into my brain and heart.
This memory of a colorful cake, of happy times, slammed into me like a train. I pulled over to slow my breathing and wipe my eyes. Years have past, but the raw grief is just as painful.
There is a knowing in our bones. I picture a map of the world, with every single place I have traveled laid out on one dimension. Like the “where we fly” map on the last page of airline magazines. The routes are like bones, veins. I could superimpose my body on these routes, and they would match up. My arm, reaching to Santa Barbara, our 2005 summer vacation. My leg, toes pointed, tracing the spine of the Andes. Many fibers, up and down the highways and byways from North to South. A skeleton of shared experience, of memories.
Yesterday my sister and I took her granchildren to a nearby lake for a few hours of swimming and sand-castle building. She was driving, but as we approached the time-barrered sign, I felt the rise of the road and knew I had been there, BC. Before the Calamity. Before the knocking on the front door and the awful words “Your son is dead.” It doesn’t matter how many years have passed. Our bodies know. Our nerves flare up, with the geography of grief, the pain of remembering.
After settling the little ones in, I dove into the cool water and swam away my feelings.