The Quiet Rebellion of Grief
I’m writing this sat in the garden of my childhood home - my home, now, I suppose -, shifting back and forth between the blistering but welcome sun and the pleasant reprieve of shade. Surrounded by notebooks, paperwork, letters I should have opened months ago but didn’t -couldn’t-, and a million memories of my childhood and the people that were present for every moment of it, but are now present only - and constantly - by the resonance of their absence.
It’s been over six months since my dad passed. I’ve been putting off the final piles of paperwork that need doing. I’m playing catch-up, now, though play has little place in it. I thought I’d canceled all expensive, once vital but now redundant subscriptions, memberships and insurances. Turns out I hadn’t. I’m not even truly surprised.
I can’t begin to guesstimate the amount of hours I have spent poring over bank statements and tax papers rather than photos and memories. Speaking to customer service employees instead of friends. Tending to formalities rather than my grief.
Whenever I sit down to do what must be done, I inevitably spend at least 5 minutes just being steaming mad at this world that drowns the first weeks and months of grief in paperwork instead of love, care and support. Which bureaucratic wheels move achingly slow, until someone dies, it seems, and suddenly everything needs doing and settling within a fortnight. It’s maddening. And then the grief kicks in. Where my anger makes it clear that no, this is not okay, not by any means, the grief that follows carries the disbelief of how many aspects of our lives have been dehumanised, its voice breaking for what that means.
I wonder if my procrastination and refusal to motivate myself into just getting it done is my small act of rebellion, of reclaiming some humanity in this system that seems insistent on stripping it away until we’ve forgotten its feel. Obviously I’m paying for that rebellion infinitely more than the institutes its aimed at. It feels a little like throwing pebbles at the Great Wall of China, hoping one of them will make a dent. It’s the satisfaction of the act more than any unexpected outcome that counts, I would say.
In all the grief work I do, whether in my own or when holding space for the journey of others, I keep coming back to this notion of reclaiming our humanity. Which is to say: to reconnect with the emotional sides of ourselves that we are taught to hide, suppress and overcome. The seasons of life that are often not welcome and thus expressed only within the walls of our own house, our own bodies - if at all. I don’t think we can grief without rejecting the notion that we must always be productive, strong, positive and thriving. Nor without fostering a compassionate relationship with the parts of ourselves that believe just that - because growing up in the world that we have, most of us will have developed those parts internally, too.
And then what?
Then the paperwork still needs doing, and the letters still need writing, and the dear customer service people still need talking to. But now, it doesn’t have to feel like I have to shove aside my human struggles just to get it done. It’s okay that what could have been done in 20 minutes has taken four hours, and that there’s little energy left for the next task. Because it’s okay to let the waves of grief slow us down, to allow them to shape the rhythm of our days.
I feel that it’s in this act of slowing, of refusing to rush through what demands more than just our doing, we reclaim our right to be human. Our right to stumble, run, skip, crawl, plod and bound along, always moving at our own pace. We are not, after all, robots programmed for efficiency. We only live now but in every now we carry what happened yesterday, last week, last month, last year. Our earlier experiences still echo through the chambers of our every cell and organ.
So, yes, the paperwork still needs doing, but it will get done in its own time. Let the process be slow, imperfect, and entirely human.
