Complicated Grief

When pain can't be explained

A year before he died, my ex-boyfriend posted a photo on Facebook of the rustic and well-loved prayer rug he kept in his office.

He accompanied the photo with the caption:

“The rug is old, handmade, gorgeous, and I love how it splays where a supplicant’s knees are, stretching those stitches. When you pray you put yourself on the floor, where you should be. I use it every day and would wrap myself up in it if I could. Too cold though and I’m too big. :)”

Since I received the shocking news of his death, the phrase “you put yourself on the floor, where you should be” keeps ingeminating in my mind.

He was an academic who seemed to belong up in university belfries and ivory towers; it’s hard to picture him kneeling on the ordinary old floor.

“On the floor, where you should be.”

After receiving the awful news, I keep wondering how I should be feeling, which is actually the only way I’ve ever experienced grief: complicated.

When my father died, we hadn’t spoken in six years. My grief swallowed me whole, but I couldn’t figure out why; hadn’t I already buried him?

I felt like an imposter at my support group when others talked about the ache of missing conversations with their mothers. I didn’t miss my dad in any direct sense, yet I could barely function for over a year.

Then in 2021, one of my best friends suffered a severe stroke and has lived at a rehabilitation facility ever since. She isn’t gone; in fact, she’s been improving! But she is and will be a different Kim than the one whom I shared a breakfast burrito with, the same week a small blood clot betrayed her brilliance.

Then when I lost my dear darling stepdad, who I loved in a straightforward regular no-nonsense way, I still felt as though I was appropriating grief, like it wasn’t mine to feel. “How’s your mom doing?” I answered over and over, so at some point I gave over my grieving rights to her and just felt deeply weird and irritable for the next few months.

Then, this time, another complicated loss affects me, and at great distance.

He knew complicated grief well. After all, his own father had succumbed to a battle with depression a few years prior.

When my father died, I called him for emergency insight. “Oh buddy,” he groaned, “I’m so sorry. You’ll get through this with strength and grace, because that’s who you are.”

As I limped around earth during those early months, feeling as though my home was somewhere in a different universe on another sphere called Planet My Dad Died, I relied on those words to salvage my strength with the unwelcome wisdom he had gained: “Some day you’re going to feel so free,” he assured.

“On the floor, where you should be.”

Where should I be? Should I forego this grief and give it up, to someone more deserving? Am I allowed to feel any pain when theirs soars high above mine?

‘Too cold though, and I’m too big,’ Grief answers back.

When I first mentioned his death, I received this emotionally-masterful comment from reader Lauren, who said:

People who have touched our lives tenderly are woven into the fabric of our souls, and when they are gone, it feels like a yarn being pulled in the wrong direction, skewing everything just enough that it can never quite be put back as it was.

This image made sense of the bulky grief that wasn’t fitting in any grief-boxes I’d arranged in my mind. It does feel all wrong!

Imagine this rug, gloriously-tattered as it is, with a wonky askew pattern; it would never be the same:

A manifestation of my OCD is an existential obsession with figuring things out—why exactly evil exists, what specifically it means when people die too young, how precisely grief is manifesting, which exact threads in the rug of my life are skewing everything amok.

And, like many symptoms of mental disorders, I suspect these are also symptoms of simply being a human.

It’s really, really hard to sit with all the questions that naturally arise from living a life and not choose to numb out instead. Which is probably why Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Real Housewives exist.

I also suspect that, because Western society prizes logical intelligence above the rest, it seems that we should be able to figure it all out. And if we can’t, that’s on us.

I’ve wasted a LOT of time in my life thinking I wasn’t smart because my brain can’t do logic. I’ve been told over and over there’s only one kind of intelligence.

You can only measure intellect on an IQ test, that’s it. “Interpersonal intelligence” is a lie made up to make people feel better about themselves. (This is actually something somebody told me.)

But when my brain uses mental math to grapple with the complexities of life, I find myself in all kinds of nightmarish puzzles, like Why do bad things happen? (Started asking that one in kindergarten; haven’t slept since!)

“That’s a rigid, one-dimensional question,” my therapist says. “Can you ask it another way?”

I feel intimidated, because a voice inside tells me I should start quoting the Stoics in an essay response to the riddle at hand.

…But I think about how I danced through my grief last week, answering a question I can’t put in to words.

…And I think about a quote from the Jewish-Buddhist author Jay Michaelson: “Not-knowing is more powerful than knowing, simple vulnerability more resonant than the baroque convolutions of esoterica or the tired poses of cynics.”

…And I think about how I’ve not-known my way through the most important decisions of my life. I’ve never stayed five minutes too long in a job or relationship that wasn’t right; isn’t that a pretty useful type of intelligence!? Yet my SAT score was hilariously low!

…And I realize I’m trying to logic my way through complicated grief because people told me that was the only way to understand something.

…And it’s not working.

So I’m going looking to the type of intelligence I actually possess, which is more mosaic than math problem, and it’s helping me navigate an isolating pain that I can’t explain.

I recently listened to an interview with the musician Nick Cave, who lost two of his sons within seven years of each other.

There is no greater grief, x2 no less, and I expected Nick to dismiss ‘lesser’ grief while talking about his own.

Many artists claim experiences for themselves, as though they are the first ones to ever experience it (who, me??!!??), and that’s what I predicted from a morose singer who has gone through two unthinkable losses—while the majority of his fan base probably relates to his melancholy music when their crush doesn’t text back.

Instead, Nick fully leaned in to the universality of loss:

I disagree with the sort of “grief club” or “the club no one wants to join.” I think humanity itself is that club and that we are all feeling these senses of loss, whether it’s directly personal, it’s bred into us, that sense of yearning.

And that’s not a failure. It’s a condition. To have these feelings, that we’re being intellectually dishonest or all these other arguments against these essential feelings. It is our condition. And I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, most people feel this way: a sense of lostness about things and a need for something beyond that. That’s my defense of religion, I guess.

I’ve thought far too much about who gets or doesn’t get to own the experience of grief, which is certainly why I police my own feelings when it comes to loss.

To be completely honest, I resent my friends who endure what I have decided is a “lesser” loss than any of from my menagerie of complex bereavement.

I cling to the belief that I know something they don’t. I’ve lived more life than they have. I’ve pulled back the curtain on something they can’t see. Maybe it feels like a consolation prize.

I once fell in love with my own woundedness, and I would keep the wounds fresh just to keep licking them. I thought my offering to the world was cracked bells and loneliness.

With a bit of age, I’m realizing that our brokenness is a given from Day 1, and one’s offering to the world is the shards of light we find among the wreckage.

Per Nick Cave’s philosophy, we’re born into grief—and no suffering means more than an other. No genre of grief is more complex than another.

I can’t begin to imagine a more humble reckoning with the loss of children.

The etymology of ‘humble’ traces directly back to the Latin humilis for “lowly, insignificant, on the ground,” similar to the Latin word humus for “rich soil.” It generates a picture of getting close to the earth, even in the dirt.

“On the floor, where you should be.”

I thought I should find answers in buildings and in books, in monasteries and minarets. But I think this post was right:

We should be on the floor.

The floor is the place where we fall to our knees in praise of good news or in despair after bad news. It’s where we are fully human, and only human. It’s where the complications of our grief don’t matter, because all that matters is our cries out to whoever is listening beyond the thunder.

The ground doesn’t know or care whether we said a proper goodbye, or whether we settled that one argument. The ground only knows the weight upon it—the weight of humanness, in all its misshapen forms.

Because I’ve never experienced so-called (by me) “straightforward grief,” I’ve tried to squish it into traditional liturgies and old hymnals, philosophy books and funeral rights.

But where it really belongs is on the floor. My complicated grief comes out in a frustrated wail through clenched teeth, a gnarly moan, or a shrugging silence when there’s nothing to say.

Perhaps the only line between ‘straightforward grief’ and ‘complicated grief’ is a designated sympathy card. Perhaps it’s all the same once we are on the floor, wondering how, once we’ve given up on the “why.”

I made a playlist, long ago, filled with lyrics that helped me sort out the complicated grief of losing my father—including his voice on the last track.

If “artistic intelligence” doesn’t count in this society, then count me out!

None of these songs make a ton of sense; most are collages of images, conversations, and the weird memories that stick around when the seemingly more important ones slip away.

They don’t tell linear stories, but they tell the truth. The kind of truth you only learn from being on the floor.

Complicated grief is isolating and awkward, its manifestations unpredictable and confusing. But what makes it 100000x harder is letting the rigid intellect try to take the job of the floor, the dance, the groan, and the not-known.

When the woven fabric of our souls skews enough that it can never as it once was, it scares us into trying to make sense of it all.

But maybe it’s helpful to remember, per Nick Cave’s philosophy, that our souls came like that straight from their Maker, complete with yanked threads and crooked patterns that have always been there and will always be.

It’s only when we sit on the ground that we begin to reveal and see their essence—a bunch of threads woven together that can unravel at any moment.

A stretched rug is a sign of a humble and resilient life lived—one with at least as many cries on knees for help as problems solved. Getting on the floor is the first and last step.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t call to mind the tremendous mental health crisis among men at this moment, and share this potent reminder:

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🚨ALERT ALERT!🚨 I have a writing retreat coming up in May over the weekend of the 15th-17th in Boone, North Carolina (think: Sound-of-Music-style mountains in the springtime).

It’s the first time I’m ever teaching the HOW AND WHERE TO BEGIN aspect of transforming your own life experiences into writing and art—an alchemy that has given such meaning to my life, especially the hard and complicated crap.

We have a great group so far (including the rare retreat species that is MEN!!!! ;) and I’m planning it with such wonder and excitement.
➡️ LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE! ⬅️

The walk from the common spaces to the accommodations, where I have had many rich minutes of reflection ;)