How do you hold a broken person?
Keep your palms wide, keep your fingers long and straight and close together; like feeding a goat or a mouthy dog. Don’t try and pet them when they are bristling with anger. Give them space, but not too much. Or maybe give them none at all—put them in a cage for their own safety. And when they snap and snarl, try not to let fear rule your heart. Impossible, perhaps, because fear wraps around your chest like a tight coil, or a leash, or a chain that always traces back to them.
Try and keep your heart intact. Weep in the hallway. Cry to the stranger on the phone. Acknowledge you simply don’t know what to do. Acknowledge that you’re tired. Acknowledge that fear has numbed you. But then, in chance glances, see this broken beloved when their eyes are bright or their hackles are smoothed. Let your heart be filled with love, keeping space for fear. It’s love, too.
Losing them breaks us.
After years of fighting, they may choose to leave anyway. They’ll take you with them. Your chronic fear will spin around, disoriented—the worst has happened. It’s no longer needed. But it’s familiar in your heart. For the sake of its own comfort, fear might find another object to cling to, trying to make itself needed when, really, the worst has already come.
Perhaps the tension inside you will be surpassed by exhaustion. An abject sensation, deprived of power. Lay in bed and stay there, as long as you need. Perhaps fury rages within you, ignited by the frustration of sunk costs and deep, deep pain. That fury is still love. Let it rage. It’ll burn itself out.
Inevitably the struggle so long extant between you and your loved one will curl inward, plaguing you with endless alternatives, what if’s. What if we’d taken them to the hospital? What if we’d gotten them out sooner? What if, that dark night, they’d only discovered Fiona Apple’s album Fetch the Boltcutters? Would any of it have made a difference? In your mind, it would have. In reality, it wouldn’t.
Fear of our own breaking.
You may worry that all your love has gone, usurped by this anguished loss. Once you grow accostumed to it, when loss becomes your baseline as you rise each morning or mid-afternoon, a second wave of sorrow comes. The shattered reality that you’ll never be who you were again. You’ll never be that whole again. That naive, that blissful. The world will never be the same again. Existance as you’ve known it endured a seismic fissure, and that fault-line cutting deep around the planet somehow originates out of your delicate chest.
Eventually you’ll leave the black shrouded nest of berievement. Something will make you. Work, most likely. You’ll drive like a hollow marionette down the highway. Ten minutes away from your job, pull the car over and let yourself be terrified. Everyone will know. Everyone will see. Everyone will sense that you are now broken. You’re now an unworthy husk of what you were a week ago, a month ago, a year ago.
It’s true, they’ll know. Only the most oblivious to loss won’t sense it. But what you might not know yet, as you try not to hyperventilate in the cold air before facing these people, is that you heart now has a deep channel in it, deep enough to touch something truer.
You may still need to tremor uncontrollably. Your anxiety may propel you to lie under benches or beneath bed frames, just to feel protected. You might realize that no amount of money is worth moving with numb muscle memory through the motions of your old life. You may need to move houses. Leave jobs. Stop doing any number of things you once found meaningful, because the rift in your spirit-body-mind is too fresh to be moved around very much.
Don’t jostle it, then. Stay still. Molten pain will cool. The magmatic fissure will still be there, but it will be a dependable, solid thing. You’ll be able to look down into it. Or to step away from its ledge. Or lower yourself into it with torch and compass and notebook, hoping to learn to navigate this new depth.
Uncovering ravines
When a hairstylest shaves the back of your neck and hands you a mirror you’ll hold back tears, realizing for the first time that the back of your head looks like your dead brother’s. You’ll assume you can’t cry, then. It’s too public. This woman doesn’t know you. Withhold, if you will.
Other times you’ll share and not know why. You’ll leave your body as you talk about your pain, about your lost love, and then suddenly come back to the moment, realizing oh, God, why are you sharing with this poor person?
You can tell who has known this pain, first-hand. If they’re grossly empathetic, pouting and looking at you with overly-worried eyes, or (God forbid) crying in excess, you know they have no idea. Anyone who makes such a show of their empathy that you end up comforting them will mistake their own gloating for kindness. Avoid them, if you can.
But if someone’s eyes drop to their hands and they do little more than brush away a tear, give them silence. They’ll open their mouth and tell you something you’ve never known. How many friends they’ve lost to overdoses. How their father used a gun. How they’ve had periods of their life where they woke up, vaguely disappointed to be alive.
You’ll be amazed how many people hide their gouges, trying to pretend their magmatic pain didn’t pierce so deep.
It’s good to protect yourself. To have a temporary shield to lay across your chest when you need it—not everyone will look into your abyss and be kind. But don’t perpetually hide your depth.
It takes courage to speak about suffering. Openness to your own pain will help others be less alone. It’ll help you be less alone. Eventually you may look around and see that everyone surrounding you is walking with a ravine. You’ll glean wisdom from them, and they from you.
Having suffered through different stories, you may collectively discover that loss is another shape of love. You may appreciate how loss has deepened your community, strenghtened your links to each other. You may wake up one day and be grateful for your grief.
I felt like you were speaking to me here, my dearest, capturing the tragic nature of existing--and trying to live with--unthinkable tragedy and perpetual anguish. I don't have your courage, to face the suffering head on, to talk about it or write. I have tried to choke out a few words out here and there, but committing words to page means I have to face what happened. I am weak, I hide, avert my eyes, just to get up every day. But that doesn't feel right. So I walk around not feeling right and I have just accepted this as the way it will always be. I just long for the "before times". You are light years ahead of this sad, old, grieving woman, my love, and I am inspired by your deep comprehension and insight about the nooks and crannies of this pain. Most don't--or can't--get near this. And those who have not suffered something similar cannot understand. Who would want to look at such agony if they don't have to? But you are a teacher here: you dive into it, follow it, makes sense of it, sharing this wisdom with the world, and you will live better because of it. I don't know what is ahead for me, but I am certain that you are leading an authentic, meaningful life, being real and fully you. Love and gratitude to you for your writing this and all of the beautiful pieces in Internal Alchemy.