There is a punch line to grief that no one tells you. You won’t find it in the leaflets you clutch as you leave the hospital, or in the waiting room when you go to register the death. It won’t be in the platitudes from family and friends, or in the order of service you somehow pull together. It isn’t in the many books people write about coping with loss, and it isn’t in prayers, although you will look for it there.
You will feel as though the world has ended, and yet somehow it keeps on turning. A year goes by, and then another, and you hobble through each anniversary on fragile crutches made from others who have lost. You try not to attach too much significance to the day itself, because surely that will not help you heal, but you block out the office diary just in case. You know you can get up; get to the office; go through the motions of working, and there is a certain comfort in the knowledge that you are still functioning, when it seems so often that you are barely alive. But you know that you could not cope with more: you could not chair a meeting; make a decision; cope with conflict. And so you listen to the clock ticking the day away, and wish you didn’t remember the precise moment he died. But you do, and as the hands moves forward you hold your own breath and a piece of you wishes it were your last.
The years roll by and you fall into the recovery position expected by polite society, even managing a smile when others mention his name – which is not often, any more. A friend asks what you’re doing on the 10th of December, and you check your diary and stare at the empty page, convinced there was something you had to do that day. You write down an appointment, but the feeling you are double-booked continues, and you check again. And there in the corner, in faint pencil as though it hardly has a right to be there at all, is his initial. A wave of hot guilt sweeps over you and presses on your chest until you have to gasp for air. It brings with it the fear that you had forgotten, and that in years to come you might not remember him at all. You are grief-stricken once more, with a side order of guilt, and you stumble away as though someone has punched you.
That’s the kicker grief brings. The pay-off they don’t tell you; the epilogue no one writes. That the very act of getting better makes you feel so much worse.