And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
-Kahlil Gibran
What have I done to move past pain?
Drugs.
Nothing major, just the socially accepted ones like alcohol and weed… both of which make me forget my pain, at least for a while.
But for long-term pain… I talk. I call my friends and family. I talk to my therapist.
And almost always, I am told: you have every right to feel sad or hurt about X or Y or Z or your crazy ex trying to insert himself into your new and improved life.
While talking about my brain pain, my lifelong dance with depression, my wise friend Anna once shared a quote from her equally sage mother who was a pillar of our community: “If you’re not depressed, you’re not paying attention.”
But paying attention to pain can suck. And moving through pain can feel like you are walking through taffy covered in manure while someone is pointing a blowtorch at you at the same time. You are white-knuckled, trying to stay whole, trying to keep your clothes and hair intact, knowing you will arrive at your destination with singed locks and smelling like shit nonetheless.
But you keep moving. I have always kept moving through pain because of my family. I know they would want me to rise above the pain, to want to stay here and keep going and be a part of their lives.
And then that awareness brings me more pain - because I know I am so lucky. I know I have brothers and sisters here on the planet to help me move through my pain. I know my parents gave me great tools and a legacy of resilience to draw upon that many do not have. I have learned to manage my pain.
Tho one is not supposed to compare pain, my pain doesn’t hold up against my father’s, for example, or like the pain of Princess Diana’s children. Those children grew up without their mom, knowing all the dirt of the royal house and their family. My father found his dad dead on the side of the road after he was hit by a drunk driver. Then he went to Germany in an engineering battalion in 1944, and spent a year facing the Nazis. He lost a daughter to a heart disease when she was just 13.
So I do think of all my father went through, and my mom, whose kind but alcoholic father drove her and her siblings into the ditch from time to time, with icy cold water seeping into their car one winter nite, causing my mother to have a fear of the water ever after.
And I realize, we compare pain to give ourselves some sense of scale, to remind ourselves we are not alone in it. And compared to many, my pain is not so much.
Pain is generational.
Pain is sometimes sensational.
The stuff of tabloids, the rhymes in songs, the headlines in magazines.
Your pain is my pain is your pain is our pain.
We breathe through it.
I do a lot of breathing, a lot of sighing.
When I sigh, I am saying, I cannot do anything about this, so I am sighing instead.
I have to let it out. Siiiiiigh.
That’s how I move through pain. I let it out. In writing, in a song, in a conversation, in art, in helping others, in a sound, in a sigh.
I walk through pain, too. I try hard to keep walking, to let my body try to reconcile what the brain cannot: a deep loss. One step in front of another, miles and miles. Looking for signs, smiling when they came, then crying and laughing at my superstitious self.
Helping others is a huge way I move through my pain. When I find someone who is struggling with the same things I have, when I meet someone who takes the words right outta my mouth, I feel a kinship in their pain, and want to help them navigate through it.
I think the biggest mistake we make is trying to move our pain on our own timeline.
Pain doesn’t know schedules.
Grief does not give a shit about your Apple watch.
If grief were a better planner, it wouldn’t have made my parents die 11 days apart and my brother die one month later.
While some would argue this was likely the most efficient way of grieving the loss of three people I loved more than almost anyone else on the planet, post-funerals Rachael would disagree. The sleep. The tears. The efforts to make sense of it all. The guilt the guilt the guilt - not just with John, who took his life, but also with my parents, because I worried I hadn't spent enough time with them. Because I hadn't.
Sigh.
Big sigh.
Deep acceptance.
Deep acceptance of my faults. Deep acceptance that I am human. That I didn't want to drive down and back home sometimes. That I didn't want to live in my hometown that had zero diversity when I left.
Deep acceptance and TIME.
Depth in relationships does not build up overnight, so there is no reason to expect deep acceptance of a deep loss to come quickly.
Time does heal all wounds.
I would not have been able to write about this five years ago; I would have been hysterically crying instead.
Time lets us talk about the past with a detachment only she provides.
Time lets us move through the dangerous minefield of pain in a way that only she knows.
December 28, January 8, February 21… that winter of grief was one I could not watch with serenity. It was all I could do to survive that winter…and spring, and summer. To wake up each day and drag my tired ass to work, come home and do all I could to keep myself busy and not cry for the 23rd or 76th night in a row… and that is OK. Because here I am, five years later, and winter is coming. It’s mid-September in Portland, but it feels like fall already. I have weathered winters of grief, and have learned: to watch with serenity through the winters of your grief is an ideal, but like most ideals, striving toward that ideal of serenity is just as important as arriving there.
Striving toward serenity is sometimes all we can do.
*sigh*
- Rachael Himsel
9.18.22