Grief is like this hole that you dig for yourself, shovel at the ready, preparing for loss and the metaphorical inability to move thereafter. So you dig and you dig and you walk around the yard, keeping the hole ever in your periphery even as you ignore it or focus on other things. And then you experience a loss of some kind, and you climb into your hole and pull the dirt in around yourself, immobile and trapped, submerged within your grief. It's just you and the hole. And then maybe gradually, you push some of the dirt away and you free parts of your body. And you begin to move your legs again and push more and more of the dirt away until you can slowly start to pull yourself out of the hole. And then you stand. But you have to be mindful, because it's really easy to slip and fall right back in that hole again. So you walk away from it and move around the yard again, still keeping the hole in your periphery. Then maybe a memory strikes you, or you hear a song, or you see a movie, or smell an old and familiar fragrance, so you go back to the hole for a little while. Maybe you get all the way in, or maybe you just stand by it for awhile. This happens over and over again. Sometimes it hurts a lot, sometimes maybe just a little bit. But it's there. It's always there. You and the hole.
I didn't (maybe couldn't) listen to The Flaming Lips' "Waiting for Superman" for a long time, the allegory just being too much to couple with my own loss. But the song's poignant grasp on the realities of coping with your grief and your pain is just too powerful to try and ignore forever. Taking this childhood ideal, this unconquerable force of good and empathy, and noting that he can't save you this time feels like the world exploding, but it's real and it's true. You just have to wait for time to eventually do its thing.
And maybe someday you can fill in that hole and not linger around it so much anymore.
Wow. All my love. And yeah, even without being tied to a loss, this song has always destroyed me.
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