Patience

   I wrestle with thoughts of calling out someone who keeps telling me I am not grieving properly. She says I am avoiding and denying my grief, as though she could see me 24 hours a day, instead of the once a month she does see me, as though she knew who I am better than I know me, as though grief was a decision I could make and not this global condition that keeps knocking me off my feet. 
   But I don’t want to snap at her, because that’s my self-importance wanting it. I want to forgive her, because she truly doesn't understand. It’s one thing to minister to people whose best friends just died. It is another to lose your best friend, forever, and with him your future.
   Also, she has burdens, and it is extraordinary how dutifully she carries on day after day, putting a bigger situation first in spite of what she needs. Maybe she’s lashing out.

   The first time my new truth came out of my mouth, I said, “The world is different.” 
   And she said, “No, it is not.”
   I say that it helps me to process my sorrow by thinking, and she says, no, it doesn’t. I say I would rather sit at home, next to Michael’s chair, and watch Netflix than go to a public weepy-time service where you listen to sad music and light a candle and then go home alone, to your chair and your memories. She says I am doing it wrong.
   I wonder if I said something carelessly misleading to her or someone told her a story about me that misrepresents what Michael meant to me — my only love, my dearest friend — and she has some false understanding of my history with him that presents me as cold or calculating or unworthy of him? And so she wants to punish me? 
   Or maybe she is angry with me for not finding a way to spend more time with the other people in his life who lost him, too, and who suffer and miss his face.

   When I talk to myself about this, in my mind, I rehearse direct conversations, direct, with her, which is the thing to do when we have a serious misunderstanding going with someone who matters to us. I recite the names of all the big people in my life who are dead now. I cry about my mom and dad, and my dead cats. But that would be self-justification. I don’t need to justify how I feel.
   Then I lose my patience, in my mind, and insult her. Call her smug, mostly. 
   But I don’t believe she is smug. That wouldn't be honest or helpful or represent how I feel about her. I like her and don’t want her ever to feel what I feel. No one should feel like this. I think maybe she is overwhelmed, but too strong to give up carrying on all the work she has to do.
   And what if she is simply at a loss and trying to navigate our conversations using some touchstone advice some trainer gave her — that people are pigheaded sheep who do not know their own hearts and do not know what is good for them and must be broken down so they admit their helplessness and the light can enter their hearts?
   Well, I admit that. My heart is all lighted up. I’m not a joyful sad person, I am a sad joyful person. I live now, and now is often beautiful, when it’s not crushing me. But I live here without my life’s partner, and our future is gone. My world has no future in it.
   Why does it matter to me that this young person wants to correct me and contradict me? Am I focusing on that because it’s a simple problem, a relationship problem, and I know I can resolve it?
   Because it certainly is less awful to think about a problem I have with a living person than to think about Michael and how he looked as a corpse in his chair and that he is not living anymore.

   That must be what is going on. I am distracting myself with this whole thing.

   For now I am will channel my mother, and think calm thoughts, giving time some time to work. Let her live past the rough patch she's going through. And then take her to tea or something else good, and have it out.