Dead Last
I am the slowest griever.
Recently I told my friend I want “Dead Last,” tattooed on my thigh because I am proudly dead-last in the race to finish grieving a lost relationship. My friend was like, “I’ll give you that tattoo.” And I said “uhhhhhhh” wow all my excuses for not getting the tattoo are melting away and we are left with only the fact that I can’t make big commitments like tattoos that will be on my body until I die.
I did not always feel so much acceptance for my slow griever status.
When the person I thought I would be with 4ever broke up with me at age 29, I wanted to bounce back quickly—meet someone new, post about it on Instagram, get back to feeling like a hottie with a bottie. I especially wanted to recover faster than him. Like a person clinging to the outside of the train but trying to look like they were sitting inside, I did my best to project a public image of resilience for about six months. Then I let go of the train car and tumbled into a little cabin in the woods where I could do my healing work. For like three years. 🤡 And I worked as a waitress in my hometown. 🤡 And I had to take wine orders from the parents of my high school friends whose kids always seemed be working for NPR in Africa or something. 🤡 I eventually grew my way into a new and more flexible identity, the basis of the legions-deep capacity for intimacy that I have today (and that is the foundation of my practice as a therapist). But the whole process was not giving Demi Levato revenge track. It was giving… maybe this song by Jim Croche. I LOVE THIS SONG BTW.
Six years later, my then husband and I decided to divorce. This time, I had no attachment to moving on more quickly than my ex-partner. I felt jealous that his life seemed to be getting better a lot faster than mine, but I didn’t nurture any illusions of a resplendent rebound. I mostly just felt sorry for myself, which was fine by me. I spent a year working through my “Healing Heartbreak” online program, reading Conscious Uncoupling with my friend who was also getting a divorce, and trying to just Glennon Doyle my way through the mayhem. Lots of voice-memos to myself about myself, walks in the forest, bike rides alone. I watched a personality disorder diagnosis cross my skies like a looming cloud. I felt like my life as a sexual being was probably over, and I took risks toward the future I wanted only when my therapist called me out on letting fear rule my life and made me commit in session to moving to Portland as I had said I wanted to. My plastic avatar fell off the board game of Life and onto the carpet below.
But over time, I again crawled out of the tunnel and into a field, grounded, hollowed out, and sporting a lower center of gravity than before. Lines in the sand were drawn and potential partners who crossed them turned into pillars of salt. The tendency to leave my truth in the ways I had in my marriage or my previous partnership started to smell like something burning on the stove. It evoked in me a similar panic and I sprinted into the kitchen to turn off the burner.
I continued to leave my truth in new ways and make myself vulnerable to new dramatic course corrections over the coming years. I’ll do it again. I guess my soul loves Earth School and wants to make sure I get the best bang for my tuition-buck here. (Dear soul, Ready for a break—maybe a pottery class?) But I don’t need to retake the classes I crushed through turtle-grieving my losses. I could take those finals on no sleep after a bender, just a Diet Coke and a ballpoint pen as my aides. Being a slow griever means I grieve hella slow and sometimes feel like a lame-o about it, especially when my little avatar is trudging through high-pile carpet and hasn’t met any of the other wayward avatars yet.1
But it also means that when I army-crawl over the finish line, I am very ready for the post-grief-Ferrari that G-d likes to park in my driveway as a reward for my snail’s pace. (Thanks, Daddy. But srsly when I completed my grief year and moved to Portland, it was like moving to Oz. After I fell off the board game of Life, I willingly trudged through the high-pile carpet, bewildered and lonely until—poof! I came upon a lot of other fallen plastic avatars who I came to love with the ferocity of a parachute opening mid-earthly-plummet. My new plastic avatar friends were making art, making out, and drinking Spindrifts as they innertubed down the glitter-river of the Great Mystery herself.)
Grieve slowly if you grieve slowly. Grieve fast if you grieve fast. There’s no advice in the essay, just an invitation to come as you are.
xo,
Nora
Things that got me/ get me through the high-pile carpet:
An Emotionally Focused Workbook for Relationship Loss: Healing Heartbreak Session By Session Book by Clare Rosoman and Kathryn Rheem. The intro will make you cry. These two ladies wrote this as a labor of deep care for people experiencing relationship loss.
Bea sent me this IFS session between Richard Schwartz and his student who is three or four months away from dying. It’s called “Last Session.”
This TED talk helped curb my strong tendency to romanticize the past and get high off of longing.
Frontline documentaries.
Pasta with red sauce.
My very shy cat Zia.
My ex-partners—all of ya!—who have been kind and reasonable.
Lettie Jane’s Deeper Drawing class at Ulna Studio.
Everything else. All of you who come roast marshmallows in my dumpster with me. Thank you.
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After falling off the board game of Life. This confused my friend Colin so I’m adding it here.
🌈🩷 ty for the shout out and your vulnerability and sense of humor.