The Unexpected Guest

or, grief is a cruise ship.

After experiencing four losses in as many months, I’ve heard two sentiments on repeat.

The first is about the unexpected nature of grief, its tendency to ebb and swell. To roll like waves. To shift and hide and appear with a vengeance. Its curious pattern of evading pattern, to look different in every case.

The second is an expressed wish that I take care of myself. To be gentle. To be kind. This is a lovely thing to say. Yet as these words washed over me, transmuted from sound to meaning, I realized: I had no idea what anyone was talking about.

I’d like to think I have a pretty decent grasp of “kindness,” that I know what it looks like, how it feels. I know how to be kind to a friend or a kitten or a stranger in distress. But considering how to be kind to myself left me standing in place, glancing to and fro, as if trying to locate an exit. It reminds me of the time a friend told me to “step into my power,” and I was left with the knowledge that, short of donning a cape, I had no clue how to do it.

Pondering self-directed gentleness brought up images of soft blankets and bubble baths, meandering walks and warm cups of tea. Such things were at odds with the way I felt, which was more aligned with screaming or setting something — perhaps everything? — on fire. I’m good at fixing myself a hot beverage. I am less good at surveying my internal landscape and determining what is needed. I am even worse at seeing myself struggle and saying a kind thing back.

For weeks, rage was my primary emotion. It was often aimed at no one and nothing in particular, other times directed at whatever got in my way — my inbox, the C train, the teenagers who exited the local coffee shop, en masse, while I held the door for the whole baker’s dozen without so much as a glance in my direction.

Most days, I sped down the sidewalk in double time, like the afternoon was scored to Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughta Know.” Sometimes I sprawled out on the floor like a starfish. More than once, my husband came home to find me splayed on the couch, wearing coat and hat and shoes.

“Are you going somewhere?” he asked.

“I meant to,” I said. “But then I got stuck.”