The Funeral

I didn’t realize it was grief I was feeling until I went to a funeral. We had been living separately in our house for months.

I had been in a state of unsettled mourning for months. I consciously opened my heart to the grief process, and it was arduous. The persistence, the discipline, the commitment. The acceptance of life as it is and commitment to the values of how I want to live it.

I had been grieving our marriage, our history, our image, my image, our family unit, my lover, my best friend… until someone said the word ‘mourning’, I hadn’t realized I was grieving. When I went to my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s uncle’s funeral, the grief people were feeling was palpable. It was a sudden and tragic death. It felt familiar, oddly. I understood sudden and tragic. I understood it all being wiped away in a moment. I understood the anger. The injustice. The devastation. The logistical, clinical, legal processes and the relative exhaustion. I had been living with it for months. I offered genuine hugs, and received them back. Touching him still felt so strange after months without it, after decades with it as natural as breathing. At the funeral, I spent most of the time with my hand on his leg or the back of his chair. Genuine support freely given, it also kept up a charade for the time being. We didn’t do much touching, other than a little from him because it was freezing in the funeral home, but when we did, it was friendly and loving. Truly, I felt very little in the way of warmth. My walls were erected and I was safe in there, but it sure was drafty. Cold and dead inside.