Grief and Bigness

I'm still amazed and confused about the dizzying hugeness of grief. A well-meaning person once concluded that grief has 5 stages, but I suspect that person probably scanned their eyes across the murky city sky one evening and concluded that the sky has 5 stars. For people like me, who tend to lay down and look up during vacant nights on the countryside, it's clear we'll spend our whole life discovering new facets of grief and still wonder why it's so big.

Catie was big to me too, almost mythically large in the way only a big sister of 4 sisters can be. This might explain why the space she left when we lost her, or she lost herself, seemed to have black-hole-esque proportions. The picture at left might begin to describe what it's like to be very small and have a big sister (that's me watching, in the far right corner). I spent my adolescence wondering if I'd ever be big enough to fit into her clothes, big enough to have friends like hers, big enough to drive away in my convertible when things got rough. But now, when I take the few items of clothing we kept of hers out of storage and hold them up to me, I realize how little she was. Quite little, actually.

Wading around in grief, you stumble across questions depending on the season. Other people are wading around in it too, but their questions are different, so you hope for people to have compassion for that unique question that only you are living through. Like there was that day I turned 18 years and 356 days old. Since my older sister only lived to be 18 years and 355 days old, I wondered if that made me older than her. This might seem irrelevant to some people, but I assure you the question of whether I was officially older than my only older sister really shook some walls inside. I also waded through a period where, despite a lifetime of being told I resembled my sister, I actually saw her features when I looked in the mirror. I questioned whether resentment or joy was the primary emotion I felt towards the mirror. Even though I'm largely past that question, I still see her when my mascara smudges underneath my eyes like hers always did.

Fortunately--particularly for those of us who've experienced an unusually big or confusing loss-- I don't think we're ever even allowed to know the full scope of a loss at any one point. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that "the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and (...) thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past." I think this is true, since I mostly remember the way my sister sounded when she laughed, not the way she sounded when she cried. Perhaps we're also spared the burden of the future. After all, if we knew the exact number sleepless nights that loss would eventually provoke, we probably would be too paralyzed to continue. Bigness is generally taken down to what we can handle, so we can keep walking and making coffee and calling the cable company, because that's what people do.

Catie's kindergarten poem about herself

Sometimes in grief, it becomes "strong" to say the loss was small and had no power over us and "weak" to call it what it might well have been-- pretty freaking gigantic. It becomes "strong" to be steadily optimistic and "weak" to admit you occasionally believe horrible things about the universe because that person is gone, even though the most wise people in history have thought those thoughts as well. I've never particularly bought into these falsities. Like I am smart and fulfilled and generally thankful for how fabulous my life is, but I'm not going to conclude that it was therefore ok that my sister died at a crucial point in my identity formation. Pretending big grief is small, or actually joy in disguise, makes everyone around more comfortable, but can also leave the person wading through their loss feeling like a failure on top of everything else.

Catie's kindergarten poem about me

I also think making grief seem small can dilute the true joy and peace that comes before, during and after loss. Because those exist too, and they're even more huge than the loss itself. I feel joyful that I like to swim in the big waves and dance and sing in the shower and drink coffee with huge amounts of cream and sugar, since these are things I learned directly or indirectly from her. I also feel joyful that I have things like Catie's kindergarten poem book, which makes me laugh hysterically every time. Today would have been Catie's 26th birthday, and that makes me joyful, too.

Staying

I meet a lot of foreigners down here. I meet retired expats who sit amongst themselves in the shadows of their mountainside homes, drinking flaxseed smoothies in the same corner cafe morning after morning. I meet teams of bright-eyed young missionaries in matching t-shirts, eager to feed the children or spread the gospel or kick-start their personal revival. I meet vegan Western European backpackers drinking and couch-surfing their way around South America, huge Eastern European men-- who generally prefer being pants-less it might be noted-- on their way to summit a few volcanoes, New Yorkers visiting their Ecuadorian relatives, students studying abroad, German teenagers doing their year of volunteer service, crazy-haired sociologists, Peace Corps volunteers, marines, foreign service employees, and recent divorcees who were somehow financially fortunate enough to live their mid-life crisis Eat Pray Love style. 

I've fit several roles and probably their accompanying stereotypes during my time in Ecuador. Like most study abroad students I misplaced my dignity in Quito's Plaza Foch, and like most Fulbrighters I enjoyed being a "grantee" (not a "volunteer") by choosing private cars over public buses on leisurely weekend getaways. Now that I've decided to stay here without any real outside affiliation (a program, a grant), it's getting increasingly difficult to pin me down. Which brings me to my next point: I'm staying.

It became clear I would be staying when I realized I wasn't leaving. I don't mean "leaving" as in departing on an airplane, I mean "leaving" like that gradual tearing away, hopeful anxiety-filled period that usually occurs when you're transitioning into goodbye. I've done the "leaving" many times-- it occurs to me I'm actually more skilled at leaving than I am at staying. But I just haven't been leaving over the past few months. I tried to jump-start the process several times, mostly by taking people aside and telling them I was, in fact, returning to the States for good in August. I didn't read their eyes as saying "I will miss you," I read them as saying, "we both know that's not true." So I had a long time to be leaving, and I just kept staying, and here I am... staying. 

But before I can stay I need to leave for a bit. I miss my family and Resees peanut butter cups and the way the wind smells in coastal Virginia. I fly soon-- July 24. This is 11 days before the end of my grant period, but I figure I need that 11 days feeling what it feels like to be home more than I need 11 days of my grant money. I'll be Stateside for almost a month, in which time I'll definitely see my cousin get married and probably construct a haphazard road-trip with my Ecuadorian brother Marco, who is probably coming with me and everyone will probably assume is the reason I'm staying in Ecuador. You are all welcome to assume what you will. 

I've accepted a teaching contract at my current University-- Universidad Tecnica de Ambato-- for the next two semesters (September 2011-August 2012). I've been assigned real classes to teach, as well as research hours. To earn extra money, I'll also spend some time private tutoring, giving a swim lesson or two, and my friends want me to turn my kitchen into a for-profit bakery (this last one being slightly less likely). I won't speculate on details, since this is still Ecuador. But that is, strange as it may be, the "plan."