Dear Diary,
I actually kissed the walls of the house today. I guess that isn’t any weirder than chasing my sister down the hall to puke on her after I heard the news. Grief has strange forms, I’ve learned. I didn’t really realize how much I love this old Victorian house until the strange parental meetings ended in a decision to move. This is my home with all its quirks – collapsing ceilings, bat visitors, ghostly haunts, sealed off cupolas, cellar doors, and a hidden room. I don’t want to move!
My friend John is a psychiatrist. He says I am grieving because I have to move. He says grieving happens in lots of situations, not just when someone dies. He says we grieve when someone moves, when your friend isn’t your friend any more, when your cat runs away, or any time you feel really sad. I have talked to him about all of these things because they have happened to me.
I always seem to get in trouble when I am grieving. John says that is because I am “acting out” my grief. I threw my fork down on my plate and chipped it when the policeman came to the door during dinner and told my dad that my dog, Pepper, had died because he was hit by a car. John says my dad didn’t understand that I was grieving, so he just sent me to my room for “acting out” at dinner. Even after the policeman came, I didn’t really believe Pepper was dead, so I went all around the neighborhood calling for her for weeks.
One morning while I was delivering newspapers, I saw a white fluffy dog that looked just like Pepper running down the street, but when I called her she didn’t come to me. When I told John about it, his eyes looked a little wet, and he took my hand and said that it hadn’t really been Pepper and that I was in the denial stage of grief. I didn’t want to believe that Pepper had died. (By the way, I know it is crazy to call a white dog Pepper, but I think doing things in the normal way is boring. I guess I could have called her Salt, but who wants a dog named Salt? But Salt goes with Pepper – so her name is Pepper.)
Another time I was grieving, I threw a puzzle across the room. My dad told me that my great grandma died. I was just so mad at Dad because he came home and told me that great-gran was out of pain, and I thought that meant she was all better. I started to cheer and jump up and down, and then he said what he really meant was that she had died. That’s when I threw the puzzle. He sent me to my room that time, too. I guess Dad just doesn’t understand that I don’t handle grieve like normal people.
How do normal people handle grief? I guess crying is acceptable as long as it isn’t too agonizing or prolonged (Prolonged means for a long period of time. I learned that when I stayed in my room all day because my mom said I couldn’t come out until it was clean. I didn’t even start to clean it until after I had dinner in my room alone. My mom said I was just prolonging the agony. Agony means extreme suffering. I looked both words up after she said that.)
I went to a funeral with my grandma once because a friend of hers had lost her twenty-five year old son in a trucking accident. She was so overcome with weeping that she had to be supported on both sides to just follow the casket down the aisle. She was wailing, according to my grandma, who was sitting next to me clucking her tongue and wiping her own eyes. Is wailing an acceptable form of grief? That mother made most everybody cry at the funeral, but they also whispered behind her back and shot concerned and suspicious looks at her when she yelled, “No!” over and over at the grave site. I guessed that was too much grieving for most people to be comfortable with.
Another time I saw a woman at church whose husband had died of cancer the day before. Her makeup and hair were as perfect as always; her suit immaculate (I learned this word at school. It means perfectly neat. My teacher told me that my assignment was messy and she wanted me to do it over, and she wanted it to be immaculate. I had to look that word up, too.). This woman whose husband had died smiled and shook the hands of those who came to console her. But I watched her eyes. They were puffy and haunted with dark circles under them. When I shook her hand, it trembled slightly, as did her lips. But I guess she didn’t grieve enough for people’s liking because the whispering and glances happened that day, too.
So just what is appropriate behavior when you feel like your guts have been wrenched out and all that is left is a giant hole where your heart used to be? Well, whatever is appropriate, I doubt that kissing the walls of a house and puking on your sister fall into the category of normal.
My friend John used to live upstairs in my house because my parents rented rooms to college students. Apparently, we became friends when I was two years old. He gave me an IQ test that I guess I was doing really well on until he dumped a bunch of black and white buttons on the floor to sort and I sorted them into all kinds of weird groups. He kept putting the buttons back together and asking me to try again. I never grouped them by black and white. Finally, he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was grouping them by how many holes they had. At that point he and my parents decided I was brilliant, which I think is really silly – that just because I sorted buttons by holes instead of colors made me super smart. I think it just proves my point. I don’t do things like other people. I don’t sort buttons normally, and I don’t grieve normally, either.
John says there are stages of grief. He says people pass threw these stages as they learn to accept whatever it is that makes them sad. He says some people stay in some stages longer than others, and usually we jump back and forth between these stages. So I guess in some ways we are all alike when we grieve. We all grieve in these stages. But how we deal with each stage is different. Like when I asked John about why I kissed the walls, he said I was trying to accept the move by saying good-bye to the house. He said when I chased my sister down the hall and puked on her I was misplacing my anger. I was in the anger stage of grief. I know one thing, if he thinks I was angry he should have seen my sister after I puked on her!
