Hello. My Name Is...

Grieving during a pandemic is uncharted territory. In a way, I have found it to be a point of connection between myself and the world. Anticipating disease is a feeling with which I am quite familiar. Loneliness has been a major theme throughout the last decade and longer. Our family existed in a type of isolation for many years. However, the melancholic aspect of my personality feels rather crowded at the moment. People are grieving graduations, sports, family reunions, vacations, little leagues and so much more. I understand the use of language to describe loss is scant. Yet I wish we could preserve the use of grief for actual loss due to death. Sometimes I think it is a way we overdramatize our lives and other times I wonder if it is a way to lessen the weight of the word, given our death avoidance culture.

Time is incredibly fluid in grief. Waverly died over four and a half years ago and Oliver died one and a half years ago. I vacillate between feelings of yesterday and another lifetime. I miss one child intensely one day and the other the next. There is a chasm between then and now. And then I will sense the overwhelming pressure of grief as if I am experiencing the seconds after their final breath.

A few weeks ago Matt and I spent a few hours sitting outside with our new neighbors. It was a spur of the moment get together and seems to quickly become weekly given the quarantine. We poured ourselves G&Ts and walked over to introduce ourselves. Thankfully, Matt and I are able to read one another and it was obvious we both planned on avoiding the details of our story. We wanted to keep it light and breezy. As someone who values authenticity and walking among the dark places in others' stories, I find this difficult. But dropping two dead children on potential new friends can also be a bit much. They know we moved into a small home and there are no children present. We do still own a minivan, which is probably a bit of a head-scratcher.

This isn't new. Returning to graduate school has provided me with lots of awkward introductions. Once inside our home, Waverly and Oliver's faces gaze down from walls and shelves. Their presence is undeniable. I can no more move on as I can forget. Their death hasn't ended my story, instead, it has shaped it and added depth of experiences and characters. I am not defined by my grief, yet it has changed me.