We're on a road to nowhere...

One of the most insistent metaphors that is imposed on grief or other traumas is that of the journey. At the most superficial level it's just a way of saying that grief takes time, that I can't hurry the experience even if I want to, that I should be patient with the weeks and months and years. But at a deeper level, the 'journey' suggests that an experience in time corresponds to a movement in space, just as one might spend a day driving from Melbourne to Sydney. So when applied to grief, it suggests that there are a definite series of emotional states, like towns on the way, that I will pass through. Each such place or state then represents progress along the way. I've left denial behind long ago, and now I'm on the outskirts of acceptance. There's no turning back.

Now in some ways the metaphor works. I feel different now to how I felt in the first few months after Jen died. The subterranean anger in all of us has gone deeper underground. Life is calmer. But as a friend suggested in her thesis, I should also ask myself how grief is not like a journey. Rather than being some linear, ordered, rational succession of emotional states, like towns along the Hume highway, grief is a wildly disorienting alternation. It's more like Dr Who - there are rapid switches forward and back in time and state. Living with grief, I can at one time feel like I'm passing Holbrook (the traditional halfway point in the Melbourne-Sydney drive), and then a day later feel like I'm briefly back near the outskirts of Melbourne.

For example, tonight I was pondering how I'd explain to someone the way Jen felt in approaching death. She wasn't scared of dying, because of her confidence in God (though she struggled with pain in the last month), but she was desperately sad about leaving me and the boys. She knew she'd miss all the joys and heartaches of seeing the boys grow up, their achievements and disappointments, the flowering of their potential, their faith, their careers and perhaps their families. She knew she wouldn't live to see the reward for all the love and effort she put into both of them. We too miss her at each milestone - every celebration has an undercurrent of sadness and there's a ghost at every party. So tonight here I am in tears again for the same loss, as though Jen was not two years' dead, still trying to paint pictures of grief in words. What kind of a journey is that? C. S. Lewis, in 'A Grief Observed', commented that he thought at the start that his writing would be a map of grief, but realised that it could only be a history.

Last of all is the destination. The 'journey' metaphor often carries the implication of a known goal. To those outside grief it's probably some convenient shorthand such as 'acceptance' or 'moving on'. Here inside the wasteland of grief, I'm not always sure about the state I want to reach. Since grief is bound up with love, I have no desire to bury it, only to find a different but positive perspective on my past with Jen, whatever that looks like. I think the time-travel of memory will always be at hand, even without a blue box. The history of these years will not resemble a journey so much as the Doctor's 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey' mess.