Grief, part 2.

 

The thing about crying in public -- and I don't mean writing-workshop-this-is-a-safe-space sort of crying--but unexpected emotion in a place it doesn't belong, is that it is easier the second time around. 

The first time: I was in a Milpitas movie theater with a friend, watching a Bollywood film about a girl whose fiancé dumps her and she chooses to go on her honeymoon alone. What was the line her mother said that made me bawl over the possibility that I'd never have a child? I don't remember anymore. Last week, in the theater, I cried in the dark as my daughter bopped along to the song a pig sang to an elephant: "we'll still be friends, even after it ends." 

Grief, I am learning, doesn't get easier, but more familiar. The ways it can sneak up on you and refuse to go unacknowledged. The little ways you learn to release it into the world. First it was huge, too big for any words to encompass, and each time I tried it spilled past the confines of sentences into rambles, a river I could not tame. Now my words are measured. I smile and say thank you when someone acknowledges this loss. I know it will take my voice, my breath sometimes, and yes it is uncomfortable, and sometimes I stop in strange places to sit with it, like in the parking lot while my daughter plays in the park, or in the last row at the children's theater.