I lost another client last week, a man to whom I had given massages occasionally for two years. Samuel was a gentle person who loved flowers and looked after the needs of his aging parents. He died from AIDS complications.
In the course of the time I knew him, he had almost disappeared. Each time we met, there seemed to be a little less of him--less fat, less muscle, less energy. The skin draped loosely over the bony structure of this skinny, skinny man. I used very flat hands when massaging him since there was so little depth to the tissue, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I felt like I was massaging bones. I remember holding his head in my hands one of the last times I massaged him. The prominent vein on the forehead and the deeply sunken eyes and cheeks reminded me of others who had died. Quiet tears rolled down my face while I worked. I realized I was beginning to grieve for yet another client, this man who didn’t appear to have much time to live.
The ancient Etruscans believed that once grief started it never ended and so advised that there was no point in grieving one hour earlier than one must. I failed to heed this advice with Samuel and started grieving him several months before he died. But it wasn’t just him. I had lost two friends and two other clients to this disease. My mourning for him seemed an extension of other griefs. While I have not honored the advice of the ancients, I do believe in the first part of the saying. Grief seems never to end.
Life-change theory asserts that the grief cycle takes about two years to complete. Issues of loss change within the time period and usually encompass aloneness, readjustment, acceptance, and a need to get on with one’s life. Typically, the emotions related to grief relax significantly by the end of the time even though one may continue to experience occasional episodes of feeling bereft. Armed with this information, in my mid-thirties, I started thinking in two-year increments about my own emotions related to loss. Feeling hurt or confused, I’d figure if I were still within the two-year allotment of time for the grief cycle. The realization sometimes brought a small relief, a kind of calendared comfort, when pain persisted. But after age forty, I noticed that before one cycle could complete, I was starting another one. It felt like a stacking up of caskets in a temporary, winter-time mausoleum waiting for burial after the spring thaw. The bunching up continues. For me, grief seems here to stay.
Two deaths have contributed most to the early onset of grief. The first, Ted’s, was preceded by his phone call telling me that his doctor said it was a matter of weeks or months before he would die. I was pondering that information when, a few weeks later, another friend, James, called to tell me he had just found out he was HIV+. These two phone calls plunged me into a grief I fought hard to resist. Certainly, I was confusing concepts of terminal disease and chronic disease. (Terminally ill, Ted died four months later; years later, James is still alive.) But I grieved several months before Ted died. In the second death, Michael’s, there were no phone calls. I was face to face with the disease as I watched him die. For months, on an almost daily basis, I observed his tiny losses of life, including changes of emotion, giving up beloved activities, decreases in energy, increases in pain, growth of lymph nodes, and more. Perhaps, empathetically, I was joining Michael in his dying process. Together we recognized and mourned loss after loss. Grief entered the picture long before he actually quit breathing.
Michael had not been dead many days when I realized my client Samuel was becoming deeply ill. My tears for Samuel that day as I held his head were also tears for Michael. Two months later, Samuel missed an appointment without canceling. It didn’t seem like him simply to miss, and he had been so frail the last time I had worked with him. The case manager contacted his family and discovered that he had died.
I now am living with grief, and I imagine it will follow me throughout the rest of my life, both as an ordinary occurrence and as an occupational given. Surely the Etruscans were right; once grief starts it never ends. I wonder whether I will learn not to begin grieving before I must. Perhaps I can ritualize my grief, turn it into a duty, and assign it predictable parameters for beginning and ending. If only life were that simple. Overlapping griefs have come to color my life and work in a significant way. I will try to recognize grief’s power and live into its significance.
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| Exultation, acrylic on paper, by Phillip Hoyle |
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