My father was born on June 26, 1940. Eighty-one years ago today. My mother would have turned 83 on May 6th. And my first daughter, Grace Ayodele, would be a young woman of 18 on December 12th of this year. If they had lived. It’s weird to think of my loved ones at ages that they never saw. Or maybe in their eternal realm, they’ve seen those ages. Perhaps age is a constraint that means nothing beyond the confines of this lived life. I don’t know.
But from where I sit, I feel the gnawing of healed-over grief. It’s not new. I didn’t just lose these people from my life. And though I wish I had gotten more than the time I had with each of them, I’m thankful that I’m not wracked with the ache of new grief. New grief sucks. If I never experience it again, I’ve still had more than my share. But the grief thing is still…a thing. It still lives in me. And when I’m feeling a little bit blue, it can latch on to the amorphous blueness, giving it more shape and substance.
Earlier today, I tweeted something that felt profound at the time I wrote it: Being on submission feels like being pregnant with the world’s baby. My skin is stretched taut, my stomach a knot displaced to the top of my belly. The baby wants to be born and greet the world to which it belongs.
I’m a writer on submission. A writer with another kind and thoughtful rejection under her belt. They are bitter round pills, rejection. They roll around in the stomach, undigested. “I love your vision, your ambition, your scope, but no.” That’s what I was feeling when I wrote that tweet this morning. But though I still agree with it now, I realize that the knot at the top of my belly wasn’t just about my books that want to greet the world. The rejection of my writing from an editor stirred up feelings of outmoded love that no longer has a living person to receive it. Both phenomena can feel like unrequited love.
Don’t get me wrong, grief is deeper and more expansive than rejection. And more permanent. I know that the editors who have rejected my book haven’t killed me or even wished me dead. But that feeling of a round, undigested pill sitting at the top of the belly is somehow akin to my longing to actively love the ones I’ve lost. So because it can feel like grief, it may trigger it, awakening the grief that’s always there within me.
Shout out to all the grief long haulers. I know that the millions of untimely COVID losses around the world have swelled the ranks of our ever-growing community prematurely. I’m so sorry about that. I know that there will be things that will trigger grief in our bodies that some of us will not understand. It’s real and it sucks. But I find that being able to name it gives it a place in my body that is neither too big nor too small. It gives my body permission to make the necessary connections and to show compassion to myself. And then I can lay it down knowing that it’s there but it’s not all there is.