The Heaviness of Layers & Layers of Grief

They say bad things come in threes. And I feel like that’s true, especially when it comes to loss.

Maybe it’s not actually three. Maybe humans just like patterns and we need some way to make sense of the times when life seems determined to keep piling things on. But I do know that grief rarely happens in the nice, isolated way we tend to talk about it. One thing happens, we grieve it, we heal, and then we’re ready for the next thing. That would be convenient. It just isn’t how life works.

When we usually talk about grief, we put it in a silo. Someone dies. A relationship ends. We lose a job. A pet dies. We talk about that one loss and what it did to us as if everything else stopped while it was happening. But grief doesn’t get that kind of space. Life keeps moving. Other things happen. Sometimes another loss arrives before we’ve even figured out what to do with the first one.

Last year, I learned what that feels like.

I lost Bennett in May. It might have been the first time in my life that I actually let myself feel a loss while it was happening. I’ve spent most of my life telling myself and everyone around me that I’m fine. I made my feelings small. I pushed them down. Sometimes I pushed them down so far that eventually I forgot they were there at all.

I was never an emotional person. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Looking back, I think I was an emotional person who had become very good at making sure my emotions didn’t make anyone else uncomfortable.

Bennett didn’t give me that option.

I went into the vet that day thinking he had torn a ligament. I knew something was wrong with his leg and I knew it could be serious, but I wasn’t thinking life-threatening. Then they told me it was cancer. It had already spread beyond his leg and into his lungs, and the kindest thing I could do for him was say goodbye.

I absolutely lost my shit. There is no prettier way to say it. I scream-cried. I cried in a way I don’t remember ever crying before. I knew there were people in the other exam rooms. I knew there were people sitting in the lobby who could hear me. And for maybe the first time in my life, I gave zero fucks about whether my feelings were making anyone uncomfortable.

I was devastated. For me, losing Bennett felt like losing a child. I don’t have children, and my animals have never been “just pets” to me. They are my family. I didn’t need anyone else to understand the size of that grief in order for me to feel it. I just let it be as big as it was.

But Bennett wasn’t the only one grieving. I came home to Kinsey and Ruxin, and they were looking for him too. He had been their anchor, their big younger brother, and suddenly he wasn’t there. So on top of my own grief, I was watching theirs. I couldn’t explain to them where he had gone. I couldn’t tell them why he wasn’t coming home. I could only watch them look for him while I was looking for him too.

Six months later, I lost Kinsey.

Kinsey was my baby. My first dog. I got her when she was eight weeks old. I trained her. I took care of her. I spent almost every day of fourteen years with her.

The morning she died, I let her outside like I always did. She laid down in the grass, and I encouraged her to get up and go to the bathroom while I went inside to make my tea. When I looked outside again, she was at the back of the yard, lying down and unable to get up. I ran outside as fast as I could.

She had tried to go to the bathroom and fallen in it. I picked her up, carried her inside, cleaned her up and called the vet. Everything happened quickly after that. She was in heart failure.

I’d noticed changes after Bennett died. She seemed slower. Her breathing seemed heavier. But she was fourteen, and I thought she was getting old. I didn’t know she was struggling. Even writing that now brings up guilt because I wish I had known. I wish I had understood what I was seeing.

With Bennett, I scream-cried. With Kinsey, I went numb.

I don’t think I understood that at the time. I loved her every bit as much, probably more deeply. In some ways, our bond was even harder to explain because she’d been mine from the beginning. Fourteen years is a huge piece of a life. But when I lost her, I didn’t have that same explosive grief I’d had with Bennett. It was like I had nothing left.

Two months later, I tried to get another dog. It was a disaster. I thought maybe bringing another dog into my home would help fill some of the enormous quiet they’d left behind. Instead, the anxiety of a new dog, a new routine and a completely different situation collided with grief I hadn’t dealt with yet. I couldn’t handle it.

At the time, I think I saw all of those things as separate events. Bennett died. Kinsey died. The new dog didn’t work out. Life kept moving. But grief doesn’t live in separate boxes just because we put the events on different lines of a timeline.

And there was another layer underneath all of it.

I don’t watch the news. I haven’t for a long time. I know myself well enough to know that I can’t take in that much pain every day and still function like a normal person. Everything affects me. If I watched every story about every person being hurt, every family being torn apart, every right being challenged, every terrible thing happening somewhere in the world, I would walk around heartbroken all day, every day.

So I protect myself from a lot of it.

But not watching doesn’t mean I don’t know.

I still know what’s happening around me. I know there are women worried about rights they thought were settled. I know LGBTQ people are watching laws, court cases and policies that directly affect how they get to live their lives. I know people of color, immigrants and other marginalized communities are carrying fears and experiences I will never fully understand. I don’t have to watch the news every night for that awareness to find its way into my body.

And I think that grief was in there too. It wasn’t as obvious as losing Bennett. It wasn’t as immediate as finding Kinsey in the backyard unable to stand. It wasn’t even something I would have called grief at the time. It was just this constant layer underneath everything else. Sometimes anger. Sometimes fear. Sometimes helplessness. Sometimes this deep sadness that we are still having some of the same fights over whose lives, families, bodies and identities deserve protection.

Then James Van Der Beek died in February.

I didn’t know him. He was a celebrity I’d loved watching on television. Dawson’s Creek was part of my younger life, and yes, he was Dawson, so of course his death was sad to me. But the reaction I had was bigger than that. Much bigger.

I cried for days.

Eventually, I started wondering why.

If Bennett and Kinsey hadn’t died the year before, would James Van Der Beek’s death have affected me the same way? I don’t think it would have. I would have been sad. I probably would have had a little moment because, come on, he was Dawson. But I don’t think it would have cracked me open.

By February, there was already so much grief sitting inside me. Bennett was there. Kinsey was there. The guilt was there. The empty house was there. Watching Ruxin adjust was there. The failed attempt to bring another dog home was there. The grief I carried for other people was there. The state of the world was there. And underneath all of that were probably years of things I’d pushed down because I was fine.

I was always fine.

Until I wasn’t.

James didn’t create all of that grief. His death just found it. And when it did, the whole thing came spilling out.

That’s what I’m beginning to understand about cumulative grief. We experience losses as individual events because that’s how time works. This happened in May. That happened in October. Something else happened in February. But our bodies don’t necessarily file them away that neatly.

Cumulative grief doesn’t care whether all of the losses belong in the same category. Your body isn’t keeping separate folders labeled PET GRIEF, POLITICAL GRIEF, RELATIONSHIP GRIEF, CAREER GRIEF and THAT RANDOM THING I HAVEN’T DEALT WITH SINCE 2007.

It just knows you’re carrying a lot.

The newest grief doesn’t arrive to find an empty room. It walks into a room where everything else you’ve lost is already sitting.

• • •

The Mica Lens

I started this series because I realized I couldn’t keep shoving everything into that room and closing the door.

Taking inventory was the first step. Naming different kinds of grief has been another. And I think cumulative grief asks us to do something slightly different. Instead of looking at the entire pile and wondering how the hell we’re supposed to process all of it, maybe we need to gently pull it apart.

Because “everything” is really hard for a body to process.

One thing is something we can sit with.

Here’s an exercise I want to try.

Find a handful of small objects. Stones, crystals, coins, buttons, scraps of paper, whatever you have nearby. Sit somewhere quiet and think about what you’ve been carrying.

Give each grief its own object.

One might be a person. Another might be a pet. A relationship. A job. Something happening in the world. A version of yourself you miss. Someone else’s pain you’ve been carrying. A future you thought you’d have. Something from twenty years ago that apparently decided it lives here now.

Don’t decide whether something is big enough to count. If you’re carrying it, it counts.

When you’re finished, put all of the objects in your hands at once.

Feel the weight.

Don’t analyze it. Just notice.

This is what you’ve been carrying.

Then set everything down and pick up one piece. Name it. You can say it out loud or just to yourself: This is Bennett. This is Kinsey. This is my fear about what’s happening in the world. This is the relationship I lost. This is the future I thought I would have.

Hold that one object and notice what happens in your body when you give your attention to only that grief. Where do you feel it? Is it sadness? Anger? Guilt? Fear? Does your chest tighten? Does your stomach drop? Do you want to cry?

You don’t need to fix any of it. You don’t need to figure out why it’s still there. Just give that one grief a few minutes of your attention without asking your body to hold every other loss at the same time.

When you’re ready, put it down.

You can pick up another one, or you can stop.

You do not have to get through the pile.

That might be the most important part.

The point isn’t to empty your hands or clear the room. It isn’t to process every loss in one sitting so you can finally be done with grief. I’m not sure grief works that way anyway.

The point is to see what you’ve been asking yourself to carry.

Because sometimes we think we’re falling apart over one thing when our bodies are actually responding to ten things. Sometimes the thing that finally cracks us open isn’t even the biggest loss. It’s simply the one that arrived when there was no room left.

Maybe the first response to that doesn’t need to be figuring out how to make ourselves feel better.

Maybe it can simply be:

Of course I’m tired. Look at everything I’ve been carrying.

And then, when we’re ready:

I don’t have to carry all of it at once.

With you in all of it,
Kristin