Snipping Heartstrings: Thoughts on Grief

People keep dying. I know that that only makes sense. As one gets older, so do all the people in one's circle of acquaintances. As people get older, people die. The older I get, the more often people around me are dying, and I know that that makes sense.

But it's sad.

As I write this, I'm not in the mood to feel. I am often not in the mood to feel. I am an all-or-nothing person, and it's hard to find the time and space to feel All of...almost any emotion.

I have never had to deal with grief before, not really. Even now, most of the deaths in my circle are contained in the mid-to-outer rings. Papa died when I was seven, and I was very sad and I cried and I miss him, but I was seven. I didn't have particularly complex experiences or expectations of future experiences to process.

On the whole, my heart has a very efficient way of dealing with grief and loss: it immediately cuts the injured heartstring, singes the end, coils it up, and tucks it away. Snip.

This doesn't only apply to dealing with death, or even only to people. This strategy is how I deal with things I hate that I cannot reverse or control. If I get a clearly permanent stain on my favorite shirt, heartstring cut. I must instantly stop caring about that shirt unless I want to be consumed by regret, anger, and sadness. If I have to pay an abominable amount for a car repair or medical bill, I pay it and cut the heartstring. Nothing to be done. Can't care. The one time I got in a car accident, I took stock of the fact that it had happened, and cut the heartstring. I'd do what needed to be done, I was mentally sorry for any choices I made that contributed to it, but I didn't see the value in caring about it. "Caring" wasn't going to negate the need to produce insurance, talk to the officer, or pay for repairs. And, for me, "caring" wasn't what was going to cause me to be more careful in the future.

However, I've since learned that society doesn't understand or appreciate this approach. It looks cold, selfish, callous from the outside—and I can see why. I'm not actually a sociopath; I'm not actually heartless; I do actually "care" about things, just not in a heart/emotions way.

So, I've had to learn to emote without feeling. I have to produce the external signs of emotional caring without feeling any of it in my heart. I "feel" things in my head and body, but they're not emotions; they're thoughts and instincts. For all intents and purposes, they do the job, but they don't look like they do the job. It'd be like Sacagawea watching us follow someone via a GPS. We aren't examining the ground, we aren't listening, we aren't following any signs in nature, so how can we still call what we're doing "tracking"?

I think at some point I forgot that my external emotions weren't actually feelings. I fooled my own self, totally unintentionally. I began to believe that emoting and feeling were the same thing, and I am great at emoting. It's just that I'm emoting what I think, not what I feel.

Maybe that doesn't make sense. It's taking me a while to untangle it all too.

What am I talking about? How did I get here? What am I trying to work out again?

Emotions. Grief. Loss. Right.

My method of cutting heartstrings is very efficient and fairly comfortable. It may even be a correct way to handle some types of loss, like a stupid favorite shirt. However, I think that at some point, when I am faced with an actual loss, it will be important for me to learn to grieve with my heart properly. You always hear about how repressing feelings isn't a long-term solution, how one day the suitcase of repressed feelings is going to pop open and if you don't know what to do with it, it can overwhelm you.

I'm sure that's true. Until recently, though, that possibility hasn't felt imminent enough to catch my attention. Every once in a while I'll think about how it would Feel to lose someone I'm very close to, and all I can imagine is that it would either destroy me or I'd cut their heartstring, and neither of those are the right course.

The older I get, the more people around me are dying.

I almost cried today thinking about it. I started to pray for friend who is on the cusp of a great loss, and the next thing I knew I was starting to cry. I felt the sadness in my heart, and it began to rise like a tidal wave until I could either let it crash over me, or I could put it away and try to process my feelings with my head.

Given this post, we know I chose Door #2.

But I need to sort this out soon.

~Stephanie