The Invisible Colors of Grief

“Kailen was, and is, all the words I don’t know, all the colors I cannot see.”

That sentence, taken from one of my journal entries shortly after Kailen’s death, poignantly encapsulates the complexity of grief. The human mind tends to seek shelter in rationality, but when it comes to love and loss, mere intellect won’t lead you home. Believe me, I’ve walked that road.

In reality, grief is organic; it’s a dynamic, multifaceted process, characterized by emotions that progress with unpredictable fluidity. We can try to contain them, put them in boxes and give them names, but we will always fail. Which is why I believe the famed “5-stage model” of grief is grossly inadequate.

In his aptly-titled book, Grief is a Journey, Dr. Kenneth J. Doka writes these words:

“Another model of grief is that it proceeds in stages, which is based on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages. These bereaved persons expect, or are expected by others, to go through phases of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression — before they reach acceptance. But the fact is that Kubler-Ross originally saw these stages as reflecting how people cope with illness and dying, not as reflections of how people grieve. Actual experiences of grief are far more individual, often chaotic, and much less predictable.”

My personal grief journey lends credence to Doka’s proposal. In the months following Kailen’s passing, I entered a season of ruthless introspection. I spent several weeks at my parents’ house, on a farm in western Kentucky, where I sought refuge in solitude. I began spending large swaths of the day in contemplative silence; I read more and wrote less; I took long afternoon walks through the woods and found abiding comfort among the trees — the only living things that seemed to understand me anymore.

I started asking hard questions and searched desperately for the answers. In short, I wanted to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to know why I woke up sad and went to bed angry; I wanted to know why laughing made me want to cry. I did what every griever is tempted to do — I intellectualized my pain. My humanness needed to understand the empiric alchemy of happy and sad that now defined me. It seemed I was embroiled in a battle for my very sanity, fighting with all I had to somehow tame the emotional undulations threatening to consume me.

This journal entry, dated October 1st, 2015, illustrates the frenetic nature of my grief:

“This grief — I’ve found it to be a contradiction of contradictions. I yearn for the pain to leave, yet beg it to stay; I want to live life to the fullest, yet find myself being drawn even more greatly to death; it is absolutely impossible that Kailen is no longer here, yet even more impossible that she is.”

 Or this one, written a few days later, which shows just how devastating grief can be:

“What does it mean that the most exciting thought of my day is this: Someday, I’ll die.”

Just like anyone who has loved and lost, I was in agony. And because words have always been my purest form of expression, my escape from life’s brambles, I convinced myself that if I could just define my grief, write it out on the page in a way that made sense, I could escape it.

What I didn’t know, of course, is that grief isn’t formulaic. It’s a lead role with no script. It is, by it’s very nature, undefinable. Put another way — it’s all the words we don’t know, all the colors we cannot see.

It wasn’t until I truly appreciated my own futility that I began the long road home. It wasn’t until I stepped to the edge and bowed to the mystery of it all that I sincerely began to heal. And while I am not yet home, far from being fully healed, I am still bowing — to the undefinable mystery of love and loss, and to the God that reigns over it all.

In my book, Even if you don’t, I begin one of the final sections with this opening paragraph:

“Those last few months were lived in a perpetual dusk. The sun no longer shone brightly, but rather painted the world in a somber, pale orange, as though it were perched tenuously upon the horizon and couldn’t decide whether to rise or set. Life was now a monochromatic limbo.”

Several pages later, after Kailen and I received some difficult news from our doctors, I concluded the section with this sentence:

“The sun, resting tenuously on the horizon, had decided to set.”

Maybe the sun is setting in your life as you read this. But take heart — it will rise again! And with it, so will you.

(Photo credit: Kate K (www.flickr.com/creativecommons/autumncolors))