A LIMINAL PAUSE
Grief is tangible.Is it push, or is it pull? Is it weighted, or is it tidal? Both would make sense to me. Both, thralls, wrenching and shoving until I’m not sure if I’m breaking apart, or if this is simply what I’ve become—bent, silent. Enduring. I’ve become fluent in endurance, I think. A new language, another eloquence, entirely learned by circumstance.Maybe I should be grateful; maybe one day I will be.This is what grief has made of me so far: a personified attempt to find gratitude, reducing myself to adjectives meant to explain myself to others. I often fall short of the mark. I let people call it strength, have long ceased denying it—it’s easier to let it sit than continuing to weave through ambiguity.The path ahead is limited, both by outlook and realism. It’s hard to believe there was a time when I relished the idea of challenge and a lack of comfort zones—any opportunity for growth was met with outstretched arms and an enthusiasm that now echoes back as naïveté. The future appears inert, formless, every imagined horizon stripped of colour and resonance… bleaker still, as it wrestles with the muted part of myself that still scans for silver linings, out of muscle memory rather than the old conviction which would so often override common sense.The past, generally, resists simplification, no matter how tempting it is to try and narrow it down to binaries. There’s no resolving the contrast between heightened joy and immense pain; duality is part of life, and contrast is what gives our days their substance, their texture.I don’t linger on the loud, the vibrant, the memories which demand to be heard. My more comforting paths of nostalgia tend to wind through grey areas—quiet, unremarkable moments that neither demand attention nor invite deep reflection, yet evoke a yearning where the radiant, more significant moments somehow fall short.Her hair, when she’d lean over. The way it tumbled—rich, dense—in waves over her shoulders, the occasional corkscrew attempting to defy gravity as it escaped the masses, falling into her eyes. I’d passively watch, with a small and affectionate smile, as she’d push the rogue curl impatiently out of her vision, over and over. I’d fight the urge to still her hand, and tell her it looks pretty.I’d invariably let the moment pass, not realising how often I’d replay such ordinary moments, on repeat, months (years) later.Shared moments, too, reach out to me with tender intensity. We often found ourselves tangled on the sofa, music silencing our conversations and letting melody lead the narrative instead. We would almost always entwine, our lack of voices heightening awareness of affection we’d long since forgotten to notice: the familiar weight of her shoulder leaning into mine, and the easy comfort of a space built together. The fullness of it—the significance of sharing music—teased and challenged the need to speak aloud.Those moments don’t live as isolated memories—they thread themselves through the present, not as interruptions, but as undercurrents. I don’t revisit them so much as move through them; they accompany me, wordless but constant. Their presence, in the earliest days of grief, seemed to only sharpen what was missing, and in the static that followed I began to notice how the shape of my world had shifted. The edges seemed to jut where they once curved; the ground—the same landing point that roiled beneath me—was unfamiliar.This changed orientation of perspective has altered itself in ways that challenge my grasp of expression. In the genesis of grief, I likened it inwardly to an anchor being hauled from the deep sands of a home harbour—safe in its familiarity, beloved in spite of its flaws—and being cast adrift into open sea. I swung without intent between trying to keep myself due north, and surrendering to stillness—staring blankly at the sky instead of the rapidly disappearing pier, choosing no perspective over a changed one. I careened from one to the other, never settling, always with a sense of being completely unmoored.I clung to the love lost, barren of intent and direction—her, the focal point of eight years and fourteen days. She was the very centre of my universe, no matter how hard I’d tried over the years to shift it back onto myself, clawing through memory in sheer desperation for something (anything) to tether me again. Her voice. Her smile. Even her pain, vast and known to me enough that I carried it as my own, should have sufficed. I wasn’t trying to be noble—I just needed something to hold on to. I needed somewhere to sink the anchor.What I hadn’t realised at the time was that the anchor hadn’t simply been forced out of place—in quiet violence it had come away in its entirety, taking half the vessel with it.There was nothing ahead of me to replace it with—nothing to ground me, nothing to take root. I had been shifted, suddenly and acutely, to new coordinates, and the very thing I had once relied on to steady me—and bind me, at times—was no longer mine to wield. As the fog of the early days began to lift, I found myself gripped by a fear and uncertainty so viscous it clung to me—cloying, close, inescapable. There was no anchor. No home point. Just me, alone, facing open water with no sense of direction.I speak of the early days, but trying to ground the reality of it within words—words that offer a true sense of experience to others, words that somehow wrap around the heft of it when it is half-formed by design—leaves so much to be desired.The bereaved speak of the haze that descends in the opening days of grief, and it cannot be overstated that mine was complex. Finding your loved one dead—and this, a death by their own choice—adds layers that take more than just time to unlace. I can attest to the veracity of the fog: it lay thick, ropes of it—shock, disbelief, and a muted sort of horror that takes time to fully form.I can say, with the sober ache it deserves, that I wasn’t shocked to find her body on the bed, eight and a half hours after I’d left for work; my knowledge of her pain—my closeness to the inner workings of her mind, as near as anyone can be without inhabiting it themselves—gave her death the gravity of inevitability. That empathy, however, didn’t stop my mind from slipping into a place of protection, bubble-wrapped and bound from the moment I walked into the bedroom and saw her lying there. Living amidst (and perhaps at times within) her pain and having carried it with her, for her, was not enough to spare me from the psychological response of shock.It was, definitively, traumatic.In some ways, the fog was a blessing. It numbed me just enough to cross the room and touch her, to see with stark clarity that she had indeed chosen to leave. It allowed me to start the process of calling emergency services immediately, evading the pitch and groan of hysteria and denial.I wasn’t rendered mute or useless, nor did I relinquish control to pure precision as the world, my world, crumbled around me: the fog gave just enough room for me to still be myself, even in the face of the very worst thing I have had to experience.The days that followed had none of the dull, marred lucidity of the night before; if finding her was the rush of deluge, the days afterwards were sluggish, sodden marshland.I woke each morning and simply lay there—shallow breaths, slow-moving recollections—until I forced myself upright and into the world of a home that now existed with half of it missing.Somehow, I kept myself clean. I moved through the motions: eating, drinking, feeding our cat, my mind attempting to grasp that this—all of this—now belonged only to me. I was completely incapable of seeing the whole of it. It was mammoth—a word I used in abundance to try and explain my reality to concerned loved ones—and I was certain that no one else could seeit either, not whilst it was still so close, still so immediate, even if they somehow had vision clearer and less hazy than mine.It wasn’t just the loss of my love, or the trauma of the days before and the day of the end: I had, almost in completion, lost everything. In losing her life, I had somehow also lost my own. The landscape had altered. Everything had, and would, change.In those days of after, I found myself constantly tripping into moments of waiting—waiting for the sound of her moving upstairs, waiting to hear her singing quietly as she dressed, waiting for the privilege of watching her descend the stairs to smile at me, avoid my eyes, offer some small expression of feeling or being—some glimpse into the version of her I would be loving that day. I waited, caught in those moments of suspended and unintended disbelief, for her—for us—to continue as we had the days before.When it lowered—when I would catch myself back in reality and realise that she wasn’t there, wouldn’t be there, couldn’t be there—it would immediately elicit a physical reaction before the emotional had a chance to settle: a breath, stalled in my chest. A folding, wrapping, aching pressure, tingling with heat, encasing my head as if gently, apologetically nudging me back to the present.All of it fragmented, continuing to fracture day by day.Grief, itself, is fractured. Grief is not linear. I had heard it before, but in the surreal landscape of January’s loss I gripped that truth and sank my teeth into it, holding onto it for all it was worth because any certainty, any level of clarity was a genuine lifeline. I would repeat those certainties—sometimes gently, other times with a ferocity I know deserves apology. I would speak those convictions into the silence whenever I could feel myself slipping beneath the waves of it all, some of them built to soothe, others to ground.Grief is not linear.
She loved you.
This is not my life.
She is dead.I know myself well enough. I have a heart that strains toward absolutes, and a mind that insists on being heard only in the details—what I found was that grief highlighted the quiet struggle between the two. Bluntly, and mostly without care.It became a constant inward battle: offering myself the compassion and freedom to feel everything I knew I deserved, and expecting myself to make some kind of visible, measurable progress. I expected myself to sail once more. Within days after her death, I was willing myself to paddle, to get somewhere, to show some sign of motion through the loss. I’m still not sure whether that pressure came from within, or from what I imagined others expected of me; all I know is that it was ever-present and insistent: you must move forward. There was no other choice, from my limited view, but to meaningfully, intently navigate the waters.It mirrored, I think, who I had been in the life of before, the same version of me which turned emotion into movement, and movement into decisive action. That version of me had been built to change in the face of adversity, to cyclically adapt—not ever truly for myself, but for the sake of my environment and the necessity of a smoother, safer voyage.But then my anchor ceased to exist, and the only option I had, the only action I could take—after weeks of panic, resistance, endurance and obscurity—was to jump ship.So I did.It’s been four months since she died, and even less time since I jumped.I’ve been sitting in the water for some time now—not swimming, not searching, just… observing. The changed perspective which once felt misaligned has settled, uncomfortable but increasingly known, as I edge through the days with intentionally gentle purpose. I’m still uncertain of where I am, where I’m going, what I want, and who—if I have a say—I’m going to be. I admit that I know little of this new viewpoint of mine, wholly aware that I have curves to learn—corners to investigate—but already there’s clarity in the sharper edges, a greater awareness of just how soft I truly am. I seem to have more space for both warm compassion and sharp-edged reserve—the two not quite in tandem, but working alongside one another with gritted teeth and uneasy accord. Once again, the divide of duality: nothing gone, nothing gentled, but held.It is the duality of my present, and its volume is mine: my voice alone to shape it, my life alone to live it.I find myself neither fixed nor free—a liminal pause between waves—where observation replaces action, and I learn to watch the currents instead of fight them. There’s a far-flung tang of peace in that—restless, but less resistant. I’ve stopped trying to reshape the tide, stopped the exhausting effort it takes in trying to get back to something which does not—cannot—exist. I’ve started listening instead: less reactive than I once was, but no less intentional. The stillness isn’t emptiness; it holds its own quiet momentum.Perhaps this is the beginning of a new fluency. Perhaps endurance can—will—give way to something a little more yielding. Something that feels like permission—not to actively pursue a chosen course, but to simply embrace that choosing stillness doesn’t mean I’m not moving.
LW
May 2025
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