I’m driving, always driving. It’s raining. It’s always raining.
Sometimes: The rain is torrential. The windscreen wipers flip back and forth at such speed that I am sure they will detach from their housing the fly off across the highway. The drops of rain come down hard and fast; flung furiously from the heavens. Wind howls around me and the car shudders under the onslaught. Each raindrop is so big; it must, surely, contain a cup’s worth of water. I pull over, on the shoulder, and wait for the rain to pass, cringing as the weighty splash back from passing trucks is hurled against me again and again.
Sometimes: The rain is heavy and constant for so long that I forget it is there. My mind wanders to other things. For a moment (a minute, an hour) I think my thoughts and the rain is gone. And then something – maybe the texture of the rain, or a bump in the road or even just my mind itself reminds me that it’s raining. In those moments-of-remembering the insides of my torso – the organs and so forth – reorient themselves to be pointing in a different direction. My heart swaps places with my uterus.
And then the world rights itself and though I am straining to see through the watery windscreen, I can drive on. I buckle down and focus on steering my treacherous path.
Sometimes: The rain is nothing more than a fine drizzle on an empty road. Only the squeal of the windscreen wipers shuddering across the mostly-dry screen reminds me of my watery albatross.
Sometimes: I am tired. So tired. I am tired of the rain and of peering through the rain splashed windows. My head aches and my back screams and my lids feel heavy under the burden of it all. I long for sun and for laughter and someone to take the wheel. But the rain never stops and the road never ends.
Penny my heart goes out to you. Grief is one of the most tiring places to be. You feel exhausted most of the time, except when you are sleeping, and even then in your dreams you are exhausted. I can only say lean in. Its part of this crazy journey we go on, searching for meaning in something that seems to have lost all meaning. And that’s OK, Sleep when you need to. Buckets of love to come with the rain.
Losing a child is the worst grief there is to experience.
Is that the voice of experience, Lisa?