Tuesday Night

Yesterday I held my sobbing friend after she ran over her dog. She screamed and stomped her feet - her energy felt like a bomb. Like a house on fire with propane tanks inside going off. We held her in the way I’ve seen soldiers jump on grenades in movies, taking the energetic blasts with out chests. But we didn’t concave. We didn’t collapse or deflate or scatter. It’s energy, after all - invisible, intangible. You just knows it’s there, you feel the tightening and release of it as a witness. The heat, as a person outside the burning house. You just hold on.
There were the other bodies, my two big man friends. Collectively we enshrouded her. She’s tiny and fierce. Like a dagger or flint knife. Our energy felt heavy, a fire suppressant blanket. Like the water on the inside of a plane gutting out over a forest fire. We were heavy and still. We held on and held on and held on. I didn’t know what was happening. The grief made us a singular body, the grief guided us what to do. It orchestrated us in a way I have never known in grief.
“Your body will know what to do,” the hospice nurse had said in ‘Dying For Sex.’
“The body is wise.”
She listed the things that would happen in the dying process with excitement.
The hallucinations, ‘the rally,’ (a kind of seemingly unnatural resurgence of energy which leads people to believe recovery is possible), then the slowing of breath, until one big exhale followed by no inhale. It’s all very normal.
On the floor of the kitchen we reminded our friend it was not her fault. I was unaware of this concept of shaping the narrative during these tender raw time. It seemed less words were better. Or just repetition of essential details. It’s not your fault. It was an accident.
You just have to be yourself in these moments. You just become very still and pat your friend over and over and over. That’s what we did and it felt like the right thing to do. She screamed a lot and said the same things over and over and I could feel the grief coming in waves and waves from her body as the energy got lower and lower. Less passioned. More deflated. Dampened. But still angry. Just deeper
“This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” she kept saying.
“This is so stupid.”
“It’s the stupidest,” I had said.
It’s exhausting. The grief. You must burn a billion calories. During it all one of the friends went grocery shopping and came back and made macaroni and cheese in the kitchen we were all in with the lights still off and the sun had set. Covered in snot and blood and tears. I’ve never seen a birth before. So much of the human experience I’ve seen in movies. Soldiers on bombs, dying, childbirth. It’s all kind of rare and exceptional to our lives surprisingly, these big moments. It makes us prepared in a way, but then we can never be prepared.
I got her a water, it always seems to be one of those things, water. And a linen kitchen towel to catch all the fluids. You grab a blanket. The friend that make the macaroni gave her a bowl of macaroni. The energy of the grief centers everything to its needs in a best-case-scenario. It’s like a halo, or an micro-atmosphere shapes itself where nothing was before. Everyone orbits around, the gravity immense in some stages. A somatic entity,  a life force of its own volition. It requires us to do things. Compels us to act. Compels us to be still. Water. Linen kitchen towel. Macaroni and cheese. All things are adjusted to make the space in the center.
This friend and I have this understanding of heartbreak. That you can never really fall out of love. And that’s it, with no other wisdom to follow through. You just have to say goodbye and hurt.
“What’s next,” she had asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“You grieve,” another friend answered and it felt like trying to fill up a dry lake bed with a drop of rain.
“You just grieve.”