The Anger

Grief: it's more than just crying!

The woman in the corner is speaking barely above a whisper, and still her voice shakes. Her husband was taken from her, killed in a very preventable accident that spared everyone but him. She had a three-week old baby, a now-fatherless child, and so much anger.

“People tell me I’m evil to have these thoughts,” she cried, and a room full of widows rush to reassure her that she is not evil, she is not vile, that her rage, at least here in this room, is sacred and righteous and perfectly legal.

Her eyes fill with tears and spill down her cheeks, and we are angry for her, and for ourselves, and for every time we bit our tongues clean through.

As a 31-year-old widowed mother who had spent three years caring for her husband as brain cancer devoured him, I expected grief to be…sad. I imagined my days would stretch out into an endless series of sobfests and weepalongs. 

I considered making myself monogrammed handkerchiefs and buying stock in Kleenex, then realized that I didn’t know how embroider or how to buy stock and I was too tired to Google either one because grief is exhausting.

It doesn’t seem like it should be, since it drains you of the desire or ability to actually do anything, but grief made me feel like I had accidentally had too much of the silly gas at the dentist, a sort of waking dream state, if you dreamed of living your nightmare. I had a college habit of partying until 5am, when the seediest local bar opened for business. I’ve had two children and I’ve run several half marathons (brag!), and I’ve never felt a deeper sense of weariness than that of a broken heart.

For months, it felt as if my body and my soul were each wearing those Sumo wrestling costumes you can rent for parties. They were huge and heavy and slow. They couldn’t even wrestle, so they just sort of leaned up against one another. 

I was ready for the sad, which meant I was ready for the crying. But grief, it turns out, is more than just crying. Sometimes it isn’t crying at all. Sometimes, it’s absolutely no crying whatsoever for many days, and then an unleashing of emotion completely incongruent with the time and place. It’s heartily sobbing along with Cher as she asks if you believe in life after love…in the middle of CVS, while you wait for your Lexapro prescription. It’s having one glass of wine and deciding that there’s no time like the present to tell your mother all of the ways she failed you as a child, therefore ruining your otherwise lovely weekend away together. 

Sadness I could understand. Sadness I could explain to other people, but I never had to. Even the dullest of dimwits could understand that death is sad. The anger was inexplicable and unwanted, though it shouldn’t have been — it’s right there in the five stages of grief! I knew those five stages — denial, bargaining, depression, anger, acceptance — but I assumed they were more of a buffet-style situation, like I could pick and choose which stages I engaged with. Anger? No thanks, but I’ll take a double depression with a side of acceptance if you wouldn’t mind. Anger only makes sense if you have something to be angry about, and something to be angry with. And while yes, I’m a person who has gotten into more than one verbal altercation in the Target parking lot, I couldn’t see what anger had to do with my husband dying at 35 from brain cancer.