can grief make you worse?

I cry at everything now. Car commercials, page two of The Hours, gospel radio. The twenty minutes in my car every morning and evening as I drive to and from work is essentially a crying booth. I had no idea I was capable of the sheer volume of these tears. I have learned to let them come and go. To let them overflow even in the middle of talking to Christian, to take his hand and just keep going. The tears are just a part of everything, now.

Can you tell what I’m doing? I’m starting with the palatable parts of grief. People are okay with crying. I’m a little more careful about sharing the other parts.

For example, the way I have hated parents. Not a blanket-policy sort of hate, which would have an element of justice. No, some parents I have hated with a particular, focused passion. There’s one neighbor who cuddles her baby in our apartment courtyard upon whom I have wished terrible, specific things. Others I have let off the hook, surprised by my compassionate forgiveness. I have tried, at some points, to resist the hatred, but it has roots, tendrils that wrap around my insides.

I have come to suspect that grief can make you insufferable, can make you selfish, just as much as it can deepen your empathy. It reminds me of what Andrew Solomon wrote about depression, which he called “the flaw in love”: 

"To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself." 

Or Jane Kenyon’s earth-shattering long poem, Having it Out with Melancholy, which I have read probably hundreds of times. Addressing her own depression, she wrote:

You taught me to exist without gratitude.

You ruined my manners toward God

That couplet has echoed in my head for years. You taught me to exist without gratitude. / You ruined my manners toward God. 

I vividly remember how it felt to first read those words, because it named a part of depression I’d never had language for, not for a very long time. For much of my twenties, despite having what I now see as unmistakable clinical depression, I didn’t identify it as such because I thought of depression as just “being sad.” I was sad back then, yes, but more often I was existing without gratitude. I would be seized with periods of hopelessness so sharp they felt closer to rage. The voice in my head was profoundly, unceasingly cruel, picking myself apart from the inside day and night. I tested or sometimes wrecked connections with people who loved me, jerked into selfishness by a part of me that hungered to be all alone, cast out to sea where I could really, finally, give up. 

I wonder sometimes if or how grief could do the same. I recognize some familiar overlap with depression — the impulse to isolate, the loneliness, the feeling that the world is moving forward without you and you might as well give up. Isolation and hopelessness can quickly take the shape of selfishness, ungratefulness even for the people who do show up for you, overfixation on everything that could or does go wrong. I’ve been surprised at how heightened my anxiety has become over the past year – as though I’m trying to convince myself I can protect myself from anything bad happening again if only I remain hypervigilant, if only I do everything perfectly.

I think about the things that helped me crawl out of depression holes in the past. Some of them are the usual suspects – SSRIs, sunshine, rest, movement, therapy – and depending on your depression, anything else may not be possible without those foundational steps. But I think sometimes it was also the slow accumulation of things that helped me be a little less concerned with myself. Getting outside of my brain, being one person in a group of people. Releasing control. In other words, anything that gently, slowly, retaught me to exist with gratitude. 

Grief is living inside me and changing me every day, in ways I may not understand for years. But my wish for this year is that I don’t let it make me smaller, more ungrateful, more afraid. That instead I let my grief open me up.