In Sane Grief

...I wrote very early this morning at the main journal, something I forgot to mention:
    While I was waiting in line at the Post Office, yesterday (always try to avoid the post office on the Friday before Mother's Day), to requisition a U-cart for transporting (Mom's and) my food donations to the managing office, I noticed a display of the two types of Passport applications and, having nothing better to do and being in a line of people who didn't seem particularly amenable to casual chat, decided to peruse a copy of each (application in person and application by mail). Strange but true, although the geographical parameters of my life range over half the globe, including crossing U.S. political borders, I've never needed a passport so I've never had one. As I read the application an alternate mind-track teased me with travels in and out of the U.S. that I've considered since December 8, 2008: Wandering the world to research how elders are incorporated in a variety of societies; Seeking work and residence in a socially democratic country with a decent universal health care system; Learning a new language (several possibilities have arisen since Mom died and I'm continuing to investigate which to pursue first) then visiting the country in which the language is spoken in order to sharpen my skills; acknowledging and taking up the invitations of a few online journaling friends to visit them and their areas; visiting famous high rain areas like Milford Sound, New Zealand, and Mt. Wai'ale'ale, Kauai.
    Once I'd been admitted to the post office office (sorry, I couldn't resist the redundancy) I noticed a camera set-up through an open door into another area. After the impromptu Food Donation Celebration wound down, I asked the office manager about applying for a passport. Aside from reviewing the obvious technical information (hours applications are accepted, who to approach first, etc.) she offered me several helpful tips:

• Don't pay the post office for passport photos. They charge twice as much as the pharmacy across the street. Don't use a particular chain pharmacy, either: Their photos are often too dark to use. Just prior to my visit yesterday, she'd had to send away a family who had solicited photos from this pharmacy.
• If I'm planning any major change to my appearance [coloring or drastically changing my hair; plastic surgery; significant weight gain or loss; a tattoo within portrait range; having an ear amputated (she snickered at this one)], wait until my appearance has stabilized before having a passport photo taken. If I don't, I'll wish I had the first time I use the passport.
• No, I don't have to have a trip in mind in order to apply for a passport; if I don't, leave that section blank.
• Yes, Birth Certificates are returned relatively promptly and in fine shape. She's never had a complaint about this, although she's received anxious calls because "it takes awhile" to get them back. "For god sakes," make sure I copy it before sending it off.
• At this time, if you apply in person, stifle the urge to joke about terrorist activities. "You'd be surprised," she said, "how many people do this. We're obligated to note this on an application and this can slow the process," which, normally, takes four to six weeks.

    Although I'm sure the passport application display has been ubiquitous at our local post office since the USPS became an "agent of application" on behalf of the U.S Department of State, I think it is not incidental that I didn't notice it until five months, to the day, of my mother's death. I think it's also a landmark in my grief process. By chance, the Hospice Grief Counselor called me Thursday. As we chatted, I mentioned to her that between her last call and this one I'd begun to read through selected books on grief, especially pertaining to losing a spouse, since I identified more with this than with losing a mother. I also told her that, around the time I decided to do some in depth reading, I wondered if I might be a candidate for "complicated grief" and wanted to read more about that.
    "You're not," she said, and went on to clarify that people experiencing complicated grief tended toward silence. She didn't find it necessary mention that grief silence is not my problem. It's obvious.
    I told her that I was aware of this because one of the books I'd checked out was what amounted to a text on "Complicated Mourning" by Therese A. Rando, the contents of which clearly indicated that the chief hallmark of complicated mourning, blocked mourning, didn't apply to me, although I was finding the book extremely helpful in understanding my grief process. I asked her if she'd heard of the book. Only cursorily, she mentioned, but as we discussed the book I realized I hadn't absorbed as much from scanning through it as I thought I had. When our conversation ended I opened the book and reviewed its peculiar and distinctive definitions of, among other aspects of loss, mourning. Rando, in Chapter 2, which includes a section of "Definitions", Rando devotes a little over three pages to defining mourning, versus a little over a page defining grief. She distinguishes the definition included in her book from the traditional definition of mourning, "the cultural and/or public display of grief through one's behaviors", thusly: She emphasizes "the psychoanalytic tradition of focusing on intra-psychic work, expanding on it by incuding adaptive behaviors necessitated by the loss..." [all quotes from Treatment of Complicated Mourning copyright 1993 by Therese Rando].
    In addition, she devotes a majority of the chapter to a further, meticulous elucidation of mourning, including "The Six 'R' Processes of Mourning". As I reacquainted myself with these, I realized that my food donation experience, including my writing about it afterward, fell into a variety of categories:

• "Feel, identify, accept, and give some form of expression to all the psychological reactions to the loss"
• "Identify and mourn secondary losses"
• "Review and remember realistically"
• "Revive and reexperience the feelings"
• "Readjust to move adaptively into the new world without forgetting the old" [bolding SIC]
• "Develop a new relationship with the deceased"
• "Adopt new ways of being in the world"
• "Form a new identity"
• "Reinvest" [bolding SIC]

    Although I've listed these categories in order, my experience of them through this one experience was all over the map, another accepted hallmark of mourning: The processes, as observers of grief and mourning have labeled them for better understanding, don't happen in any particular order, nor do they necessarily end; they evolve, sometimes into another process, sometimes into a regurgitation and/or refinement of the same process.
    The main reason why I wrote the post to which the title above links is that, after yesterday's food donation episode was over and I was reviewing the experience, I noticed a new and distinct difference in the way I am handling my mother's death. It feels like a movement, although not necessarily along a grade like "better/worse", "higher/lower" "more/less competent". The reason I took note is that, previous to yesterday, I've experienced my grief process, for lack of a better analogy (although please assume that this one isn't exactly right, either), as centrifugally closed. Yesterday, I felt as though I'd begun to spiral...not out of anything, but to an area that, hmmm...allows me to reach for more...does that make sense?
    Specifically, yesterday was the first time since Mom's death that I "talked" to her for so long a time and with so much concentration. I didn't feel as though Mom was "there", in the same sense as I took for granted that she was "there" with me when she was alive, at home and I was out doing errands. There was none of the palpable psychic impress that her alive existence engendered in me when she was at home and I was not. She was, however, with me in a way to which the phrase "in memory" does only paltry, demeaning justice. I'm at a loss for words, here, but I suspect that other survivors will understand what I mean.
    It's the first time I can remember, too, that I've taken an "alive" and common episode in our lived together lives and adapted it successfully and joyfully into my present survivor experience. Finally, as I did so, I autonomically leapt from adapting an old experience to considering new experiences that have nothing to do with Mom's and my lived together life. It felt hopeful...not as though I was leaving anything behind but as though the world around me was widening in a way I hadn't expected.
    That's a Survivor's Mother's Day with which I can live. Gladly.

Labels: Celebrations, Complicated Grief, Grief Fantasies, Grief Literature, Grief Self-assessment, Life after Death, Mother's Day, Mourning Processes, Rando