The fact that people were dropping dead all around me was, well, that was just ‘life.’ We all just went on fighting AIDS. Grief was not a part of this...If we had been fully present with what was happening to us all it would have been immobilizing. Best to keep moving. There was a lot of midnight craziness. A lot of great parties and a lot of great friends, some of whom lived. And even then, I thought: This is war. This is what war is. ...since then, every so often (and frankly as seldom as possible), those days in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s come screaming back out of nowhere. I don’t live with it; it lives in me. It is a part of me and makes me what I am. That does not mean I want it. I am not alone in this. And I am not alone in finding that loss accumulates and is sticky and hangs together like lumps of tar and sticks and sand on the beach after a storm. If my version of memory and remembrance is a vast warehouse full of piles of paper and detritus, where I bounce from heap to heap to get to that particular memory or thought, well then these thoughts, the ones of dead friends and loved ones, are in the heap in the back corner. They lurk behind the door...And every so often I walk through that door… In How Not to Deal with Grief an anonymous survivor tells the story of grieving -- and not grieving -- for his friends who died of HIV and other causes. Please like so that more of the Grief Beyond Belief community sees this in their newsfeeds. Trigger warning: overdose. griefbeyondbelief.org/guest-post-how-not-to-deal-with-grief/
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:11:14 +0000
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