#8 of 92: Yesterday’s Stop on the Grief Train

In Death & Dying yesterday, the professor had us draw an outline of our hand and then label each finger with something we love to touch. On my little finger, I wrote ‘hard-boiled egg.’ It was the last thing I thought of but the purest. There is no emotion attached to a hard-boiled egg like there is to one’s cat or a granddaughter’s hair. There is just the feel of the egg. Smooth. Solid.

“A hard-boiled egg is usually cold, too,” the professor added, in kind of a delighted way because, I think, no one had ever offered up a hard-boiled egg as a much-loved thing to touch. That the egg would likely be cold added so much to the tactile vision.

The professor does this unusual thing at the beginning of class. A few weeks ago she had a container full of the leaves of a dozen different plants. We each picked one to smell before we closed our eyes and breathed deeply.

She is wise to arm us with serene thoughts.

Yesterday, we talked about Childhood Traumatic Grief and Prolonged Grief Disorder. I see the professor watch me out of the corner of her eye to see if I’m having trouble with the discussion. She reminds us that a child who loses a parent will be grieving their entire lives, and I think of our five-year-old asking out of the blue – during dinner or in the car – ‘why did my mom die?’ I give the same answer and then ask what she remembers about her mom, hoping to create a little suitcase of memories she can carry with her. But she’s so little she doesn’t have a lot to pack. So, we try to help augment with our memories of her mom.

We don’t know what we’re doing with our little one but we think we’re doing the right thing.

There is no end to this. As one speaker said to us a while back – the grief doesn’t get smaller, your world just gets bigger.

Meanwhile, there’s that feel of a cold, perfectly smooth, quietly hefty, hard-boiled egg in my hand.