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My husband Jake has been dead for a year and I still don’t believe it. Not really. Not when I look for his marginalia in new books, or read an article about self-driving cars and text him a link, or when I see an interesting new Malaysian restaurant and have the urge to make us a reservation. Certainly not when I look at our daughter, Athena, who wears Jake’s face as her own and who, especially when she’s examining an object closely, looks out at the world through the same perceptive brown eyes.
I can still see the future I’d imagined for us as clearly as I recall the past. In doing so, time collapses into a single point: Now. It feels like Jake is here right now.
Apparently, that’s a disease.
The American Psychiatric Association describes “disordered grief,” also known as “prolonged grief,” as a loss that occurred at least one measly year ago for adults (for children there’s an even faster grief clock). The diagnosis is made when people experience three of the following symptoms , every day , in the month before the diagnosis is made:
Avoidance of reminders the person has died; intense emotional pain; or, alternately, emotional numbness; difficulty with reintegration; feeling that life is meaningless; intense loneliness; feeling as though part of oneself has died; a marked sense of disbelief.
Just three?
I imagine a makeshift consensus group clad in tweed in some back room at a Psychiatric conference deciding on the shelf life of grief over coffee and Costco muffins, like it’s yogurt that’s starting to curdle. Is there a sniff test for pain? How long, exactly, is too long?
It took almost six months just to stop expecting Jake to text asking me to pick him up from Sky Harbor Airport – Terminal 3 – apologizing for his flight’s long delay. And although I no longer wonder if he’s about to walk through the door, my brain hasn’t given up the fleeting but frequent thought that he might still pick up the phone if I call.
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