Grief is forever. We have already established this, so pardon the repetition. It is just a broken record at the moment. Today, one of grief’s little tricks jumped all over me, so I have to hash it out.
It’s a bit like a “back burner” deal. At times, grief does a low boil or barely even simmers. Other times, it gives off a little steam or boils over violently. Regardless, it is always on that back burner, ever present, offering the potential to spill over and make a mess of things as if in defiance of being ignored.
I will get back to my dissertation torment eventually, but for the moment I need to spill my guts on the tugs of grief that keep reminding me where the research for me truly began. Besides, as I’ve said before, “It’s all connected.” This hashing it out is part of the process.
Case in point: I had a flashback to my brother John today. These are usually random images that come to mind, completely unsolicited, but occasionally, like today, they throw me for a loop. Maybe it was a little nudge from little brother to remind me that I hadn’t reminisced about him lately.
I like to think the out-of-the-blue memory flashes are messages from Heaven from him or my sister, kindof like one of the only ways they can “keep in touch.” There’s no Facebook to Heaven, so I have to use my imagination, as we all do, when we want to communicate with someone who is not “here.”
Today my mind jumped back to the day John died and my frantic drive up Route 8 to Griffin Hospital after getting the call from my mother that he had taken a turn for the worse. It is an unpleasant memory and still very vivid for me. It isn’t a memory I intentionally return to when I am thinking about my life before January 8, 2002. I have no idea where it came from or why.
That is all the flashing back that took place today. Just that instant downer that started to take me further into the memory of that day before I instinctively shut it down. Clicked the “off button” and sent it packing.
But not really. And that is my point. There is no “off button” with grief.
There is nothing new in my observation here, though for some people who have not experienced it yet, it may seem exaggerated or melodramatic. It isn’t. It’s just fact.
But the thing that I am connecting to, relating to, trying to get to, is the way other people’s grief touches ours. I’m not sure yet, but I may be saying that the grief of others somehow helps our own to heal. So now, finally, I am getting to the subject I have been meaning to speak to for a couple of weeks but perhaps subconsciously have been avoiding. I need to open a discussion about the tragic Petit case.
I say “open a discussion” because it has taken me so long to get to the topic, I will never be able to say all that is on my mind and in my heart here if I stick to my usual roughly-1,000 word limit per post. So expect that I will have more to say on the Petit case in the coming weeks. Right now, I need to share a small piece of it because it is so very important, and yes, it is an emerging theme in my dissertation journey.
You would have to be living on the Planet Jupiter to not know about the horrendous murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two beautiful daughters, Hayley and Michaela, in their family home in Cheshire, Connecticut in 2007. Dr. William A. Petit survived the nightmare of their slayings and now is bearing up to survive the court trials of the men accused -- one of whom recently was swiftly convicted by a jury and is awaiting a decision in the penalty phase of his trial; the second of whom is expected to stand trial next year.
Notice I do not mention their names. It’s my own recoiling the precludes me from assigning a human element to the beings that treated a family so inhumanly. The grief of Dr. Petit cannot be described in careful words because it is something that one can only feel, and feel to the depths of one’s very essence.
Dr. Petit was quoted in a local paper several weeks ago when the trial of the first man accused was about to begin, and media coverage again was making Dr. Petit’s private pain a public experience. A collective grief experience, at least in one sense.
His words jumped off the page and seared into my psyche because they expressed my own feelings so well. The paper recounted how, during a pretrial hearing for suspect (now convicted killer) #1, the names of Petit’s wife and daughters were read out loud in the courtroom.
Petit must have told a reporter afterward that it made him happy to hear their names. Given the circumstances, the setting, and the situation, this reaction might be hard to understand. But the partial quote in the paper spoke volumes about this man’s grief. When you add his quoted words to the context, it takes on a deeper meaning. He said it made him happy to hear their names “to show that they were people.”
To show that they were people.
To remind everyone that Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela were here once. They were living, loving, caring human beings; a wife and daughters; someone’s friends; someone’s relatives; the source of someone’s pick-me-up moment, from a smile each of them offered just because. Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela were all of these things and more, and Petit’s verbal reminder was moving as much as it was perfect to describe why grief never leaves us.
To show that they were people. Technically, is this grief? Or is it love seeping through a memory?
Marianne - I think memories, good and bad are healing the void. There's always going to be a void. I don't think of the void as grief, but more of an empty place where the love sits. People we love and have loved deeply.... are irreplacable. To speak of them, honor them and remember them is how they live on - forever.
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