“Try Writing a Letter to the Person That You Lost”

Grief is a reaction to sudden change.”

Dear You,

Actually, that’s wrong.

It’s technically “Dear Me”, but for as long as I can remember… I have a hard time saying my name in the third person.

“Isn’t it sort of weird that no one in my personal life ever says my name?” I asked one of my best friends, Sam, arbitrarily years ago, as the topic of my “feeling arrogant when I say my name out loud” came up in conversation.

Sam called me by my name, but we also called each other’s names in sign language and in the way that teachers refer to each other as “Miss Bailey” or “Miss Sam” out of respect, thus starting to feel like husbands and wives (or spouses and spouses by any gender or iteration) who go from being “Insert Name Here” to “Mom” and “Dad” even in their own propinquity.

“I am either Momma,” I said, talking to her about the odd lack of my own name in my own private life, “or basically… that’s it. My partner doesn’t really ever say my name, actually?” I admitted (sounding like some sort of press tour for ‘Call Me By My Name’ minus the questionable age-hypergamic undertones).

“He never really has to get my attention in English.”

“I say your name all the time,” he said in defense, when I brought this up to him some time later… “You’re just not there when I talk about you.”

At his work, I come with a name.

In a classroom, I come with a “Miss” (rightfully so).

But in my own day-to-day, unless it was “Momma”(perhaps the best promotion I’ve ever earned, ever), I had and have a fierce avoidance to my own appellative; An Antaga-eponymous Syndrome that leaves a woman feeling as name-less as the world often makes her feel… except she’s unnamed herself.

See how I’m already writing this wrong, though?

“I” am not supposed to be an “I” here… I am supposed to be a “you”, because you (I) are (am) writing this to yourself (myself) right at this very moment.

A therapist today said: “Try writing a letter to the person that you lost” while we were discussing bereavement, and- though the list of The Lost feels far too many, and those in dolor so too shall come, my first thought was: “First, I have to start with myself.”

Dear You…. You’ve lost you.

Not because you’re nameless (as in, you don’t “hear” your name in your everyday life for weeks on end, for whatever reason you’ve yourself created), but because you are worthy of being grieved. [The tense of that verb feels wrong but just roll with it please?]

“Grief is not normalized,” the therapist-person said in that therapist-person way that begs to be scribbled down in notebooks fronted by an image of Frida Kahlo (of course)- the perpetual iconography of which both looks like a stultifying Eras tour and EP drop or something, and also distinctly goes against nearly everything she once believed in as a communist who reprobated capitalistic ideologies.

(‘You’ buy her T-shirts anyways.)

“We have to study and learn how to grieve so that we can be a model for grief in our everyday lives and for our children,” the therapist-person continued… “But though grief is not normalized, it is not just about life and death.

Grief is a reaction to sudden change.”

PART ONE. Continued tomorrow.