Grieving a Dying Bone
How do you carry on living with death inside you?
The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
-Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I skipped the denial stage when I found out my bone was dying. The time for that was long gone, lost somewhere along the line where a mild pain that I easily wrote off as being some sort of over-exertion of the muscle that would be gone in a couple of days grew into a pain that enveloped my every waking moment, a pain that spared no aspect of my life. I could not be awake without feeling this pain, I could not go to sleep because of it and when I did manage to drift off into sleep it would yank me right back out, away from the only solace I had from it. I could not make my bed nor pick up my own crutches when they fell, and with the few things I was able to do the pain stayed. Hovering. Never leaving. At best only lurking.
No, I didn’t have the luxury of denial any more. I plunged straight into anger.
I skipped the first stage and ricocheted between anger and depression. I wondered which would destroy me. Would it be the anger raging in me? Would it grow to completely engulf me and burn me out, leaving only ashes of guilt and regret? Or would the black hole formed by my isolation and despair crashing into each other grow until it completely consumed me? Which would it be?
My life became a cycle of waking up and waiting for the day to end only to do the same thing the next day and the day after and the day after that, and my every waking moment was spent desperately wanting to not exist. In an attempt at self-preservation, a haze settled over me. The details of anything and everything became a blur, what need had I for details anyway? The days were all the same, as were the meals, the hospital appointments, the shows, the well-intentioned “get well soon” texts. What good would it be to process any of this?
On the days the haze wasn’t strong enough, I fell back on rage. I blamed everything and everyone for how I had been wronged. The doctors, our “brightest minds”, the only ones who could be trusted with the responsibility of healing, how had they repeatedly missed that a bone was dying? My parents, who were supposed to do everything within their power to give me the best fighting chance, how could they play with fire knowing I could get burned? God, who I had prayed to about every one of my plans and asked for direction, how could He not only let this happen but also at the worst possible time? The universe, which was already big and grand and perfectly fine without me, why had it forced me into an existence I wasn’t all that excited about anyway? And myself, why could I not withstand this devastation? Why was I not strong enough to bear this nobly?
I don’t pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times, and began again in the morning.
-Charles Bukowski
When a bone dies, it’s not fatal or terminal. You’ll keep living whether or not you want to. The death won’t spread or leave any outward signs that it has occurred. The bone dies quietly, painfully, by itself, and then the joint collapses. Everything else goes on, even your own body. An entire bone has died, your whole world has become pain, and the world just keeps going. Not yours though, your world has stopped, been brought to a screeching halt by a part of you dying, but the world keeps spinning.
How do you carry on when a part of you is dead? When there is no longer anywhere to go; there is no past to return to or future to head towards anymore? Death has come to rip away all your carefully built plans for the future from your hands and the past is now only ruins of what once was. There is only now, the agonizing now that you must live through as you wait. What am I waiting for? A solution just beyond my reach? It used to be a future just beyond my reach, and the second my fingertips grazed it it was yanked so far away from my grasp that it’s barely even within view anymore. Now, life dangles a “cure” just beyond my grasp, one with so many strings attached that even if I managed to take it I would become a marionette. But what other choice is there? I reach for the “cure” and each time it is moved again just beyond my grasp, just far enough that everyone expects me to just try harder to reach it. “It’s right there,” they say. “You’re so close, just reach for it.”
But I’m tired. I am tired of the ever-shifting goalpost, of standing up just to have the rug pulled out from under me again. Even if I managed to reach this finish line, when is the next race? Will it be as hellish as this one? More so? Will I live life constantly holding my breath waiting for a gun to go off and a race to start? Will I always be a marionette waiting for life to pick me up and put me through the next round of trials for the audience’s amusement? Who is this for anyway? Is anyone enjoying this? Is anyone there? If you are, can we make a deal?
Some part of me still wants to survive, to make it through this hell or at least know that I tried my very hardest to. So I would try to bargain, to make the best deals that I could with God, with the universe, with myself. All of this would be fine if my life was building up to something spectacular, if this was the start of some biography that you would find under the inspirational section of the bookstore. All this failure and loss and pain, it was fine because it was building up to some epic success. If I could just grit my teeth and make it through this, there would come a time in the future, a moment when I am filled with so much gratitude for and awe at life that it will all have been worth it. All I had to do was survive this. I would even imagine what that moment might be; where I might be, what I might be doing, who I might be with.
Then I would realise that life isn’t a story and that it doesn’t need to be building up to anything. Sometimes it is, and other times it isn’t. For every success story told, there are a hundred failures not. For every inspirational biography of suffering, perseverance and restoration, there are thousands of biographies never written of just suffering and persevering and even more of just suffering. I was a marionette, and no amount of bargaining would change the story marionettist had decided that I would be playing out. Whatever the genre was, I would be playing it out as it had been planned to go. And with this realisation, the mirage I had constructed with bargaining would fade away and I would be left with a raging fire and a growing black hole.
The only way to get to the other side of grief is to go through it.
-Author Unknown
What does acceptance look like when grieving the death of a bone? I don’t know yet. But now, once in a while, the fire and the black hole both stop growing. And in those moments, in a world covered in ash and half-consumed by a black hole, I can do something else. I dust the ashes of guilt, resentment, and regret from my relationship with my parents and we watch a movie together. I respond to messages delivered months ago. I write about grieving a dying bone and wonder what acceptance will look like. I let myself begin to hope that one day, the fire and the black hole will start to shrink. I even dare to hope that one day, I can start to rebuild from the wreckage.
I’m rooting for you 💜💜
luv u <3