Moving On

 

In the three years since Zane died, I’ve noticed something: It’s become hard to connect with new people (and reconnect with others). It’s a revelation I’ve known for a while now, but I only recently started to process it. 

When Zane died, my whole life was turned upside down. Prior to his death, I worked at his middle school as an instructional assistant. I loved being in education. I cared deeply about the kids I was assigned to help and adored my colleagues. We were definitely more than just co-workers. I was also Zane’s full-time caregiver, which I loved. It allowed us to become close in a way that we weren’t with any other human being on this planet. After he died (which, by the way, was right before the start of the pandemic), it took me a great deal of time to want to do anything. This was made all the more hard by my cancer diagnosis six months after he passed away. When I finally formulated a new plan for my life, I was still surrounded by people who knew him. I could talk about Zane, and they’d get it. They was a cushion, of sorts. But as time went on—and continues to go on—that’s changed. 

Sure, there are still people who knew him in my life. They’re not as prominent as they once were and, with them, I cherish our relationship. They’ll reach out to me and share dreams or stories about Zane, or they’ll simply say they were thinking about him. But there also has been an emergence of new people who had never met Zane. It’s less easy to talk about him with the newbies. It’s not their fault. They weren’t a part of my life when he was alive. But when I spend time with them, something’s missing. I can’t freely share stories about my kiddo because they don’t know his personality, his resilience, his smile. I restrict myself with most of them to a general discussion of grief: I’m having a hard time today because I miss my kid or Today’s a tough grief day. Some of them are amazingly sympathetic. Others are dismissive and meh about it. More than I care to count say absolutely nothing. Those are the people I tend to avoid. (We truly live in a grief-illiterate culture). 

There’s another subset, a resurgence of people who I knew before I had Zane, but they never took the time to meet or know him. This doesn’t include my friends and family who live far away (like my two besties in Wisconsin). I mean, they’re…far away. Plus, they learned about him through our discussions or pictures I would post. I’m so grateful to them. No, those aren’t the folks I’m talking about. For whatever reason, some friends from my past want to reenter my life now that he’s gone, and I have to ask myself why? I don’t have the answer, but I do know I struggle with these people. A lot. More so than with the newbies. Because why weren’t they there when he was alive? When life was hard in a different way? Why didn’t they want to meet him? It hurts. And now that he’s gone, they never will. 

Anyway, the more time that passes, the more distant I feel from my son. So much of that has to do with these new relationships; of being part of a world where people didn’t know Zane. (As a side note: if you didn’t know Zane, that’s a huge loss for you because he was beyond amazing). And the more things I do, the more people I meet. And the more people I meet, the more expansive the world without him becomes. Frankly, that doesn’t feel good to me and actually creates a whole other grief within the first loss. 

The concept of “moving on” in grief is alien to me. Sure, you have to continue living (unless you plan to end your life), which propels you forward whether you want it to or not. But that’s not what I hear when the term “moving on” is used. Instead, it’s meant to tell a grieving person to stop being sad, to go back to the old self you were before the death (or at least come damn well close to it), and to put grief aside, so that others aren’t bothered by your loss. That’s what a grief-illiterate society propounds: hearing about your loss gets in the way of other people’s objectives and ruins their good time. 

Have I met wonderful new people? Yes. Do I enjoy spending time with some of them? Yes. But I can never be close to the majority of them, and it’s because they will never meet Zane, who is still such a huge part of my life and heart.