Shame + Grief
When I looked underneath my guilt, I found shame. And she wasn't all bad.
About halfway through my most recent session with my therapist, where talking about my mom became almost tangential to mining the grief that continues to resurface around losing Kurt, I stumbled on a feeling I hadn’t previously connected to the loss.
Shame.
When he first died, guilt was my bully, like a drill sergeant screaming in my face: “HE’D BE ALIVE IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU.” “WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST PICK HIM UP YOU LAZY PIECE OF SHIT.”
I picture myself wheezing out a defense in the smallest whisper I can muster, chin tucked tightly to my chest: “he wasn’t supposed to walk home, sir. he promised me he wouldn’t walk home.”
"WHAT’S THAT? YOU’RE SAYING THIS IS HIS FAULT?” “OH, I SEE. YOU FELT ‘SICK’ AND WANTED TO SLEEP SO THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE DESERVES TO DIE. GOT IT.”
“no, no, no, no, no,” I whisper, shaking my head, tears building then silently dropping down my face. “that’s not what i’m saying. i didn’t know. i didn’t know what was going to happen. he was beautiful. it should have been me. if it was going to be anyone, it should have been me."
“YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU!”
Kurt was the first person who helped me see myself clearly. Being with him felt like a long overdue exhale. I had no part to play, no role to fill, there were no expectations, all things that felt true for nearly every other relationship in my life.
Being with him was … easy. Loving him was easier. The surprise was that letting him love me was the easiest.
I’ve talked before about being too much. My emotional landscape always felt endless and … I can’t get the word here and I want to be precise … raw, unprocessed, tender, green?
Untamed, maybe?
Untamable might be what I’m looking for, but interpreted less like savage and barbaric and more like unrestrained and unreserved.
I couldn’t create a bottom to the depths of my connection to world, the ways in which I felt accountable to everything and everyone. In youth, that, among other personal dynamics, often made me a shapeshifter. I was who people needed me to be.
I say “in youth,” but really that habit followed me into adulthood. How could it not?
So you might imagine how powerful being loved by someone who saw me and then reached in and pulled something genuine and true to the forefront felt. Or, maybe didn’t pull but invited, encouraged, coaxed.
I don’t think I really understood until he was gone, and even then not right away.
After Kurt, there was nobody for awhile and then a string of self-centered, sometimes abusive people I knew I maybe didn’t deserve but allowed anyway because I was … too tired to push back against the guilt that hovered close and constantly reminded me that somebody’s got to pay.
I didn’t have the will to remind myself that Kurt would never ask or need or want me to be with anyone who didn’t lift me up. No penance was required.
From run-of-the-mill assholes to master manipulators that weaponized Kurt’s death against me—”There’s always been three people in this relationship, me, you and Kurt!”—the constant was always some version of having to be over Kurt in order to love another human.
That wasn’t my grief. I didn’t want an end. I wanted integration. I wanted to not have to disavow my love for a person no longer on Earth in order for my love for another living human being to be acknowledged as real.
Instead, my guilt was doubled; I was twice condemned.
I talked for awhile before what had been silent and dormant for all these years finally shook herself awake and peeked out from under the mountain of guilt I’d always assumed was the main byproduct of sorrow.
Shame.
I think both my therapist and I were a little surprised by the discovery, especially because we were exploring grief that was, by comparison to the loss of my mom, aged.
Guilt in grief feels expected, especially when, like it or not, something about your own life or actions directly intersects the point where everything shifted. “It’s not a lie to say that if I hadn’t gotten sick Kurt would still be alive today,” I tell my therapist. “Or, at the least,” I correct myself, “he would have survived that night.”
Even with my mom I wondered and still wonder sometimes if I could have saved her life if I’d been there. “I’m a nurse and I couldn’t even save my husband’s life if I needed to perform CPR for 20 minutes,” one of her health care providers told me. “Doing CPR correctly for 20 minutes is harder than people think.”
But, I mean, what is she going to say? Yes, you could have saved her if you were there but you weren’t so now she’s dead.
Those are the gray areas I hate, those places where you both know and don’t know, that I’m continually struggling to let quietly exist without question or judgment.
Some things in this world just are.
Now, to the shame.
Shame.
The unexpected visitor who sat me down and asked, “Hey, why did it take you so long to realize that I’m the underside of the guilt you’ve courted for so long?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “Maybe guilt feels less personal.”
“Right,” she answered, “because unlike guilt, where you’re encouraged to just beat yourself senseless, I ask for something more nuanced and exacting. I want you to take a look at yourself.”
“Yeah, that bit … I don’t like …”
But she cut me off.
“I want you to ask yourself if you honestly believe that all you’ve ever deserved these last 25+ years is to spend your time doubting and diminishing who and what once gave you the most confidence you’ve ever had in your whole life? I want you to wonder why it’s so easy for you to think he had you so wrong? What do you need in order to believe you still deserve to be loved the way he loved you?”
“Oooof, c’mon now,” I beg.
That last question? That one’s a killer.
Both the heart and soul of the shame I feel.
I meander to my point with my therapist, as I often do. “I’m ashamed I’ve spent so much time with people who didn’t deserve me.” Even that I say cautiously. Who am I to believe I’m special?
Yuck. NO.
“I look at the years I’ve wasted,” I try again, “the ways in which, after Kurt died, I almost instantly reverted back to a person who would just squeeze herself into whatever space was made available to her, believed she was only worth whatever someone was willing to give her. I feel real shame about that lost time.”
The subtext of that admission is almost always: “Because that’s not what Kurt would want for me.”
But something about this moment changes my perspective and I move from thinking about “how would Kurt want me to live?” to something akin to “what would Kurt say to me about the shame I’m feeling?”
“He’d have compassion for me,” I tell my therapist. “He would know I’m doing the very best I can, have always done the very best I can. He wouldn’t be disappointed. He wouldn’t judge me. He wouldn’t feel like I’d betrayed what we had together because I couldn’t sustain the clarity he fostered. He would remind me that what we had was whole and unconditional, and still is, even now.”
“There you go. I think you’ve got it,” I hear shame whisper.
Maybe shame is the sometimes more tender side of guilt, what you’re left with after drilling through the heap of mostly inconsistent and false assumptions served up by a brain marinating in sorrow. Perhaps shame, in the right dose, helps you slide some of the pieces of yourself back in place where you can begin to see a crisper, clearer picture of who you are now.
I don’t know. I’m still learning, obviously. Aren’t we all?
Would love to hear your thoughts.