Grief & guilt aren’t the same thing
The day before we started walking, I got the news that my dear uncle had died.
This wasn’t unexpected. He’d been very sick, and part of me dreaded that our departures might coincide and I would be stuck in Europe and miss the services. Whether it was foresight or a self-fulfilling prophecy, that very thing came true.
What I didn’t expect—what I always forget—is that life is usually a lot gentler to me than I am to myself. I called my aunt and, through my tears and violently colliding thoughts, I heard her loving insistence: “Do not try to come back. Unkie wouldn’t want that and either do I. We know how important this trip was to you. Anyway, you’ll be a lot more help to me when you come next month.” (Referring to a trip I already had planned.)
That was all undeniable. Still, I was torn. Ripped apart, really. It would be another 12 hours before we were at the remote rural starting line of our 10-day trek on the Camino de Santiago. We were still in a biggish city with an airport. If I left right then and traveled hard for 36 hours I might make it just in time for the funeral.
I called my husband, who kindly emphasized not just the objective ridiculousness of that notion, but also the fact that I had been explicitly told not to attempt it by the person whose wishes mattered most in all of this.
One foot in front of the other
So, I wrote a slapdash eulogy in my tiny, lightweight notebook, hammered it out on the hotel computer’s stubborn keyboard, figured out how to get the browser to display in English, and emailed it to Auntie. My sister, who herself had to rearrange plans and travel across several states, would read it at the service.
I assured our guide, my friend, that I wasn’t going anywhere—though of course she was in full support of me leaving if I decided to do that. Part of why this was such an important trip for me was that I was there as a support person for this group, not just a participant. Still, she urged me to do anything I needed to support myself in the coming days, even if it seemed counter to my role.
The generosity of this world. The kindness.
I processed what I could, tucked Unkie into my heart, and was soon on the forested road in southern France where there was, indeed, no turning back.
I was returning to this astounding landscape after only six months away from it, and saw now that it hadn’t been a dream the first time. In fact it was somehow even more dreamy—where last time had been sweltering hot with brown earth (and surreally beautiful even so), this time there were cotton-ball clouds, deep green fields, swaths of red poppies.
Joy bubbled up and came to an abrupt, bouncing stop, like someone hitting the emergency button in an ascending elevator. I couldn’t, couldn’t enjoy this, I realized, at least not with the purity of last time. On this walk, I’d also be grieving. Plus I’d be carrying guilt. It could all be true. It would have to be.
Ahem.
The Voice
My mind’s droning lecture about acceptance was cut off at once by the Voice.
I’ve found that, in rare moments, grace has something so important to say that it opts to actually speak to me, using literal words. What with the thinness of the veil on the Camino, what with moments of grace available with every step, the Voice visits me there more often than in ordinary life.
Now, it halted my steps and my thoughts.
About that guilt. It went on. You can absolutely walk with it if you’d like to. By all means. Carry on. Carry it.
Or. You can leave it right here.
Since these kinds of things happen outside of time and space, before the Voice even completed its invitation, the guilt dropped out of my system like an anvil, like a giant locked safe, like a hundred concrete cinder blocks cemented together.
A lifetime of guilt
It was the guilt at missing my uncle’s funeral, in spite of all the reasons that was OK. It was also the guilt of not protecting my little sister from the dangers of the world when we were young. It was the guilt of repeatedly betraying good friends and my own intuition for the sake of being accepted by people who were louder, meaner, more powerful. It was the guilt of having gone into freeze mode and failing to intervene when I saw others being treated poorly. It was the guilt of not being right there next to someone I cared about every single time something really bad or really good happened to them. It was the guilt of being selfish, being unkind, being human. Being born.
This one instance of guilt was actually a tiny thread that, once pulled, unraveled a lifetime of it that had begun accumulating the moment I took form as an intruder in a body unable to acknowledge me as a person. It was huge and it was heavy and it was ready to surrender to gravity.
Then and there it dropped into the ground beneath my feet, turned instantly to compost, and began fertilizing the wheatgrass that grew tall to my left and right.
Guilt is optional; grief is not
As it flowed away I saw what the voice was pointing to: that it was optional. All along I’d been carrying it voluntarily, hauling it on my back from place to place like a hermit crab (only not as cute, and having far less to do with the natural order of things). It wasn’t conscious, of course. But it also wasn’t necessary.
I saw too how I’d been conflating grief and guilt. Grief might include some guilt, sure, but it’s much bigger, much healthier. It’s also compulsory, an inevitable part of all human experience. It’s not a discrete period of sadness after someone dies, as our culture has come to view it. It’s in us always, just like joy and anger and memory and eagerness and love. It had a place on this walk, and it had a place in me.
Now, unimpeded by guilt, the grief ran through me and disappeared into the dirt and gravel under my trail runners, shot back up through the earth like a geyser, re-entering, energizing, transforming, washing me clean. All of it moving in and out with every breath, every step. Moving me along.
Learning to move on
Of course I’d be lying by omission if I said it felt amazing to drop the guilt. Like any lifelong relationship, no matter how healthy, saying goodbye leaves the same kind of void as any other loss. It’s its own grief. Months later I am still working to reorient around what used to be a solid pillar of guilt, wondering how to step into the cavernous space it has left. What do I want to create there?
Though I knew on the first day that this would be a grief walk, I didn’t expect what a massive, permanent shift I’d experience. I couldn’t have known just how much I’d be grieving, what grief actually feels like, and how exquisite the letting go would be.
