It doesn’t matter now how tarnished it was,
what water and bramble ran between us.
What you thought was lost
you had not yet lost.
This is the loss.
The others were only wear —
the fraying of a worn-in collar,
a shirt washed too many times
in the background, beneath consciousness.
This one is a tear.
Unmendable, even by the machines
that pump and groan and beep —
machines that could hold her body here
and not her.
Who I was before rises like the dust storm,
lays down its grit
I cannot get out of my mouth,
my eyes —
and when it settles I see again
through a scarring of the retina
that only others with similar striations
can read.
We stand together then,
in the bittersweet preciousness of family,
in the bittersweet preciousness of humanity,
gaining the bond that only such loss forges.
And we stand alone,
in the recommitment to live well and true,
and by living, honor
the one still breathing
who could not.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2013
The story behind the poem
This one isn’t mine to claim. It belongs to a friend, whose sister overdosed and did not die. What she lost was not her life but her brain — she survived into a body that is still here, still breathing, in a facility, and the sister he grew up with is not reachable in it.
There’s a name for what he was left holding: ambiguous loss. The therapist Pauline Boss coined the term for grief that has no ending because it has no death — someone present in body and gone in every other way, or gone from your life while still walking around in the world. Dementia is ambiguous loss. Addiction is ambiguous loss. So is this. It is one of the most common griefs there is and one of the least witnessed, because there is no funeral, no casserole, no date on the calendar that anyone else remembers.
What struck me hardest, watching him, is the discovery this poem turns on: he had already grieved her, for years, through the using. He thought that was the loss. It turned out to be the rehearsal.
I want to say one thing plainly about how she got there, because I won’t have this poem read as a cautionary tale. She was not weak and she did not fail. People don’t use to feel good; they use to stop feeling bad, and whatever she was trying to get out from under was real. Addiction is what unbearable pain looks like when someone can’t find another exit — and the shame we pile on top of it is one of the reasons so few people find their way back.
If you are grieving someone who is still alive, you already know the particular loneliness of it: that no one quite counts your loss, including, some days, you. It counts. You are allowed to grieve someone who is still breathing. And you are allowed to do it without deciding, once and for all, whether they are gone.