Love’s Tentacles

When You’ve Bit Your Cuticles to the Quick

One of my sons has a tendency to injure the tips of his fingers. Somehow, a stray pin left on the table or the tiniest shard of glass makes its way into that guy’s digits. And the howling which ensues is a spectacle all in itself. You’d think somebody had cut off his arm. Yes, he’s on the spectrum. But still.

If you’ve ever had an ingrown nail or bit your cuticle too far, you know that fingers contain approximately a gazillion nerve endings. Every slight nudge, every dip into a pocket seems to ignite the wound until you’re about ready to chop them babies off, just to get relief.

This past week has been raw like that, a raking of nails on the chalkboard of my grief. A friend told me recently that when your loved one dies, you stay numb for the first month or so. Then, every feel you possess bursts out of your heart’s prison and tries to eat you alive.

Our household has been on the menu. We snap at one another and try not to judge but man, would it kill you to keep the music down? OK I try not to judge. And then of course, I do.

But what do I do with someone who, when calling to offer condolences, proceeds to tell me in great detail about their recent colonoscopy? I mean, the Scripture Scolders are bad enough, but how do you smile when someone says my husband’s life was long enough and by the way, those polyps were pretty darn big?

Kinda makes you wish for a platitude: He’s no longer in pain. God needed him. He’s in a better place now. Those sorts of go-to reminders are easier—everyone knows that every one of us hates to talk about death. We’d all rather have uh, a colonoscopy?

I hear it all the time: People are uncomfortable in mentioning your loved one’s demise. They don’t know what to say. They really don’t want to think about their own eventual end. And the better advice is to just shut up and sit with that person whose grief is still unbaked.

Yesterday, I stood in line at a pharmacy. The queue was fairly long, the kind where you strike up conversations with those behind you. The lady behind me was nice and we chatted amicably until I mentioned my husband’s recent death. She literally jumped, and then began to apologize, as if she should have known just by looking at me.

Later, I wondered if she had recognized grief written into my face. Instead of shedding tears like a normal person, I guess my loss has tentacles that wave menacingly at everyone who gets near me. I’m like a squid or an octopus, my arms searching for a way to be OK. Searching for safety. Searching.

And the tips of those tentacles are singed, screaming in pain yet still feeling their way across the ocean bottom. Like my son with hurt fingertips, it’s agony every time I dare to reach out to a new dawn. Yet unlike him, I can’t wind miles of tape around those fingers or salve my wounds with Bag Balm.

Time, I’m told is the bandage I need to heal. Fair enough, but the empty place demands something now. Ask me in a year, two years, five years and I’m sure I’ll be thanking God that the heavens never stay still.

But right now, today, the only balm that has any real chance of healing me is love. I’m so needy that only the purest love will do. My friends and family help—even the kid with hurt fingers—but I need a love that’s bigger than everything.

Look outside some night and you’ll find me gazing into the cosmos. I’ll be lifting my damaged arms as high as I can, begging for the answer to my question. As the brilliant Christian Witman¹ writes, “We feel (love) reenter us at once more truly and more strange, like a simple kiss that has a bite of starlight to it.”

When the clouds part at last, that kiss soothes my burnt fingertips, dries the tears I wish I could cry. Mercy overtakes all my headshaking and judgment and transforms it to compassion—even for complaining kids and tone-deaf sympathizers. And somehow, love’s tentacles reach out to me in a way I can’t refuse.

1. My Bright Abyss, by Christian Witman.