Absurd questions, clutter and griefy chaos

Daddy Blackbird #8

Steve, speaking into a microphone following a football game

In the early days after Steve died, I had no idea how grief would behave. It wasn’t always heavy and quiet, like thick fog. A lot of the time it shouted, insisting on being heard, like a petulant child. It barged into my brain at awkward times with absurd questions.

And when I couldn’t get answers to the obvious things - like why? how? when exactly? - my mind went looking elsewhere.

It filled the silence with its own stories.

I’ve since had conversations with others bereaved by suicide, and I’ve realised this grasping-for-sense is common. Some people believe the method a person chooses is symbolic — that jumping might mean they felt like they were already falling, or that a violent end reflects a chaotic life.

Whether or not those theories hold truth, they reflect what we’re all trying to do: build a shape out of the shattered pieces.

What follows is a list of the questions I most wanted to ask Steve, some logical, some ridiculous, all of them drenched in pain...

These were the thoughts I never said out loud at the time, because they felt too unkind, too shameful, too strange.

But this is what grief does: it makes you imagine the impossible, interrogate the absurd, and search for meaning in the smallest, most inexplicable things.