grief

I just finished a meeting with my mentor - solving a surprising MATLAB bug - and settled in to get my lunch and read a few articles from the New York Times.  I ended up reading, "No Husband, No Friends" and "Ducking Grief" about people in the process of grieving - which hit a nerve - and unexpectedly found myself in tears again, sitting at my desk with avocado dropped all over my lap along with much of the rest of my lunch, grateful that my fellow grad student seems pretty wrapped up in his research so I can quietly wipe my tears away with a napkin without having to explain.

I'm pretty angry about my friend dying of cancer.  It still seems so very... unnecessary, a statistical improbability, a fluke of the worst sort - the sort of extraordinary bad luck / genetics / environment that one is wise not to spend too much time thinking about.  I have been pretty okay, most of the time I think, much of the reason being that Caitlin (living in another state) was not part of my everyday life and routine, so there aren't very many environmental triggers here to remind me of her.

But I'm feeling pretty sad and angry.  I haven't really processed the "angry" part - as far as who I'm angry at, what I'm sad about, but I'm angry.  Some detached part of me is nodding wisely and saying, Now you've gotten through the denial stage, so next is the anger stage.  Some other part of me wants to punch the detached part of me and say, Leave me alone - can't you let me be angry already without having to dissect all these feelings?

Now I'm just rather tired and sad - not enough energy to feel angry or figure out who or what I'm angry at or why.  Maybe just the whole situation.  I've spent a lot of time second-guessing my own actions in the past month, anyway, so maybe I'm just wishing I could have done things differently.  Or maybe I'm angry (irrationally) at her for "leaving" us, even though it was by no choice of hers.  Maybe I'm just angry that I can't actually be angry at cancer for existing, since it has no consciousness, ill will, or moral agency.

Thus goes the second stage of grief.