Metamorphosis

I remember studying Kafka's Metamorphosis my junior year of high school. It has been 14 years, so I can't exactly remember all of the symbolism in the story, but some parts of it are fresh in my mind today. What I remember is that a man, Gregor, becomes a cockroach overnight. He cannot do what he could before, he was changed and had to adjust to his new self. Throughout the story, Gregor finds himself trying to communicate, trying to respond behind the closed door in which he cannot open, but no one can hear him or understand him. Once he has found a way to free himself and to communicate, those on the other side of the door are startled and repulsed by his transformation, either running away from him or trying to shoo him back in the confines of the dark place he had emerged from.

Then the rest of the story ends poorly for Gregor and those from the outside world end up with the happy ending. That is not the part of the story that I am looking at to relate to grief.

Grief is a dark place. When you are taken to that place, you transform and are no longer the same self as you were before. In our case, I look at life now as "before loss" (BL) and "after loss" (AL) because I am a changed person. In many cases, people can be afraid of your grief transformation. It can be intimidating to them because they don't know how to be there for you, what to say, how to act, what to do and sometimes because of that, they ignore it all together. Their discomfort on how to act toward you can make you feel like they are trying to shoo you back into a place of isolation because you are different and they are not sure how to relate to you anymore.

This is the first loss we have ever experienced. Neither Max or I have ever truly grieved before and while I don't want to speak for him, I know I didn't truly understand it. Other people's pain was frightening to me because I didn't know how to help them. I wanted to fix it somehow, but because I couldn't, I was the one who ignored it and sometimes never acknowledged it out of fear of making it worse for them.

Recently, we saw a grief counselor who went through the paths that people grieving can take. Something that was important to both Max and me is that we didn't want our loss to define us. It was important to us to come out of this loss in a way that Hudson would be proud of. Instead of being confined to a dark, isolating place for who knows how long, I thought of the metamorphosis of a butterfly.

Before loss, we were the caterpillar.

The grieving process is the chrysalis, where we are isolated in the dark. However, if you really look at it, that darkness is where you are being nurtured and held close in a cocoon. It is representative of your faith and God's arms around you, working in you. It is the support you have from friends and family, nurturing you and helping to ready you for the point where you are transformed.

When you emerge from that chrysalis, you are now something else, something different, but if you allow it, you emerge something beautiful.

I believe we are still in our chrysalis stage and though it can feel dark and isolating at times, we are held together by those we love and our faith. Never in my life have I physically felt the power of prayer and it is phenomenal. In times when our grief was the heaviest, we were given an overwhelming sense of peace and acceptance, allowing us to have an abnormal amount of strength.

We will continue our metamorphosis and emerge from our personal chrysalis to navigate our after loss life. When we do, we are determined to do so beautifully.