Chapter Thirty-Four The Lynd Wurm
Thirty-Four
The Lynd Wurm
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to go anywhere so soon after my father had died, but if I’d stayed home I wouldn’t have made money or seen friends. And I doubted that I’d have recovered faster from grief sitting at home alone.
At one lecture I gave, an attendee who’d heard about my father’s death slipped a book into my purse. She said that after her brother’s death she’d spent two weeks experiencing something she called “the opposite of a trigger—a glimmer .” She said she was suddenly living exclusively in the present. There was no past, no future. She felt like a child. Food tasted incredible. And she said the only thing that really got at what she’d experienced was the book she was giving me, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. The author, Francis Weller, wrote that being around death gives you “dark wisdom,” and he told the Swedish fairy tale of the Lynd Wurm:
A king and queen were having trouble getting pregnant, so they went to a wise old woman for help. The queen didn’t follow the directions exactly, and so when she gave birth she had two sons—the first was a worm creature the midwife threw into the woods without anyone knowing. When the prince, who as far as the king and queen knew was their only son, wanted to get married, he found his path blocked by the Lynd Wurm. The monster said the prince could only get married once he was married, as he was the older son. They tried to find him a wife, but he ate all his brides.
Finally, a woman showed up for her wedding night prepared. She carried a bucket of lye and wire brushes and had on seven blouses. She said she would take off a blouse every time he took off a layer of skin. Then she scoured his body with the lye, and he emerged as a human being. They could consummate the marriage and live together happy and whole.
Two moments in this story have haunted me. One is the Lynd Wurm blocking the path. Weller says, “As fairy tales often point out, what was thrown away returns and demands to be acknowledged.” The other is what the Lynd Wurm says when his bride tells him to start taking off skins: “No one ever asked me to do that before.”
Weller said that is the secret to grief—that we long to have someone ask us to be exposed in that way, to reveal the wildness of our grief, to sit with us in it even if they don’t understand it. He described grief as a solitary process that we can’t do alone.
My father’s death, the divorce, the move, the upending of how I’d envisioned the rest of my life—for as hard as I’d worked to prepare for it— messed me up . Grief snuck in around the edges. I’d think, I’m fine , fine , fine , and then it would be as though I’d been hit on the head by a falling anvil. Or maybe like I’d put on a lead suit, been tackled, melted like the witch in The Wizard of Oz . No analogies worked. Something metal. Something heavy. Bereft.
Hysterical episodes are common when dealing with grief. You’re going through your day, and then suddenly lose it on a door that refuses to open or a stranger who won’t get out of the way. I thought I was serene until I knocked over a glass while trying to scoot the cat off my keyboard. As water flew everywhere and the cat darted away, I picked up a soggy book and threw it across the room. Then picked it up and threw it again . Once I could see straight I looked to see which book it was— Just Mercy . Of course it was. I burst out laughing. There I was, alone, knocking things over, flinging objects, laughing and crying at the same time.
The sorrow book told me that I was “doing the work,” though I suspected I was just having a nervous breakdown: “Grief pulls us into the underworld, where we are invited to discover a new mode of seeing, one that reveals the holiness of all things.” The intensity of grief widens the band of our emotional reality, and so for as much as we can feel sorrow we can now feel joy. Sometimes I cried all day. Some days I was deliriously happy. Other days I went from one extreme to the other in the span of an hour. The greatest joys were having breakfast and dinner with Nate and then the few days a month I went to see David or he came to see me.
“Love does not lead to an end to difficulties,” bell hooks wrote, “it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.” And yet, growing and changing did not happen in a straight line. I was trying to stay grounded and to take time to grieve and adjust to the changes. I vowed to submit to fate or to the universe or to whatever force I was now beholden to, for which I still had no good words.
And so when I got an email saying that I’d been accepted for a residency at a castle in Scotland, a fellowship that I’d forgotten I applied for, I accepted. I’d never been apart from Nate for more than two weeks, but I figured I’d have to adjust to such separation soon enough, and surely he and Paul could use some time together while I mourned. The deal I made with myself was that when I opened the first notebook in the tall stack from this time of death, divorce, and falling in love, I’d have to read them all in a row; there would be no way out but through.