Shedding

Why grief isn’t the right word for every ending.

A woman I know sat across from me and said, “Everyone tells me I’m grieving. But that’s not what this feels like.”

She had just left a twenty-year marriage. She wasn’t sad in the ways she’d expected. Her therapist had laid out the tidy stages of grief, and none of them were showing up on schedule. Some days she felt lighter than she had in years. Other days she didn’t recognize herself. There were pieces of her old life that were still fully alive in her, still humming. There were pieces that had already fallen away without her noticing.

She had the vocabulary of grief. It didn’t fit.

A language written for the dying

The stages of grief have become the closest thing we have to a national language for transition. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced them in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, in the context of terminally ill patients moving through their own approaching end. Somewhere along the way, a language developed for dying became a language we began using for living transitions. Divorce, career endings, empty nests, aging, the death of a version of ourselves we used to be.

Not that grief is wrong. Grief is real, and it fits some losses cleanly. But it isn’t the only language we have.

What John Lam reached for

I thought about the woman across from me again recently, in my conversation with John Lam for my podcast The Quiet Tension. He is a former principal dancer at Boston Ballet. John spent twenty years with the company. He was thirteen when his first male mentor, Mikko Nissinen, recognized what he could become. He was eighteen when he arrived in Boston. He was still there in his late thirties, doing hundreds of performances a year, being watched by audiences who had followed him from the beginning.

Then he stepped away.

When I asked John how he was doing with the transition, he reached for the word grieving. He used it, but with a tentative discomfort, the way someone tries on a jacket that doesn’t quite fit. He told me his grief wasn’t done. That he had needed to numb parts of himself, in order to move forward, because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to build what he was building next.

Sitting with him, another word came to me. Shedding.

Listen to the audio

He tried it on. He said, yes. That’s closer. “It’s shedding a layer of skin that no longer needs to be there, but it’s still part of me, but it no longer defines.” Those were his words, unedited, as he found them in real time.

We had found the word together, in a conversation where neither of us had it going in.

What the rattlesnake knows

As we sat with it, my mind flashed to an image. A rattlesnake.

If we zoomed in on a rattlesnake in the days before she sheds, we would see her go dull. The scales lose their shine. The eyes cloud into a milky blue as the transparent caps covering them loosen from the new eyes underneath. She stops eating. She hides. This is the vulnerable stretch, when the animal senses something is coming and is not yet through it.

Then she starts to peel. She rubs her face against a rock or a piece of bark until a small tear opens near her nose. From there, she works her way out. The old skin comes off in one long piece, inside out, like a sock. Underneath, the new skin is glossy, saturated. The diamond pattern along her back is vivid again. Each scale, with its small, keeled ridge, catches the light in a way it hadn’t in weeks.

And at the base of her tail, something has changed. A new segment has been added to the rattle. Every time she sheds, another piece is added, and the rattle lengthens. The rattle is her history. It grows longer with every letting go.

That is what shedding is. Not the loss of the self. The release of a layer that has done its work. The old skin isn’t wrong. It held her through everything she needed to be held through. What comes off is not who she was. What comes off is the surface that carried her here.

John was still a dancer. He is still a dancer. A dancer is more than the roles and the paycheck. It’s a way of being. What was falling away was the version of the dancer’s life that had been given to him: the schedule, the assigned roles, the twenty-year contract with a single institution. The essence remained. The container was being shed. And every year he had put into it was already inside him, added to something that keeps a count of who he has been.

Once you have the word

Once you have the word, you start seeing it everywhere.

The mother whose youngest child left for college, who was told, over and over, that she was grieving the empty nest. She wasn’t. She was shedding a version of her daily life that had been organized around care, and letting new experiences emerge. Some days, the new space felt like nothingness. Some days, it felt like a self she hadn’t met before.

For the losses grief doesn’t quite fit, there is another word. And somewhere, quietly, a new segment is being added to the rattle.

—

The Quiet Tension Journal Prompt

Sit with this if it fits.

Somewhere in your life there is a word someone handed you for what you’re going through. And the word doesn’t quite match the feeling.

• What word were you handed?
• What might be closer?
• What has already started growing under the old?