Falafel that Broke the Camel’s Back
Have you ever cried eating falafels in public?
How did “it” follow me all the way here?
“Here” also known as “I’m 9,000 miles away from where it all happened.”
In May, I spent a few weeks in George Town, Penang, Malaysia where the street food and hawker centers are a chef’s kiss; where many endearing and meaningful art line the streets; and where a mish-mash of culture and history meets.
In my early days in George Town, I made a friend that I instantly gravitated towards likely due to the similarity in age. After all, we were mainly in the company of early to mid-20-something-year-olds who were bright-eyed, curious, lacked frownies, and certainly not on a sabbatical due to career burnouts and sorting out messes and unfinished “stuff” from life circumstances.
On a rather mild, but humid night, we sat down for a meal at my favorite falafel joint on Chulia Street. Truly, it was the best falafel I had tasted in Southeast Asia (coming from a Korean who is an American, you can certainly take this with a grain of salt).
Somewhere between enjoying our falafels and talking about our sabbaticals and lives before, the inevitable came up: my grief. As I began to recall the details of my beloved late husband Nickolas, like it was yesterday, I felt the ever-familiar lump in my throat and my tears streaming down my cheeks.
Grief didn’t care that I was in public.
Grief didn’t care that I was enjoying falafels.
Grief didn’t care that it’s been nine years and that, I was 9,000 miles away from it all.
At that moment, there was no fighting back tears or kicking and screaming in protest that grief was, once again, sweeping me away. The best part was that there was no apology for the very public display of vulnerability.
Instead, I sat paused; and ever-so-quietly and physically still surrendered to the mercy of grief.
It came, did what it needed to do, and disappeared without a trace.
After all these years…my grief, more times than not, has become fleeting, transitory.
What felt like hours, in reality, were minutes. In those moments of grief, I am viscerally somewhere else. And, when grief’s fleeting moment passed, life resumed as if someone pressed play. My tears were dry and I was back to enjoying my falafel.
To think there used to be a time when it wasn’t so fleeting but all-encompassing, but that’s for another day.
Epilogue
Late 2015
I wanted to run away, honestly.
I wanted to run away from it all: the intense grieving (I swear, it almost destroyed me on the inside), the endless crying…waking up every day, and repeating this nightmare again and again and again.
I thought, maybe, by running away, I could leave it all behind; move on; “get over it”; start anew, and help me forget the man I loved and the future we once spoke of.
The emotional pain was truly, unspeakable and unbearable and uncomfortable.
Without a plan, I was pretty firm and sold on leaving, except, my dear friend Kyle asked me to reconsider and to work through it instead.
Why…?
He said with much conviction and love that “it” would follow me wherever I went.
This. This became one of the defining moments in my grief journey and applied to all the lessons that followed. Nine years later in a place so far from where it all happened, “it” was there just like Kyle said it would be (and countless places before this).
Except my grief changed; and I, too, have changed, evolved, and grown exponentially.
Still today, I revisit this conversation now and again with much gratitude and fondness with a breath of relief that I never ran instead I sat with my grief, my loss, my heartache patiently tending to all the wounds as best I knew how at the time. And trust me, it wasn’t a perfect or an easy process; and certainly not for the faint of heart.
Some of it is still a blur, but somehow, I survived it and reached a point of thriving. The relief…
Thank goodness for Kyle.
Thank goodness for the people who have our best interests at heart. x