John's Grieving

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

Two years of deep, barely functional grieving for the person you chose to make the center of your life?

That’s not weird.

John’s grief, and the intensity of it, the level to which it has eaten him, for me is the single strongest indicator of not just the depth of his feelings, but the reality of him and Sherlock sharing a committed relationship before Sherlock’s ‘death.’

Here’s the thing.  Losing a spouse—or a…significant other, because whatever else Sherlock might be to John, he is that—is not like losing anyone else in your adult life, except perhaps a child.

Everything is woven together with this person.  Your whole life.  Your living arrangements.  Your social circles.  Your finances (John and Sherlock are both making a significant part of their living from Sherlock’s work).  Not to mention your needs.  I’m not talking co-dependency here (although that could be another issue at hand), but you have this one person at your back, always.  This one person who has made your battles their battles, and vice versa.  A person you turn to when life gets heavy, and when you want to share something wonderful, and when you just don’t want to be alone.  A person for whom you have reshaped your life to create a space for them, made choices that made allowances for them, woven your life goals, career goals, economic goals with theirs.

When you lose that person, you lose all of that.  Everything.  Your life turns to sand under your feet.  I’ve seen it happen to people I’m close to.  It’s not just that they’re grieving and looking for something stable they can move forward from.  It’s that there is nothing stable left.  They’re trying to figure out how to schedule their life with one set of hands and make financial ends meet with one paycheck and reconfigure their own expectations and how to turn the path they had been on into one that gets them to a whole new place—and where the hell that even is.  All while grieving, aching in the space someone used to occupy at their shoulder.

John lost everything when he lost Sherlock.  Had to decide whether to live with his ghost in a place they had loved or go somewhere new.  Had to decide whether he had the strength to fight to redefine his relationships with the people who had been their friends but were now only his friends—or whether that hurt too much and he couldn’t even bear to try.  Had to go back to a job that…hell, we don’t know whether he’d been working except as Sherlock’s assistant.  He might have been a year out of practice and had to throw himself back into medicine with a gap in his resume.  Had to live in a London that no longer included Sherlock.

It’s not a surprise that meeting Mary is what got his feet back under him.  She must have seemed like the first stable thing, the first possibly meaningful thing he’d found in his life since Sherlock.  The first thing he had touched that didn’t hurt with the memory of Sherlock’s touch having been there.

It’s no wonder he moved so quickly with the engagement.  God knows how strongly he really felt about her vs. the fact that being with her meant he could breathe again, meant he wasn’t feeling his life eroding under him like a muddy bank every time he tried to take a step.