I’ve been traveling a lot this summer — hence my inconsistency when it comes to posting. Generally the travel has gone well, and visits with friends and family have been wonderful. Whether in personal settings or professional ones, I have felt valued and loved, seen and supported. I can’t ask for more.
I am still on the same journey I have been on for the better part of a year. Grief, I am learning, doesn’t ever go away. It changes, it eases and spikes and eases again, it becomes part of us, redefining who we are and how we interact with the world, with the people in our lives, with ourselves.
Months ago, I wrote that I would not wish to stop grieving. We grieve because we loved and because we remember. Grief is how our hearts and minds remain connected to those we have lost. I continue to believe this.
I am no stranger to grief; I’ve dealt with more loss in my life than I would have liked. We lost my mother and father when I was still in my early 30s. We lost my brother Bill far too early. And, of course, we lost Alex — the cruelest cut of all. In the past, I fought my grief, trying to hold it at arm’s length, fearing that to embrace it would be to surrender. The thought of that surrender terrified me. What if I couldn’t pull myself out of my sadness? What if the loss overwhelmed me?
This time around, I didn’t have a choice. The loss was too great, the pain too consuming. Had I not surrendered to it, I would have broken in half, like a tree trunk snapped off by a straight-line wind. Yes, there is an echo here of Aesop’s fable, “The Oak and the Reed.” A better analogy for my purpose is standing in the surf. I’ve never been a confident swimmer, and I used to hate swimming in the ocean because I would try to stand against the force of breakers. Only when I learned to body surf and to dive through waves did I start to love going to the shore. It was a lesson the girls picked up on quickly, and some of my fondest memories are of swimming with Nancy, Alex, and Erin during our annual beach vacations.
Grief is a huge wave. Only when I allowed it to wash over me and carry me where it would, did I come to understand that I could surrender to it without drowning.
Something else I’ve learned about grief — and another analogy to explain it: Our emotions have needs, just as our bodies do. And often we have to listen to our thoughts and feelings to understand what those needs might be. You know that feeling when you’re suddenly hungry for something very specific — a piece of fruit, or some meat or cheese, or a savory snack. That is our body’s way of telling us that it needs a certain type of nutrition — sugar, protein, salt. We learn to trust those cravings and to cater to them.
My emotions, and perhaps yours as well, work much the same way. There are days when I need to be with other people. There are days when I want to be alone. There are days when I crave work and others when writing and editing are the last things I want to do. One day I wanted to get a tattoo. Another day — Alex’s birthday, actually — I needed to hike and birdwatch on my own. I walked eleven miles that day. I have learned to listen to my grief, to honor it, to let it guide me through the roughest days.
So, how am I doing? I’m asked that a lot. Still. I don’t mind at all. I understand that the question comes from concern and from love. And the truth is, nine months on from the hardest, worst, most brutal thing that has ever happened in my life, I am all right. I won’t say I’m doing great. I don’t think you’d believe me if I did. But I am living my life, savoring time with the people I love most, doing the little things that I enjoy and from which I draw strength and peace. I have bad days, of course. But I get through them. And I’m finding there are fewer of them now than there were in the fall and winter.
It occurs to me as I write this that I have been listening to some new music lately. New to me, I should say. The lyrics aren’t particularly deep and the musicianship isn’t all that flashy. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of peanut butter and pretzels — a bit of protein, more substance than, say, gummy worms. But no one would confuse it for gourmet fare. It matches my mood in a way. I am not ready to go back to the tunes from which I have usually drawn emotional comfort. There is too much baggage in that music. Too much pain. Too many associations. And so these new songs are what I’m using to get through right now.
One last analogy to explain where I am with my grief at this point in time.
Thanks for reading. Have a great week.
Our girls LOVED Sewanee Fourth of July when they were young. We would give them a bit of cash, help them meet up with friends, and then pretty much say goodbye to them for the day. It’s a small, safe, friendly town, and we never worried about them. They always found us eventually, sunburned and sweaty, their faces covered in face-paint, their pockets stuffed with candy that was thrown to kids by the parade participants. We’d go home, have a nap and some dinner, not that any of us was very hungry, and then, after covering ourselves with bug spray, would make our way to the fireworks venue.
Somewhere along the way, as her battle went on, Alex decided she wanted to have the image of those blooms tattooed on her arm. She turned to a friend from NYU who had become an accomplished tattoo artist. This friend, Ally Zhou, specializes in fine line work, and was the ideal person to render the precise details of the dried bouquet. The result was a gorgeous tattoo that Alex bore proudly for the rest of her too-short life.
I know there are many of you reading this for whom a small tattoo is no big deal. You have sleeves or extensive back pieces or whatever. I think that’s great. But as I say, this was something Nancy and I had never intended to do. It felt momentous, like a ritual of sorts, a way of alchemizing our grief into something physical and shared and public, something that links us to one another and to Alex. I love my new tattoo, for what it means as well as for how it looks.
We had lived together for two years before our wedding, and we were both in our late twenties. We had known almost from the day we started dating that we would spend the rest of our lives together, and by the time that weekend rolled around, we felt ready for the responsibilities and challenges of marriage. And we were. And still, we had no idea.
The clichés are true. Of course marriage is about love, about passion, and — even more — about friendship. But it is also about compromise, about joining two lives and finding the balance necessary to make certain that each of those lives feels complete and fulfilling, even as together we build a third life that belongs to both of us. It is a complicated undertaking. And while love and passion are great, there are times when they feel elusive. The kids are sick and you both have work deadlines and the shopping needs to get done. Or one job is more demanding than usual and it’s all you both can do just to get one kid to soccer practice and the other to ballet while also taking care of dinner and arranging the babysitter for the Friday event in town. Work, balance, compromise, sacrifice — sometimes, it feels like that’s all there is. Those early days of the romance, when everything was laughter and love and sex and adventure, seem so very, very distant.
2. Have faith. I’m not talking about religious faith here (though if that’s your thing, great). I mean faith in each other and in what you share. That belief in the fundamental power of our bond has gotten us past some really hard times. The love might not always be palpable, but we KNOW it’s there, and that certainty gets us through.
Yes, another post about our daughter and our loss. A part of me shies from this, wonders if I have written about her too much. “Write something upbeat,” I tell myself. “Something funny, something — anything — that isn’t about grief.” But we are grieving. Still. It’s been six months since we lost Alex. A bit more, actually. It seems like so long. It seems like nothing. And that is what my therapist tells me — that really six months is nothing. We remain at the very outset of a long journey, one that will be part of our daily existence for the rest of our lives.
Today, Alex would have — should have — turned 29 years old.
It has now been nearly five months since we lost Alex. I still get the same question — and to be clear, I don’t mind being asked. Not at all. It’s just that I still don’t know how to answer. My friends tell me that five months is nothing, that there is no reason I should have a handle on my emotions already. My therapist says the same. I suppose I should listen to all of them. But I grow impatient with myself. I make my living with words and with emotions. The core of my art is conveying the emotional state of my point of view characters. It’s practically the definition of what a fiction writer does.
My mother would be 102 years old today, which speaks to a) how very old I am, and b) how uncommonly old she was when she and my father had me. I was born at the end of the Baby Boom, when most couples in their early-forties were done having children. Mom always worried that she would be too old to be a good mother to me, whatever that might have meant. She shouldn’t have worried. She was a wonderful mother — caring, involved, just intrusive enough to make me feel loved without being so intrusive that I felt smothered.
Within moments, I was gliding over lush rain forest, surrounded by a ghostly mist, utterly alone, and, it seemed, in a cocoon of sensation — birds called from the green below me, the air was redolent with the sweet scents of rain and earth and forest decay, mist cooled my face, the green of the damp foliage was so brilliant as to appear unreal. Time fell away. Yes, I was moving. But to this day, I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to float through that segment of the course. It could have been mere seconds. It could have been hours. It didn’t matter. For the purposes of that experience, time meant nothing to me. I had escaped the tyranny of clocks and calendars.
Today is the 22nd of January. It’s been exactly three months since our older daughter passed away.