Letters, and stars, and pieces of stories
I’ve been writing more than I ever have this summer, and more hesitant to share it than I ever have been. My best friend died five years ago next week and that feels big for two reasons:
- Five years is a lot of time. After the first anniversary, the fifth is the next “milestone”. So there’s that aspect, probably the most intuitive.
- I did not feel like a very different person after that first milestone, but I feel very different now. Some of that is made up of the ways that I’ve experienced loss since then. Some of that is made up of the ways that I’ve experienced joy since then. A pretty staggering realization, though, has been that most of that is just time. I’ve experienced the happiest and saddest days of my life without Jeff, and somehow the more important piece has been all of the days in between — I’ve reached a point where the magnitude of the number of days matters more than the height of the peaks and the depth of the valleys. What matters now is how far away I am from him; every day, I only get farther.
So I’m writing an essay about the ways that I think he wouldn’t recognize me if we met now. I’ve been writing it for weeks and it feels like a whopper. I’m writing about the ways I’d have to re-introduce and re-explain myself to him, if we met now. I’m writing about the really deeply profound ways that I’m proud of myself, in a way I never have been, when I think about what it would be like to sit down together in a pair of armchairs and say to him: the last five years, the ones that were taken from you — they weren’t taken from me. This is what I did with them. Parts of them were sad — so sad that I thought I might not survive. I survived anyway. This is what I did with it all. I loved the things I’ve lost so much that I didn’t let their loss stop me. I kept going. I’m still going. This is what I did with it all: I kept going, anyway.
It all feels quite profound, and transformative. It feels powerful and reclaiming to think about death and to write, in the face of everything inside you that insists that you write only about sadness, instead about the ways that the intervening distance makes you proud. And even as I know all this, I’m thinking: this essay isn’t an essay I want to share.
Why?
Because there’s a deep, real part of me that just wants to be done writing about loss.
And of course, at the end of it all, that’s a little silly — because really what I mean when I say I want to be done writing about loss is that I want to be done living through loss. I want to stop sitting down at my kitchen table to get all my thoughts onto a page and then look down half an hour later to realize that I’ve written a great many words about… being very sad.
But I am very sad, sometimes. And often I seem not to have very much control over that. And even when I’m not sad — even when I’m proud — I’m still shaped by the loss. Ghosts are always ghosts, I’m learning, whether they make us cry or not.
[image description: A hand-drawn letter “R” maps to individual pieces of shapes that make up an “R”; a hand-drawn letter “B” maps to those same shapes. A hand-written caption reads: “Is this helpful? Who knows. We can be lots of things w/ the parts of us that make us up. THAT is helpful. At least, to me.”]
I’ve been writing my whole life, but only ever as a sort of coping mechanism to make sense of the world. The first thing I ever published for broader consumption was an essay about losing my first pregnancy, and at the end of the day, I did it because I really needed people to stop asking me when I was going to have a baby. There were altruistic reasons, too, but it truly was mostly practical: this way I could at least be dismissive in good conscience to people who by all rights should have known better. After that, I kept publishing the things I wrote about grief that felt particularly nascent because every time I’ve done so, people have reached out privately to thank me. I’m going to be writing it anyway, is my thought process. We might as well all get some broader utility out of it.
And yet: I’ve always abstractly wanted to be a writer (in the way that someone who journals 500 words a day, every day, without ever making any effort to create a unifying narrative does, anyway), but never “like this”. When I first started writing about grief, it was important to me that I wasn’t a grief writer — that people knew there was more to me than just that. So: fine. I’ll publish a few articles about being sad and then we will all return to our previously scheduled programming. Whatever that is.
But then I realized — I am a grief writer. I just am, by simple virtue of being someone who writes and someone who grieves. And when have I ever worried about being a thing and in doing so being only that thing? Why, of all the things I’ve ever been (funny, loving, curious, ambitious), is “grieving” the thing that I am worried will swallow me up to the rest of the world and zip me up into a narrow space? Why am I worried that the world will see the sentence I loved some things so hard and so well that it hurt when I lost them and attach the most meaning to it hurt?
And even if that is what the world saw — so what? Isn’t what matters that I can see the ways that grief makes up a single point (maybe a very bright one, maybe sometimes even the brightest one) in a larger constellation of self? Polaris, the anchor star, helps comprise Ursa Minor. Sirius, the brightest star, helps comprise Canis Major. Neither of them dim the stars around them with their brightness or their significance.
(If I am coming through here as “very frustrated” then I am getting better at “writerly voice”. If I am coming through here as “curious” then I suppose I am getting better at “composure”. Both things serve me, but here, I would like you to know: I am wildly frustrated by this, because I think it means that I am still afraid of my own emotions. And here, the emotions are so big that I think that we can shorthand that to I am still afraid of my own self, or at least, what lurks in the corners and in the deep parts. Figure 1 above is a photo of my journal from when I first started wrestling with this: the parts making up a system are 1) completely valid in their own right and 2) completely insufficient to define a whole.)
The stars know what they are. The stars don’t wait for approval or instruction. We look up at them and we draw our maps and steer our ships by them because they aren’t afraid or self-conscious of their patterns — where they’re bright, where they’re dim, where they’re explicit and where they rely on others to fill in their gaps, to turn them into a bear, or a dog.
So here’s the thing: I’m gonna finish this essay about what it’s been like to lose my friend Jeff, five years out, and then I’m probably gonna get really afraid of sharing it and then I’m gonna share it anyway so you can read it if you want to. It contains some of my very favorite parts of myself, and I want you to have it. I’m done being afraid of it because of where it came from. He would have loved it.
I think about Whitman’s enduring words all the time: I am large — I contain multitudes. I wrote about them very often when I was first learning how to contain everything that Jeff’s death, and later the loss of my first pregnancy, ignited in me. What I am learning now is that it serves no one to filter out these multitudes — not least because when I am deep in the heart of the grief work, I am not a wise filter. A blind navigator, an unreliable narrator.
I’ve known that about myself for some time, but what I did not know until quite recently is that part (most?) of what is tricky about loss, many years on, is that it’s sneaky and insidious. It isn’t linear, which means that sometimes showing up “deep in the heart of the grief work” has caught me off-guard. Its multitudes include the sort of melancholy that’s hard to put a finger on, and the sort of rage that’s hard to tear my heart away from.
It took me a long time to recognize loss in rainy Tuesday mornings where I wake up and I feel like crying and I can’t understand why until a Dashboard Confessional song comes on the radio and I get so goddamn tired of these mental gymnastics and then it occurs to me, in one big rush, how goddamn angry I am over having to perform them in the first place. Oh, hello, you say, thinking about how hard the first day was and wondering whether maybe what you thought was getting easier has actually just been the hard stuff changing shape. You’re loss, too, aren’t you?
Getting startled by anger, five years on, is what the grief work has looked like for me lately — and I’ve put a lot of work into not processing this publicly until I did a little detangling, because I was so afraid of anger for such a long time. I was afraid of anger at first, on the other side of the big black line demarking exactly when I began to understand permanence, because there was some small unacknowledged part of me that survived by thinking that somewhere, somehow, Jeff could hear me. Everything: the missing, the bargaining. The sadness. The love. And so it felt really important to me that, if he really could hear me somewhere, anger didn’t make the list.
I was afraid of anger, later, because it represented an unchanging alteration to who I am. Our relationship is frozen in time, I reasoned, and so is his death. Two immovable forces — and because of our relationship, and his death, I am angry. How can that not edit the tapestry of my self? And if something as fundamental as my own self is edited in ways I don’t want, by an event I would never have asked for, then how is the world a fundamentally fair place to live? How can I acknowledge these two things and not give myself over into letting the rage and the desperation and the heart-pounding become a part of who I am?
I don’t know the answer, still, and I suppose in the end it doesn’t matter, for all the same reasons that the stars don’t wait for approval or instruction; in the end, I suppose, the constellations still shine, independently of how well we understand their histories. And I do know some things. I know, for example, that I am a person who drives into work on some rainy Tuesday mornings crying a little with all the blind rage I have over everything I’ve lost. And yet: I also know there was a long time where I denied that rage and I know that it felt good to have it back; I know that I am a person who welcomed back the anger after coming through the other side. I buttoned it down for so long and when it came back to me shrieking god damn it and beating its fists against my bedsheets I breathed it in, and when it passed again I understood how it feels to let something terrifying go, rather than to chase it away — and how it feels to re-understand power, in this sense, as the ability to watch the stars come, and go, and come, and go. When the anger came back, I breathed in the power of having been able to let it go, even temporarily, and I murmured: welcome back. I missed you. And isn’t it funny: what, in this world, we lose for good, and what, in this world, we embrace when it finally returns to us?
This anger has been the hardest part of the constellation to love, but it’s a part of me. I’ve been waiting for years for it to fade. It’s not going to. This lives in me too. This, too, in the midst of everything else. In the midst of the joy, the hard work, the growth: this, too. For so many years I have tried to reshape it or deny it or move through it and the entire endeavor has left me feeling powerless, without ever quite being able to understand why.
I am learning that power makes a number of homes in me, and none of them come from reshaping or denying. One of the places this power lives is the ability to point at a sharp, angry, bitter thing that I hoped would have been sanded down by now, and to watch its jaws snapping and raging against the world, and to want to move past it and to highlight the soft good kind things about me — but to instead stand up straight and say, instead: this, sometimes, too.
No, better: this, always, too. And even as I introduce this sharp angry bitter thing, none of the other shapes get dimmer. Everything else stays lit.
This has been a very long-winded way to say that I am probably going to keep writing essays. Because there’s another important piece here, too. Unlike the night sky, the world can’t look up at us and make out all the constellations unless we help them, because our stars aren’t always apparent to others. I mentioned when I was reflecting on writing my first essay: “Nobody knows about my baby unless I tell them. And it has been so hard to tell them.” There’s this part of me that finds it really important that when people look at me and see what I hope they see (a kind, happy person who likes to read and work hard and make other people laugh, and who tries my best to make the world better in ways that are smart and sustainable), that they see someone who is doing that around having sometimes been quite sad, or quite angry — someone who is doing that anyway. Because I can tell you: the most powerful thing anyone could have told me during the hardest parts isn’t that I was going to be all right, or that I was going to survive, but that someday, I was gonna be back in it. For real. Someday I was going to be writing things for other people again. Someday I was going to be writing essays that get comments like “this is an excellent and incisive interpretation of the text” again. Someday I was going to be remembering other people’s birthdays and sending cards again. And it wouldn’t just be agains! There would be a return, but then there would be even more; I’d make it back to where I started and then keep going. Someday I would think about going back to school. Someday I would get a dog, get married, plant a garden.
I don’t believe we owe anybody our stories but I also know how people think of me. I know they think of me as someone who balances a lot of things. They think of me as someone with a lot of resilience and a lot of reserves. I know they think of me as someone who is smart and kind at the same time.
I want you to think those things. When I am at my best, they are true. Importantly, I want you to add another point, too: sometimes I am really goddamn sad. I’ve been waiting years for the time that the sadness goes away completely and I think at this point it’s safe to say it’s not going to happen. I had to take a day off work a few months ago because I — having never once had a dream about Jeff since he died, and not for lack of trying — had a dream that I walked into my bedroom and he was holding my baby. (I cried typing that sentence.) It’s the saddest thought I’ve ever had: everything I’ve lost, all neatly wrapped up in one image. I woke up thinking I was going to make it to work and then I cried throughout my entire shower and I thought: nope. Not today.
Tomorrow, though. The next day I went to work and a student told me that they were glad to have known me. I came home and I had an hour-long conversation with a friend I’ve known for years and at the end of it they said the same thing. Later that night I turned in an essay that got a 96/100, marked by a hard grader. So: let it never be said that grief isn’t a star of mine, or that by sharing a body with that grief, the other stars have dimmed.
I am a grief writer by virtue of being a person who writes about their own life that has experienced grief. In being so I am also a joy writer, a hard-work writer, a growth writer, a love writer. Those other things are easier to show and they make more sense coming out of me, so I have gone out of my way to write about the loss. In the same way, I think it’s easier to make sense of grief reactions immediately following the loss — but Jeff died five years ago next week, and I can tell you that those seven words still absolutely function as a very bright point in the map of my life. They probably always will. I’ve been afraid to write “too much” about the ways my life has been shaped by loss, but I’ve been slowly realizing, this summer, that I don’t like that fear. And this is another place power lives: I don’t like that fear, and I get to decide what dismantling it looks like.
More simply, and maybe most importantly, I like my life. I like who I am. I like what I’ve fought to carry out of loss. Enough to honor it, by writing it down and giving it to others? Yes, I hope so. Yes. Let’s begin.
