The Endless Season of Grief
NOTE: I’ve changed some names and details for obvious reasons.
In September 2015, Brian killed himself. He was separated from his wife. They’d been having difficulty for years, so it wasn’t surprising that he’d moved out. I always figured they’d get back together though. They had kids. They’d survived economic ups and downs, had built a business together.
Brian was a filmmaker. He was a good writer, director, and production designer, with a sharp eye for details and craftsmanship, and a great sense of dark humor. Knowing him, he had probably thought long and hard, and worked out the exact spot, from which to kill himself.
We weren’t the closest of friends. We went hot and cold. There were periods when I honestly couldn’t stand him, and I’m sure he couldn’t stand me. Our lives had some strange parallels though. We were both diagnosed with hyperactivity (now known as ADHD). As kids we’d both had creative drives, impulse control issues, and angry temperaments. I managed to mellow a little bit as I got older. Brian didn’t. I think this is because he still cared about things. Injustice infuriated him. He picked fights; I avoided them.
We both wound up becoming filmmakers because it combined our different interests, and offered us something all-consuming. We also became increasingly frustrated by the endless process of trying to finance, develop, and distribute our work. And the hustle of balancing money, time, family, career aspirations, creative goals, savings for rainy days and retirement (hah)… we both felt like Yossarian in Catch-22, always coming within a few missions of going home, only to have the mission cap raised.
In that sense, Brian and I weren’t that different from all the other artists I’ve known. Even the “successful” ones balance two or three projects at a time and often have several side hustles. That sounds like fun in your 20s, acceptable in your 30s, but as the 40s grind on it just seems like an exercise in frustration.
I think Brian may have wanted to say goodbye to all that. Or he saw the long stretch ahead of him as an endless chain of increasing pain and difficulty. Or he saw (as he often did) the ugly strands of America rising again and becoming more organized.
Brian wasn’t the first of my friends to die young. Intellectually, I can understand that his death wasn’t part of a trend, that I had simply changed stations and perceptions in life. But emotionally, it felt like the beginning of something. Some harbinger of what was to come.
I woke up a month after the funeral and suddenly felt the stretch of time since graduating college. The months since then seemed stacked like cards a mile high. What had we all achieved since then? Something, I guess. But we didn’t move the world. Memories that felt fresh were in fact years old. What I was sensing then — and I didn’t know it — was the beginning of a new season. The season of grief.
A few months after Brian died, I started getting a wave of calls and emails from my friends. Parents, siblings, relatives, mentors, and friends were dying. Heart attacks, suicides, massive strokes, overdoses, cancer, advanced Alzheimer’s. Then there were the injuries, surgeries, layoffs, financial hard times, divorces. The Little Earthquakes that shake us to pieces, as Tori Amos would have said.
And in the background was the constant hum — could this be the day? The day a cop shoots someone I know or kicks me in the head during a protest? And there was the constant stream of death that’s been going on since I was a kid, seeing people dying both far away and nearby—from our government’s evil and antipathy. Iraqis and Afghans being bombed and shot, immigrants dying in the desert, refugees drowning in the sea, black men and women beaten and shot to death by police, addicts dying from opiates…
Then two things happened at once in late 2015: my mother’s health, which hadn’t been good in a long while, suddenly took a dip for the worse with a series of problems — worsening eyesight, arthritis, infections, weight loss, and finally lung cancer. And our cat Snowball developed a mast cell tumor. Thus started a year-and-a-half merry-go-round of doctor and vet visits, surgeries, specialists, pharmacists. Weight loss, weight gain, emergency ward visits, hospitalizations, infections, new diets, new routines, paperwork, money out the door. In my mother’s case, battling her own stubbornness, depression and anger.
Meanwhile, the election heated up. Rubio, Cruz, Carson, and finally Trump demonstrated the utter callousness and disregard for human decency that we’ve come to know and expect from the GOP. And they won. My wife and I woke up the next day feeling like the Leonard Cohen song Everybody Knows:
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
The world was primed for a return to ultranationalism just at the moment we needed an international perspective. The leaders in country after country decided to sharpen their knives and throw as many people who didn’t “fit” under the bus. We lost some of the best and brightest artists that year. They must have seen what was coming, and decided to check out (Leonard Cohen among them).
My mother also chose to check out. On the last day of Obama’s term, we checked her into a hospice. She was done with the tests and chemo and opportunistic infections and being in pain. At about the same time, Snowball, who had been doing okay on a steady dose of steroids for over a year, started declining. He didn’t want to be here anymore either.
My mother died in March. We put Snowball to sleep in April. Both of them deserved more time and better health. But the world continues its mad spin, and we continue to lose the good people to violence and ill fortune. Every day I feel a little emptier.
I know it could be a lot worse. Some of my friends have gone through much worse. Some of them will never recover from what they’ve lost. My life is full of love. My wife was there for me through all of this.
It is so fitting that Twin Peaks has returned. Many people remember the show for its camp elements: the donuts, the coffee, flannel Cooper, cherry pie. What is perhaps less discussed is that the show is wrapped around death and grief. Who killed Laura Palmer, yes, but who was Laura Palmer? At first, we didn’t really know. When someone close to you dies, your heart turns into a fist wrapped around emptiness where they used to be. The grief overshadows the person you’ve lost, and it’s only later that they start to return to you, in fragments like cards in a deck.
Maybe, if any of us survive this season, we’ll find out who we really are apart from our grief, and who we lost. We’ll stand on the edge of the sea, and let them go, and heal our hearts.
