When Grief is Written All Over Your Face
We write for as many reasons as there are blends of coffee, and often a particular blend helps us write more pointedly. Neither the coffee, nor the writing, however, can dissolve grief. Writing might help, might be therapeutic, but grief wears on a person until it wears itself out, whenever that time comes.
Hamlet once complained that neither one month nor even two was enough to sate the thirst of his grief. He had, of course, every reason to complain, to be dejected, to suffer an uncommon grief. And in the end, he never truly recovered.
Hamlet is a tragedy, of course, and despite the number of times I’ve seen it performed, I know that the one thing I can never do is peer into the real Hamlet’s face. I would only want to do so, I confess, because I’d like to see what grief has done to his eyes, to the lines emanating from them. Hamlet is a very young man, but I believe grief would have taken its toll on his face.
As it has mine.
I am much older than the Hamlet persona, the college boy who was supposed to quit grieving within a month or two and welcome his mother’s hasty remarriage to his despised uncle.
Up until this fall, I haven’t felt my age, and while I don’t spend much time in front of a mirror, I never thought I looked my sixty-one years either.
Lately, though, I have seen my image and haven’t been able to look away. What I see are new lines, deeper lines, lines that age me and wear on me.
Grief lines, and I know they’ll be with me from now on. They aren’t going away despite my recovery. So since I must live with them, and see them on occasion, I choose to write about them, through them, so that they don’t overcome me.
I choose to write my grief. I hope that it helps.
A week from this coming Saturday, we will celebrate the life of our friend Owen, who passed away on October 16. One of his survivors suggested that for the gathering, we all write letters to Owen, content determined by whatever we want to say. We can read these aloud, display them for others to read, or if we are feeling too private, too filled with emotion, keep them compiled in a book to pass among us.
I want to write a letter, too, but I’ve never written to a dead person before, much less to a dead person who was an intimate of mine.
Owen’s death took us all by shock, most of all, Owen himself. From a cough that wouldn’t be suppressed in the third week of September, to an initial diagnosis of pneumonia shortly thereafter, to a C.A.T. scan on September 29 that showed a lung mass, to a bronchoscopy four days later that showed metastasis into the other lung, to death two weeks later. No one had time to register what to do, how to feel, how to prepare for life without our friend, brother, uncle, partner.
We still don’t know how to prepare.
My wife and I first met Owen at an Amnesty International meeting, our local Greenville chapter. It was our first meeting, and Owen’s, too. He sat right by my wife, which told me he had good sense, though I wondered if he was thinking of asking her out. He learned quickly that we were married, though he did ask another woman at the meeting — her first time, too — out for a drink.
My wife and I lived downtown then, in the old Davenport Apartment building. We kept running into Owen around town and soon we invited him over for a Saturday Night Live drinking party. Not long after, Owen discovered a vacancy in the Davenport and so moved in a floor above us. We all became inseparable.
The woman he asked out after that first Amnesty night, Nina, had connections to the Davenport as well. She met and started seeing another tenant, a Dutch man named Addy; all of us waved to each other on nearly a daily basis. Addy eventually opened a Dutch restaurant/bar in downtown Greenville, at the site of a former cafe named B. Mackenzie where my wife and I celebrated our anniversary once — our first since moving to Greenville. Owen and one of our other male friends, Al, and I used to go to Addy’s a couple of times a year to drink, smoke and catch up on being educated, literary males in our 30’s. Guinness was our draft of choice then. On the menu, Addy had named a food special after Nina. Back then, everything felt like family.
There are too many stories to tell about our friendship, and I am feeling overwhelmed and tired as I write these few lines. I don’t want to look in the mirror now, or for a long while, because what I see feels too haunting and sad.
The part of ending that hurts the most is knowing that I can never ask Owen a question or comment to him about a new band or new song he might like. Just today, I heard a relatively new song by LCD Soundsystem, and wished that I could have shared it with my friend. Last Saturday, when Alabama lost the Iron Bowl to Auburn, I wish I could have heard Owen’s philosophical assessment, his soothing words about how wins and losses even out over time.
This is not a win; it will never be.
I won knowing him. I lost all the years that I should have known him.
We did share many events, though: our fathers’ deaths; my daughters’ births. Thanksgivings and Christmases, and Chanukah latkes. The times his beloved Tar Heels beat Duke and won the NCAA tourney. Or when Bama defeated Notre Dame, LSU, Texas, and Clemson for its Natties.
We also shared these moments:
I was the one with him for his initial cancer diagnosis. I was also the one who was there when the oncologist discovered the metastasis, and I was the one who had to tell Owen, as he was coming out from the anesthesia and asked, “So what did they find?” that it was in both his lungs.
“That’s not good,” he said.
And, two hours before he died, I told him this:
“Owen, you know that you’re my best friend, right?”
“Yes, you’re mine too. I love your family.”
“I know you do.”
Those weren’t the last words we ever spoke. I’ll keep those others private. They’d seem anticlimactic anyway, unless you know hospitals and procedures, and the banal realities of life even when someone is dying.
I can’t say I feel better now. I can’t say that having written this, my grief has subsided or that my face has relaxed again into its normal repose.
Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe it will begin the healing, or maybe continue a healing that is occurring within, without my notice.
Maybe I will write that letter tomorrow, along with the playlist I’m supposed to compile of his favorite tunes, for our gathering.
What I do know is that if it weren’t for writing through these terrible episodes of life, love, and friendship, I’m not sure what I would have. How I would cope.
I’ve heard that it’s the process, the journey, that is most important.
Owen and I, we’re both on our journey still, even if we can’t hear each other’s voices any longer. But that’s no reason to stop.
For Owen was a writer, too. And above all else, he knew a good story.
Indeed, he lived it.
