An Unexpected Sign of Progress (in Vegas of all places)
It’s a long story, but I was recently in Las Vegas with a group of my oldest friends, attending a concert at the Sphere.
The trip’s rationale was more about getting our friends together than it was going to Vegas; it just so happened we wanted to go see U2 at the Sphere and one of our buddies was attending a conference, so the timing sort of made the decision for us (and yes, after recently diving headfirst into discussions of conflicting life indicators, I do need to acknowledge situations, however trivial they may be, when the circumstances do line up in my favor). It was a great reunion, something that hasn’t happened since before COVID. I also appreciate the ability to go years between visits and still be able to jump back into our old routines as if we’d seen each other yesterday. I guess that’s the benefit of life-long friendships: the strength of the relationships has a way of almost bending time.
But yet again, I got hit by unexpected reminders about Chelsea and had to do some work to process those emotions. Even longer story, but Chelsea had a history of going to Vegas with family and the only times I had ever been there were with her, so when I got to baggage claim at the airport, I had the snap realization that, ‘Oh s&*t, the last time I was here was with her.’ Complicating matters further was the fact that attending a concert at the Sphere was just the sort of event that she would have enjoyed personally and studied as a scholar of visual rhetoric; in fact, I’m fairly convinced we could have gone to a show and written the trip off as ‘research,’ given her scholarly focus on spectacle, digital humanities, and visual rhetoric. And finally…one of my friends on the trip was a person I hadn’t seen since before she died, so I had to do a little bit of work getting him up to speed on how I’ve been doing (we’ve talked over the phone and zoom, but it’s different seeing someone in person for the first time).
So all these different factors conspired to keep Chelsea present in my heart and mind most of the weekend. But I think there may have been some progress this time…
As I was talking with my friends about these emotions in real time, we got to the question of what I might consider the ideal reaction to these sorts of unanticipated triggers. After thinking about it a little, my response was, ‘I’d like to have a quiet conversation with Chelsea in my head in which I tell her I miss her and express hope that she would be happy with what I was doing in that particular moment.’
And so when I was at the Sphere, I had that internal conversation: ‘Sweetie, I miss you terribly and I wish you were here, but I’m gonna live this up with my friends and I hope that, wherever you may be in the Cosmos, we’re making you proud.’
Once again for the record, I concede that these conversations are likely coping mechanisms: I don’t believe that I’m actually talking to her, nor do I have specific beliefs about where she might be in the Cosmos, if she exists at all. But talking helps, as does thinking about her smiling at us as we watch the show; at the end of the day, I’m a pragmatist, and I ascribe to what helps.
Time will tell whether this reaction holds, and I’ve grown accustomed to the notion of two steps forward, one step back, but I can still celebrate what I’d consider to be progress in my journey. Thinking about her while I lived my new life that weekend made me smile. And I hope that, maybe somewhere out there, she’s smiling back, whatever that means.
On a completely different note…
I work at a University and we had a pretty tragic situation happen last week: one of our students passed quite suddenly in circumstances similar to Chelsea (‘natural’ causes with no advanced warning in an otherwise healthy young person). A few of my students knew this student well and are really struggling, as are significant segments of the university. I bring this story up to revisit the point that it’s hard to know what to say in moments like this, even for someone who’s been through a version of it; I’m struggling significantly to know what to say and how to talk with my students about the situation.
I struggle with which words to use, whether I should bring up what happened to Chelsea (either specifically or generally) as a way to connect with students, and how to create some space for recognizing and validating the tragedy without making it seem forced or awkward.
Of course, as I’ve discussed ad nauseam, the struggle is a positive sign that I’m probably asking the right questions. And I understand that there are no words in situations like this: language literally fails us in these moments (recall that, the title of this blog came from a colleague of Chelsea’s, also a professor of language and writing, who had the best reaction possible when Chelsea died: ‘This f*&king sucks’). Words can’t capture the powerful emotions at play in these moments, and we shouldn’t harbor any sort of guilt over our inability to find the ‘right’ words; there are no right words, as this is a structural problem with language.
So…absent the right words, all you can do is be there for folks. I have been giving some advice to people in those 2nd and 3rd circles (friends of people who were good friends with the student who passed) about just showing up, being there, and being there over time. As my mom, a pastor who has done plenty of funerals for both her family and the families of others, always likes to say: keep showing up when the casseroles stop coming, as the hardest time for the bereaved is often the afternoon after the funeral, when everyone goes home and back to their lives, but the bereaved are still stuck with the devastating loss. That’s the time to make sure you’re there with them.
I also heard about some interesting case-study research that education scholars did with university classrooms: simply acknowledging a tragic situation with students is often the most important step an instructor can take. You don’t have to make a wholesale shift to your curricula, just acknowledge what happened and support your students, and that can have a lasting impact on how they process the tragedy.
But still, tragedies like this are really hard, a reminder to do the hard work of living in the present and appreciating the positive attributes of our lives.
