Closure is a Little Harder Than Laying Down a Rock…

My goal for this Medium writing project has always been to paint an honest, accurate picture of what it’s like for one human with a particular life story to move through the process of grieving and rebuilding.

Part of the writing process entails being transparent about the really difficult and personal struggles associated with loss. Part of the process means representing my optimism about the world (yes, even after everything that happened, I remain a glass half-full person). But part of the process also means focusing on the every-day minutiae associated with the journey. While we tend to underplay the significance of every day minutiae at the expense of singular, definitional moments, I’ve found that a lot of living/learning/growing takes place during these small, everyday moments in which we have to apply big principles to specific situations (and then keep doing it the next day).

My late step-father was an exemplar for this latter point. He dealt with a terminal diagnosis the last five years of his life, and he once told me that his life philosophy was simple: just keep walking forward every day, one step at a time. Easy to say, really hard to do in practice, which involved a lot of every day moments in which he had to summon the will to keep taking those steps (both literally and metaphorically). He was one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, and he ended his life giving me a road map for how to recover from Chelsea’s passing: one step at a time, one day at a time, always forward.

I bring this up because I wanted to revisit what I wrote last time, part of which seemed tailor-made for a Hollywood script (you know, with the whole mountains of Switzerland and laying down my anger a la Camino de Santiago; I can just hear the symphonic score in my head revving up as I prepare to lay down my rock). If the movie had ended, my anger would have been vanquished when the rock hit the ground and I would have returned home free of my rage at Chelsea’s passing. But of course, life isn’t a movie, and resolving my rage is complicated, so I wanted to explore what it’s been like in the last few weeks, trying to apply this principle of ‘laying down my anger’ to the lived experience of every day moments. As it turns out, resolving my anger is more complicated than laying down a rock.

To recap: anger has been a tricky emotion for me since Chelsea’s passing. I knew I was angry (for very obvious reasons), but the anger was hardly ever present in my emotional field of view. It was more subtle, manifesting in strange places.

The best explanation I could muster was that I needed a ‘parking lot’ for my anger, and it turned out that the places to park my anger were in emotional spaces where I had pre-existing anger issues. When Chelsea died, I was already dealing with a few people/issues/places with which I had unresolved anger, so my anger about Chelsea flowed into those pre-existing spaces and ratcheted up the emotional intensity. Overnight, my anger went from a 2 to a 12 on the emotional richter scale, and I would get much angrier about those issues than I had before. I was aware that my reaction was really about Chelsea (in the spirit of, ‘it’s never the thing, it’s the thing the thing represents’), but that didn’t stop me from being really pissed off about those people/places/issues in the moment.

In the weeks since my Switzerland trip, I’ve encountered a few situations related to my anger parking lots, which presented a great opportunity to examine how I might apply the big idea of ‘laying down my anger’ to situational, every day moments like these.

On balance, I think the Switzerland trip helped: it hasn’t extinguished my anger entirely, but setting the intention of ‘laying down my anger’ gives me a mental framework for how to think about my anger when it comes up in real time. I guess you could argue that I’ve already got a framework for thinking about my anger (b/c I knew I wasn’t really mad at the thing, I was mad about Chelsea dying), but the act of laying down the rock is a positive action I took to set my intention, and thinking about that action in the context of an anger trigger seems to have helped.

For example: I’ve been in a professional state of flux/uncertainty for about 10 years now, which is part of the reason I was a stay-at-home father with my daughter E (call it a blessing and a curse). I was struggling with this before Chelsea died, but her death leveled my anger up.

So about a week ago, I found out about a professional opportunity related to my old career trajectory that, had Chelsea still been alive, I may have been in a position to pursue. But of course she’s not alive and I’m in this state of professional limbo, which pissed me off because the opportunity was very exciting. Pre-Switzerland, I probably would have stayed mad for a while and stewed on my anger; now, I told myself, ‘you’ve laid it down, so it’s time to stop being pissed off about what happened,’ and that thought seemed to help. Again, the anger is still there, but I’m closer to a 2 on the richter scale than a 12, which is where I was before Chelsea passed.

I’ve had one or two similar situations in the last few weeks, with similar results. Each moment requires some intentional work, both an awareness of why I’m upset and manual recall of my intention to lay that anger down and move forward, but that work seems to take the edge off these familiar anger triggers. Perhaps in time, my reaction to these triggers will become more automatic and I’ll be back to where I was in 2019.

For now, I’ll keep doing the work, which is a nice reminder/callback to who Chelsea was as a person and how she lived her life: every day is an opportunity to become a better human, but you’ve got to do the work and be intentional about your efforts to improve.