I haven’t written about my recent life, partly out of avoidance, mostly because the wounds were too fresh. I’ve lost three of the most important people in my life and it hurt a lot, more than I could prepare myself for. I’m writing this to draw a line in the sand for myself, to encourage a formal transition out of active grief and into what I intend to be a generative period. I’d also like to think by sharing my feelings, it might be of some small help to others.
Background
Years ago, I got into a journey related to death, triggered by my reading the philosopher Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life”. It made clear the importance of having a relationship with death, to improve your appreciation of life. Or, put another way, you have to take death seriously to take life seriously. I found this exploration profoundly helpful, I finished a novel I’d dragged my feet on, and a few more after that. I mention this just to be clear that when I lost my loved ones, it wasn’t in a vacuum, and it also proved that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Another important thing to bear in mind is that I didn’t have complicated relationships with those I lost, all the complexity was lost with my youth, I just loved them. On one level this was a blessing – I know so many haunted by important words unsaid, old wounds open compounding their grief – for me there was just unambiguous loss.
Loss
My Father died December 31, 2017.
I lost him a piece at a time, it seemed every couple of months he was 5% less “him”. He suffered physical and medical indignities. His memory failed him to the point that he couldn’t trust himself to drive for fear of forgetting how to get home. He experienced spectacular hallucinations in the hospital, he would describe them to me as they happened, wondering why I couldn’t see them. We spent a lot of time in the hospital. They cut him and gave him a colostomy, something he never fully grasped. He spent time in the nursing facility, Maple Grove, across the street from his home. They reversed the colostomy and a week or so later, just as my sister and I left to get batteries for my mother’s hearing aid, he died, we hadn’t made it to the car.
My Mother died January 28, 2019.
My mother and I had spent the year following my Father’s death trying to create a “new normal”. She was fiercely strong, but there’s no way to calculate the loss of your one true love and partner of sixty-five years. We continued our weekly ritual of movie and a meal, and she did her best to create a life alone – running her “Women’s Out to Lunch” group, creating the make-up for the theater troupe, and socializing with friends. But she had one overriding mission, and that was to ensure that my Father’s interment at Arlington Cemetery was a perfect remembrance. She put her all into every facet of the event, coordinating a celebration of life at their home in Ashby Ponds, a smaller party for close friends, and the reception at the (formerly) Ft. Myer offices club. In the late fall her back was giving her wicked pain, in early December I missed a call from Mom (I thought she was having computer problems, and I’d call her the next day), she was in the hospital. It was stage 4 cancer, she was a month away from Dad’s funeral. She muscled through to January 3, and was the elegant and charming host she had always been. 25 days later she too was dead.
My Brother Charlie died July 3, 2019.
The call from my Sister Susan was abrupt, “Charlie’s dead, I don’t have any details.” Later we learned that he’d awakened with pain in his chest, had called an ambulance, and had died in the hospital not long after arriving. We’d spent a lot of time together during Mom’s quick decent, he was the same massive spirit he’d always been, full of life and full of a powerful desire for more life. Due mostly to the ten-year difference in our ages, and the fact that he’d chosen to make Colorado his home when I was 8, we weren’t as close as I would have liked. But he’d always been my big brother, and I loved him fiercely. I’d always looked forward to the time we could spend more time together and learn of the things we’d missed.
Through all of this time there were moments of grace, insights into how fragile what we think of as life is. How what we think of as “us” can be ripped from us either piece-by-piece, or in a violent moment. And that in the end, all we have are our experiences, and that those too will vanish.
My sister Karen summed it up perfectly, “we were always eight, and now we’re five”. The eight seemed permanent until it wasn’t, and the child part of me never believed it would happen.
Grief
Looking back, I’d characterize my emotional state as a kind of rolling grief, something running under the surface but kept in check by my need to be present for my family. It wasn’t until my Brother’s death that I fully submerged in the loss. The Buddha has it right, “the origin of suffering is attachment” – knowing this, and doing something about it are significantly different things. My experience of grief didn’t have the trapping of great sadness or tears, it was more subtle, but no less destabilizing. I’ve tried to describe it many times and come up short, my best take is that my relationship to the future was forcibly severed. And if you don’t have a sense of the future, the present loses all meaning. I found that I had no interest, no curiosity, no “zest”. Without intention, I’d become a nihilist, never having considered how that would feel. It feels bad. I’m sure it was also garden variety depression, but the important takeaway was I couldn’t “snap out of it”, it was something I had to ride. I allowed myself to exist in this state without resistance, and without judgement. It felt natural, and it also felt temporary, and fighting it seemed foolish.
I don’t think we “get over” loss, we just add it to our experience of life, just like all of the victories we have. Death is as ever-present as breathing, and we harm ourselves when we pretend it isn’t. And that’s where the attachment thing comes in, like children we don’t want to lose the things we love, while knowing it’s inevitable. I tried not to wallow in my grief, but I didn’t disrespect it either.
I left my job on August 1, my head was not in the game and I couldn’t give it my best. My memory was shot, I later learned that’s a common effect of depression, but that didn’t make it less disturbing. I tried to muscle through, but that whole “disconnected from the future” thing made sticking it out seem silly. I also had the intuition that being able to focus full-time on the situation was the right thing to do. Flashes of memory would pull me down like a riptide, then fade, and in fading create a new sadness. The sadness of loss. I felt the wound, but could see the scabbing at the edges, it would scar but it would seal.
Recovery
Being arrogant (and kind of stupid), I tried to manufacture some “turning points” to get myself out of depression too early. They didn’t feel like setbacks, just childish attempts to short-circuit the grieving process and spare myself the pain. Having lost touch with the future, the goals I set felt sarcastic, like an echo from a time when I believed in their power.
We all have our talismans to ward off the hopelessness of death bound life, for some it’s the ancient magic stories, for me it’s just living a life I choose (harder than it sounds). The full title of Seneca’s book is “On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It”, and the simplified lesson is that meaning isn’t supplied, you have to create it and decide to live it. Life (duration and quality) isn’t what you want it to be, it’s whatever it’s going to be – the only part you play is how you use what you’ve got. Sooner or later you’re going to be “hit by a bus”, either literally or figuratively, and it’s that moment, the split second when you know it’s over where you’ll know if you lived life well. The price to pay so that you aren’t overwhelmed with grief, regret and acute loss is deciding what you do with the life you have. The technique I’ve adopted is that of goal setting, simply saying what you’re going to do then seeing if you do it. One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is there are times when you “can’t” set a goal, and usually that’s when you’re gripped by a depression. At its core, the inability to set a meaningful, life affirming goal at any moment is rooted in disbelief – in the self, in the possibility of success, or the learning value of honest failure. What Nietzsche referred to a “slave morality”. Anything that devalues life, like belief in a better afterlife (or simply believing nothing is worth doing), turns living into a time killing proposition.
So, that’s where I find myself now, having lived time in a life where the future felt meaningless but not yet fully engaged in a “life worth living”. But I will, I know that now, where before I only “thought” it. I will love my family, I’ll love my friends, I’ll make new friends, I’ll create things I believe worth creating, I’ll experience new sensations, I’ll continue to learn and expand, I’ll choose proof over comfort. I will not be trapped in memory, or sadness, or grief, or hopelessness. I’ll accept there are few things I control, and focus myself on those few things. And in doing that, I’ll feel the wonder of the long life that is the only eternity I get.
Years ago, I tried to distill my personal philosophy to something graspable, and I came up with “be kind, be excellent”. If I spend my remaining time pursuing both of these qualities, I’ll have lived long.
