And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
Long one today. Sorry.
An odd thing I’ve noticed since Michael’s death – people keep wanting to tell me what to read. Or actually, they tell me what NOT to read. I’ve been told about books that people are reading and loving, only to hear this caveat: “Oh, but wait a while before you read it. It has grief in it…you will find it triggering.” Even students have been checking with me before they hand in pages: “Is it okay if I hand this in? Someone dies in it.”
The main thought around all this, and it’s a nice thought, a loving thought, a protective thought, is that I might be “triggered” if I read it. But here’s the thing. I believe, and I have always believed, that knowledge is power. And knowledge is help. And so rather than avoid reading about grief, or avoiding movies about grief, or telling my students to not hand anything in to me that has even a whisper of grief in it, I open my arms and my eyes and I embrace all of it. This is how I learn. By avoiding the topic, by ducking away because it might “trigger” me into feeling what I’m already feeling, is just not helpful. I do not hide or avoid. I learn.
I have learned, through trial and error, though, that I prefer fiction for this. Every now and then, when someone actually suggests that I do read something on the subject, it’s an almost sure bet that I’ll be told to read Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking. I do have the book, but I’ve only read a few pages before I put it down. It may be, first of all, that I hate the title. I don’t want to think magically. I want to be clear-headed. I want to face reality head on. Magical thinking just won’t do that for me. But also, with this book and other memoirs, I’ve found that it seems like they’re myopic – every page, every scene, is about grief. What I wanted to know, and still do, is how you move through your day to day life while dealing with this.
Novels do this for me. They show the main characters getting out of bed in the morning, even if they don’t want to. The characters follow the clock, going to work, interacting, having meals, taking care of the dog, reading the newspaper, doing chores, and I watch them carefully. How do they do that? Then I do that too. Memoir seems to give me a close-up view, while novels give me a general whole-life view.
It’s the whole-life that I want. I don’t want to waste time and energy on what-ifs.
I did find one memoir that I loved, primarily because I laughed through a lot of it, which was intentional. That’s Debbie Weiss’ Available As Is. I liked this one so much, I actually reached out to Debbie and told her so. She’s been a wonderful resource ever since.
But lately, I’ve had a whole string of novels that just hit me where it hurts, but also hit me exactly where I needed to be hit. Other than The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez, I chose the books at random, not knowing they were necessarily about grief. I did walk into the movie, The Friend, knowing only it was what Michael and I called Writer Movies, and knowing it was about a woman whose friend bequeathed her a Great Dane. I was so moved by the movie, I came home and ordered the book and ripped through it as soon as it arrived.
I can’t even include one quote from this novel that helped, because the whole book helped, and I can’t reprint the whole book! However, it also made me want to run out and adopt a Great Dane. Probably not a good thing.
When I finished that novel and set it aside, I picked up Catherine Newman’s novel, We All Want Impossible Things. I picked her up because I read Newman’s new and glorious novel, Sandwich, and so I bought her earlier novel without even reading what it was about. So suddenly, I found myself immersed again in the world of hospice and an impending death. And I read, “Everywhere, behind closed doors, people are dying, and people are grieving them. It’s the most basic fact about human life – tied with birth, I guess – but it’s so startling too. Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.”
I was, and am, part of that crescendo. And what was most amazing was that hospice, the tail end of the story, was the most comforting. Everyone knew what we were there for. It was all out in the open, and not whispered.
From there, I went to Matt Haig’s new novel, The Life Impossible. And yes, I noticed the synchronicity of the two titles: We all want impossible things, The life impossible. And there, I read, “And the sadness leaked out. It was there on my face and in my eyes. Grief was a flood that ran through you and caused others to stand aside. Or at least wind up the conversation.”
In hospice, though, no one stood aside. And everyone talked. There was no talk of “triggering” because I was nowhere close to a trigger. I was deep inside the barrel of the gun.
But then I read the book, which wasn’t even about grief, but that brought it all into one sentence for me. It was from Ann Patchett, and the novel is Tom Lake. I was reading before sleep, and it was about 2:00 in the morning, and I read, “I understood what was happening, but not that it was happening to me.”
Sometimes, you read something that resonates so deeply, you have to close the book for a bit, close your eyes along with it, and just think about it. Roll the words around. Maybe even say them aloud. For me, this hit me so profoundly, I did close my eyes and the book, repeated the words aloud, several times, and the mantra put me fast asleep, in the deepest sleep I’ve had for months.
It was like suddenly, everything made sense. I didn’t understand that it was happening to me during Michael’s hospitalization and rehab, because I absolutely had to remain focused on Michael. On trying to get him through. For the short time he was home, I was hyperaware of every sound, every movement, or every lack thereof. And afterwards, the focus has been on getting things taken care of, how to incorporate everything he did into everything I do, what a simple day was supposed to look like.
But suddenly, as I fell asleep that night, repeating those words, I thought, Something happened to me. Repeating this sentence, it was like the windows blowing open and letting in a fresh and cooling breeze. I am dealing with what happened to Michael. And I am dealing with what happened to me.
The actual diagnosis of this is “traumatic grief”. And PTSD.
And I have no idea, after saying all this, what it is I’m trying to say here. Except that somehow, this recognition made me feel so much better. I feel clearer about what I’m going through, and what to expect. And mostly, I know that it’s survivable.
Right now, I’m reading Fredrik Backman’s new novel, My Friends. There’s that synchronicity of titles again. The friend, my friends. And I read this: “Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death.”
First instinct. But then there’s the second…Survival. I will survive this. I already have.
And that is my Moment this week.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
Reading is living.