OK, then...

It has been a wretched couple of months.

Greetings from Griefland

I read this piece last night at the very first Story Lab Chicago.  It was such a great night and I had a fantastic experience doing a live show for the first time.  It's a little tough posting this here, because I wrote it to be read out loud and I think a lot is lost without hearing it live, but for my friends and family who couldn't make it to the Black Rock, here's what I did:

“Grandpa died.” 

I have wandered into my brother’s dining room late Thanksgiving morning, blinking against the sunlight into the middle of an earnest conversation between my little nieces:

“Grandpa B died!” says Claire, age three and a half .  She takes a scoop of oatmeal and lets this fact settle over her younger cousin Evie.  When you’re three and a half, there are few opportunities to be the authority on things…Claire is taking this opportunity and rolling with it full speed.

These Sudden Ends in Time Must Give Us Pause

Somewhere between three and five hours after writing my last post, my dad died suddenly.

In the bizarre grief world that followed, my words haunted me. The fact that as I was blithely typing away about the little time we have on this Earth and reassuring a former classmate that all was well, my father was living his last hours, alone and far from home.

Even though he had no reason to know his time was short, my dad was a morbid bastard. My brothers, sister and I planned his funeral services from handwritten instructions on paper from his familiar and favored yellow legal pads. A teacher of literature, he had chosen poems for my brother and I to read. For me, it was Year's End by Richard Wilbur, which I post here in memory of him and in honor of all of the students he touched.

Year’s End by Richard Wilbur : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

In the Loop

I'm down here wearing work clothes, blending in with the office people while the wind picks you up and blows you out of town.  What else is there to do, anyway?

There's the rest of this day and then tomorrow and a Thursday morning meeting.  Everyone is walking to lunch, discussing the long weekend and their fantasy football leagues.  Standing in line for coffee this morning, I was surprised how numb I was.  Maybe it's a stages-of-grief thing or a medication side effect.  Either way, it has spread to my bones. 

Thinking of all of the terminally broken people I know.  Or those already in the late stages, the ones I stride past in the shade of Union Station, stepping carefully around their sprawled-out legs.  "That's coming for you, too," it whispers, fingers cold around my wrist.

"Are these shadows of things that must be or are they shadows of things that might be?"  But the season's all wrong for Dickens quotes. 

The Blight Man Was Born For

Some of you guys know that I'm working on a novel.  One of the major plot points and themes revolves around grief.  As someone who hasn't yet experienced a major loss, I wonder if it's crazy to try to put a character through it and to write about the grief that follows death in a meaningful way.  Sure, there has been serious pain and depression in my life.  There has been loss.  But for the most part, it's an experience that's more on the horizon than reality.

Grief and mourning and luck have all been kind of tumbling around in my head this week.  Last night, I watched Hotel Rwanda and struggled to imagine the burden of drawing a card like that out of the Universe's deck.  Even in our attempts to break genocide down and understand it on a human level through art and writing and documentaries, it's so hard to separate the individual lives involved from the capital-E Event of it.

About an hour ago, I finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote in the year after her husband John's sudden death and the catastrophic illnesses of her daughter Quintana.  This passage perfectly sums up for me the way our ideas about luck and grief are tangled:

Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequitable distribution of bad news.  In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide.  In the eleventh grade, she had been woken at Susan's at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered.  "Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said.  "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."

"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.  

 Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end.  I said I remembered.  

"He was right," Susan said.  "It did."

 I recall being shocked.  It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us.  Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood.  I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news. 

 "That's not what I meant at all," John said.

 "I knew what he meant," Susan said. 

We are not supposed to live our lives with one eye looking wearily around the bend for the tragedies sure to come, and I don't intend to do so.  But they are coming.  They will be brought to us or brought on ourselves in a million different ways, big and small.  And it doesn't take an event like the Rwandan genocide or even a death in the family to remind us.

One of my favorite poems (and a really great YouTube channel):
"Spring and Fall To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins