On the Distraction of Grief

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

written in May 2017

It feels familiar enough: your ankles crossed beneath the desk chair, the cool desk top under your wrists, your hands fingering the laptop keyboard. For many months you could not imagine even walking into this room, much less sitting down in the chair. And now? Progress. You open a document and peer at it with one eye closed.

Resuming work on a manuscript after a long hiatus is like returning to a neglected garden, one overtaken by choking weeds and encroached upon by the adjoining lawn. You peer at it from a safe distance. On first look it is unrecognizable. Is this really the thing you had spent so many hours tending all that time ago? It appears gnarled and impenetrable, and the idea of trying to make sense of it, the idea of the work it would take to reclaim it, overwhelms you. You poke it with a stick and consider setting it on fire.

You remember what it was like to work on the manuscript, before everything. Like all writing, it was a bold act, an act of faith: the words planted like seeds in the dirt. There is little more hopeful than seeds planted in the dirt. Working on this manuscript was also an act of freedom: This is what I am doing right now, and not something else. Since the writing life is after all divided into two categories—1. Writing, and 2. Everything Else—having the liberty to use a space of time to sit in a chair and put words on a page is a spectacular freedom.

But the manuscript resembles nothing like this now. For all the world it looks like what it is: something abandoned when you were snatched away, yanked fully out of the writer’s life and placed squarely into the worst kind of Everything Else.

Last year I lost my mother. I want to write “suddenly,” because despite her cancer diagnosis, two surgeries, and two rough rounds of chemotherapy, her death was sudden: following an all-clear pet scan, an unexpected and swift case of septic shock took her in the span of a two-week period. Everything that followed was also sudden. The sudden leaving of the both hallowed and despised hospital after days of vigil, the sudden horrible business of planning a funeral, the sudden need to “go on.” Fourteen years earlier my family had lost my father, who died (truly) suddenly when we weren’t looking, leaving us in blind shock. My mother died as we looked on helplessly, which is the kind of thing the eyes continue to see for a while after it is over.

I was given my mother’s estate to administer, as well as the task of helping my siblings empty and sell our childhood home. On the one hand it was like being told to scale the face of a cliff, only with paperwork and phone calls, cardboard boxes and a dumpster.  On the other, it was a rescue. Details trump grief, or at least defer it. If you’re too tired to think, I discovered, at least you’re too tired to think. Engaging in these very tasks helped me forget why I was doing them. The problem with the forgetting, of course, is the remembering. After a few hours on the phone robotically informing sympathetic creditors that my mother had died, and a few more diligently disseminating her possessions among family members and the Salvation Army, I’d be suddenly blindsided by the arrival of, say, a “final resting place” information card from the cemetery, or by the sight of my mother’s cardigan hanging in my front hall closet. The shock would come fresh. What do you mean she’s gone?

There was anyway no room in my heart for an unfinished manuscript, no longing in my mind to resolve the invented conflicts of imagined people. I did not care that there was a writing chair I used to sit in.

I’ve heard grief likened to the crashing waves of a ship-wrecking storm. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the waves of grief crash relentlessly and, clinging onto a piece of wreckage, you struggle for air and swallow some water. Eventually the waves become smaller and less frequent, and in the respite you can breathe a bit. In my case, however, just as the waves began to abate, a second storm struck.

Justin was the leader of the weekly novel writer’s workshop I’d been attending for well over a decade. We met at the beginning of our writing lives: he, more than 40 years my senior, after saying goodbye to a law career, and I at the tail end of a prolonged adolescence. In the workshop, Justin was always very much a teacher and I a student: he demanded diligence in work and seriousness in class, and I made excuses and kept a log of his more outrageous classroom commentary. But outside of the workshop he was more than a teacher, more than someone with whom I shared war stories and works in progress. He was someone who came to my wedding. Who sent my kids cards and Christmas presents.  Who attended Thanksgiving dinners, birthday parties, and both my parents’ funerals. Over the years we amassed a collection of ridiculous stories and private jokes. And, oh, how we had laughed. During the time of my grief waves, when I was listing my mother’s house and not writing, Justin was suffering a series of strokes and not writing. He, brilliant and energetic well into his 80s, was suddenly unable to swallow food and became too weak to leave his bed. In the weeks before he slipped away, he was hospitalized for a time in the next county over from mine, in (I could hardly comprehend it) the very same hospital where my mother had just died.

I suddenly found myself in a car with my workshop friends heading toward the place my siblings and I had bade good riddance, swearing never to return. As the hospital came into view, I made the conscious decision to shut down. Wholesale denial was the only way I would survive this. On autopilot I navigated our group through the halls and elevators to Justin’s room. When the time came to pass them, I averted my eyes from the doors to the ICU.

In my elected state of denial, I was unprepared for the two things that happened next: first, that Justin’s doctor would sit us—his family, for intents and purposes—down to tell us Justin had opted to refuse the permanent feeding tube that would keep him alive. And second, that this doctor would take me aside, his eyes incredulous. “You were here in April for your mother,” he said, his words making plain everything I’d been struggling to suppress, his pitying tone uncovering everything I was trying not to feel. I hadn’t even recognized him as one of my mother’s doctors until this moment. But of course now I remembered everything. “If our paths cross a third time I hope it’s under happier circumstances,” this doctor called after me as I excused myself from the room, leaving me to wonder just what circumstances those could possibly be. I locked myself in the hall lavatory, gripping the sink, waiting for the trembling to subside. After a moment I splashed my face with water and returned to my friends, and to Justin, who held out his hand to me from his bed.

Justin passed early on a Friday morning in late September. Present for the whole of my adult writing life, he was suddenly gone. I envisioned my manuscript lying dormant in a document folder on my laptop, his notes in the margins. I had the same thought regarding Justin as I’d had regarding my mother: how am I supposed to live in a world without you in it? And the waves roiled.

The weekend after Justin’s death I dreamed of my mother for the first time since she died. In the dream she was sitting perched on the arm of someone’s sofa, carrying on a conversation with unseen others in the room. I was amazed to be with her again, amazed at how vivacious her chatter was, how effervescent her laugh. Like a child I was seated on the rug at her feet, filled with the understanding I mustn’t interrupt her, and so I only reached my hand toward her in silent appeal. Immediately she took my hand in hers and held it tightly as she continued talking, a wordless, but pointed, acknowledgment of me. This was the entirety of the dream. I woke with the feeling of her hand over mine, her grasp saying, I’m here, I’m here.

In the late 1960s, a Swiss psychiatrist defined the stages of grief.  I confess I cannot name them without first Googling them. I’m pretty sure one of the stages is binge-watching the entire series of Dexter on Netflix.   One of the things I know for certain is this: in the beginning grief is living eye-blink to eye-blink, the moments between blinks indistinguishably unbearable. Eventually, however, there is an epiphany: the realization that shattering sadness need not accompany the memory of someone you love and miss terribly. I am now at the place where sometimes it does, and sometimes it does not.

I moved my desk and my writing chair to a different room in my house. They face the trees now, and this spring fat robins and Northern Flickers, squirrels and a surprisingly spry woodchuck provide theater outside the window, offering to be my new distraction if I would only come sit at the laptop. I do sit, now and again, for longer and longer periods of time. I’ve begun the process of reacquainting myself with my manuscript, of clearing away the weeds that obfuscate, of rediscovering something underneath that, with a little attention, might thrive. There is something hopeful about doing so, and something healing in that hope.