Complicated Feelings: Love and Grief
Hello
It is thunderstorm season in Washington, D.C. I am currently cat-sitting for my sister and spent last night curled up on the couch watching Bob’s Burgers as the sky threw a wild pre-summer tantrum. I love rain and thunder and was pleasantly surprised by how calmly my cat nephew, Thomas O’Malley, MPH (meow purr hiss), rode out the storm.
A poem written May 2nd, 2024, my 5th day in the hospital:
Listen close:
May demands rebirth
For all the works unfinished;
The infernos, undiminished.
Aching soles recall the rough caress of ocean sands under toe.
Newly budding roses
Encroach upon my front door,
Like last year and the many gone before.
The passersby stop and pose for a fond memory.
They huddle close.
Each bloom a triumph,
Despite the many thorns.
No limit to any individual’s worth.
Listen close:
May demands rebirth
Two weeks ago I used 35 hours of PTO from my day job to try to pull together a new and very different and, hopefully, better draft of my novel. I also tried to write a newsletter on the topic of professionalism but decided I didn’t have it in me. I don’t currently have a working personal laptop (and I can’t afford a new one) so I did my writing work from the same coworking space I go to when not on a “staycation”. I allowed myself to believe that this could be my life: a life surrounded by books and by words and by time to be spent however I wish it.
It turned out that the main thing I needed was a break. I got a lot of great writing done, including my piece to mark a year alcohol-free, but of course could not meet my wishful expectations. One sentence I did manage to write, several times, was this: “I’m very worried that I might come out of this week with little to show for it.” I spent a frustrating amount of time grappling with an incessant need to be busy and to be able to prove that I was keeping busy and that my business is profitable and important… somehow there’s nothing worse than being perceived as unproductive.
Midway through the week I attended a celebration of life for a friend who passed away unexpectedly. He and I used to drink together. After my accident I saw him less frequently, but he was always interested in my journey. He asked me gentle questions about any pain I might be feeling and about cravings, if mornings got easier right away or ever. We have similar collections of vibrant button-down shirts. A local gay bar hosted a small gathering and I arrived two minutes early. I met his sister and his sister-in-law and guided them up the stairs to the smaller, more private bar and helped them get settled. I never really know what to say to people in mourning; words often have fumbling fingers and tangle too easily. We dread situations of grief, it feels like floating… is it hyper- or hypo-reality? I got a mocktail and sat at a high top, thinking between sips about how, ten months prior, I had gone to the very same bar for my friend’s 60th birthday; how nervous I felt to be in a crowded bar for the first time since the accident, how delicately he greeted me, how safe he made me feel.
At the celebration of life, I spoke for a while with a good friend of his who I hadn’t seen since before the accident. We talked openly about how we each experience grief. He said he felt its icy fingers on his skin with such intensity when his mother died that every touch since has felt different. I talked about how every April feels overcast; like it has burnt through the calendar and left a shadow over everything. I confess that, even in my peaceful reflection, I still feel that shadow and its deep discomfort. I gave him the kind of hug that feels like stepping into a person’s soul for a moment. I gave several of those hugs to other attendees. And then I left early.
Excerpt from the first draft of my manuscript:
“As a child I started to get panic attacks. For a while they came frequently, at least once a week. The very first time I felt it I thought my world was shattering. It crept in from the outermost cells on the tips of my fingers like how winter spreads numbness from those parts that the heart reaches last, and it traveled up each of my limbs with its cruel deliberation. The mind in those moments goes frenzied and furious, the wildfire to combat one’s internal winter. It always felt like grief to me, that false energy; it always felt like mourning.
So I became an expert in grieving, I learned the warning signs and how to ride the waves as they came. When nights would afford me no possibility of sleep I learned to watch the lightning strike like god itself were screaming lessons in a language for which I had no ears to understand… And each impending crash would shock a fragment of me off that I could angrily scrawl into a notebook on my bedside table, to be sure that every piece that falls off will not be forgotten.
I feel like that child again, here face to face with the barricade-proof doors, but I do not recognize these waves nor these storm clouds; I cannot wield my expertise here because I have never known grief quite like this. All I know how to do is hold it all back, all holed up beside me in this place while I drift in and out of the dark as it commands me.”
Everything feels like grief these days.
From the very first iteration of this newsletter, Eulogy and Euphoria, my writing has been soaked in it. I try to resist thinking this way but it is deeply true: there is a lot of grief in sobriety. There is a version of me I dreamed I could be – someone who knows when to stop drinking, who sips a rye Manhattan with an extra Luxardo cherry by a fire and makes a tactfully off-color joke about the president being the world’s most controversial and accidentally talented drag queen. I don’t know if I am allowed to grieve for that version of me who will never exist in the way I thought he could. Whether I am allowed to or not… I do, because grief is not a vampire; it does not ask for permission to enter.
I dislike writing about pain because this world conditions us to bear it silently, but it is necessary, because holding it inside lets it turn corrosive. Paying proper tribute to those who have impacted us, resisting the passage of time and its pesky tendency to dull the colors they left behind, is how we ensure that love perseveres, even in death. I choose to pay tribute with language. Most choose music, because before there was language, there was song.
Journal Entry from July 10th, 2024:
“I don’t quite know how to articulate this. I used to love attention; crave it. I used to feel the spotlight hit me and be certain it was my purpose to be seen, to be heard. I used to be opalescent.
I feel like an invader… like this body that has always been my home is somehow foreign, looking in from the outside to a world where people know their place and what they want. I’m scared that when my head hit that pavement I may have actually died. Not in any measurable way, but in a way that is still real – my ambition feels separate from me. Like I am sitting on a beach where once I feasted on the sunlight but now the tide is coming in and growing bolder. I feel like I can’t engage in anything because authenticity has become a liability and I don’t know how to lie anymore.
Now I find myself constantly terrified. I don’t know what is happening with my brain but it doesn’t seem to work right anymore. I used to find the proper words so easily, but now as I cast my net for poetry it’s all lost in the flood. I come back exhausted and waterlogged and gasping for air. It’s not getting easier. I thought it would get easier. I needed it to get easier.
I just feel stupid and lost; a child in outburst because I lack the vocabulary to express what I need, drowning in something my language cannot command because it is wholly foreign and unrelenting. These waves keep crashing over me here at these crossroads. Ribcage tethered to the shoreline and a heartbeat begging to climb out of my open mouth, I feel the existential crush of an identity in crisis. Please let this be one of many self-constructed disrepairs. Twenty seven stings the same in brutal deep or brittle air; any truth is surely universal to some degree if it is heavy enough to be spoken.
Pulled under once again the icy sea soaks in and I pray I can absorb her fully, become the depths myself on being dragged underneath. I am the heavens and I wear these constellations that no ebbing tide could wash away. I collect these fire shards from the darkening surrounds and press them firmly to my upturned palm, the sun distributed atop each new watery assault in her never-ending dance, and with the times and swimming sideways in the golden western sky; emerge the placid insignificance… The miracle of I.”
The name we give to our tributes is grief.
The hardest part of grief, for me, is its cunning. I wrote that fairly dramatic entry a month after getting the neck brace off; two and a half months after the fall. I was, in theory, past the worst of it, I didn’t even need physical therapy. And I was still falling apart.
Perhaps a very small part of me liked falling apart – the grim pageantry of it all. It gave me permission to be a bit dramatic, to release my grief, even if it wasn’t a healthy means of doing so. Because I had not explicitly given myself that permission. I must confess that I wish more people knew that I was falling apart. I wish more people had reached out, and I wish I didn’t feel that way, because it makes me think of all the times that I did not reach out; the times it didn’t even cross my mind.
Not long before writing that entry I decided I would write a letter to a friend and neighbor (hi, Amb!) who I think of as a kindred spirit in joy and art. I wanted to resurrect the art of letter-writing as an act of friendship. I remember opening it with the words, “I can tell that summer is winding up because I keep falling in love every day”. I wrote it all on cardstock my aunt had sent me, put it in an envelope, and left it on her front porch. As I walked away I felt the familiar sensation of relief wash over me, relief at having just expelled a piece of the love that had been building up pressure inside of me, relief at being just a little bit lighter.
I keep that feeling with me in my back pocket at all times. It is sticky. Gangrenous. It is like a monstrous echo in an empty subway station, it bowls me over. That love and grief are the same goliath wearing different faces is a sentiment many have observed. I spend a lot of time in my life and in my writing lamenting that love is complicated and hard to understand, but really it is the simplest and most natural thing in the world. It is seared into every infinitesimal slice of me. Despite this, and much like grief, love is not easy, and I never seem to get any better at it, no matter how much I try.
It wasn’t the grief that compelled me to write that letter, or go to that bar to celebrate my friend’s life, it was the love I have for my friends, a love shared by everyone else who has ever written a letter or lost a friend.
Holding grief inside turns it sharp, it pokes its insistent way through you and trickles out into the everyday. Similarly, holding love inside defeats the very purpose of it. We were born imbued with the facility to love, we should be bold enough to exercise it daily. Yes, grief and love are phantoms that share a body. They need to be expressed in the proper ways, they need to be communicated, they need to evolve, because you cannot make them disappear.
It is so beautiful to be changed by love and grief.
Thank you for reading. If you found it worthwhile, please feel free to subscribe or share. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.
With Sincerity,
J.K.
John, this is all so beautiful and heartbreaking too, the way real life can be. It's a blessing that you are awake in this way and willing to share with us. xxx