Meditations on grief and being a person who writes

You died today. I am so sorry. I have never known this kind of grief before. I clutch at my heart whenever I think of you.

You found out 1 year, 4 months, and 5 days ago. I remember the date because for me, it was the last day of a wonderful vacation, full of springtime and tulips and the promise of home.

I found out 11 days later. I had no words at first. Then, too many.

They came spilling out of me like a tsunami, gathering in my throat and rushing out over everyone and everything around me. They filled dozens of pages in my journal. Countless little corners in my head. They bruised my fingers black and blue.

Still they drip from me. Everything I do is wet with vowels and consonants and ink.

The worst part is, none of them are right. I am beginning to think this is what it means to be a person who writes, to forever have an abundance of all the wrong words, to know that they are wrong and to offer them up anyway because they are the best I can do and sometimes they can even help someone (so they aren’t just for me, I lie a little to myself). But mostly, I offer them up because I am not sure I have a choice. The alternative is to drown.

I saw you on April 10, 2016.

I barely had a chance to knock and you were there, smiling, just as I remembered you. I will never forget the warmth with which you hugged me, swaying a little as if I were a daughter or a lover or someone who mattered very much (it’s an awkward description, I know, but once again, I have no right words for this). We held on for a long time. It might have been too long, once, but the old rules had already ceased to matter.

We spoke too fast, tripping over our words as I tried to tell you about my life, to ask you about yours. We walked a little too far to a bakery that didn’t serve lunch on Sundays. You told me about your diagnosis and a few other things (looking back on it now, I get the feeling you were putting affairs in order. Your subtlety was touching; my heart breaks open every time I think of it.). I wished that I could put my arm around you, but we were already so raw, and I was afraid, so I touched your shoulder instead, fearing even that might be too much.

You sent an email on your phone, an important email that you had been working on for awhile, and you misspelled a word. An important word. I saw you realize it. I saw you slump in your chair, head in hand, sinking beneath the weight of that single extra letter. And just like that, you became mortal.

You taught me so much. I remember so well, the first class I took from you, and all the classes thereafter. You were so brilliant, so funny, so kind. You hardly seemed real. I still cannot entirely believe you are gone.

The drugs made you anxious, you said. You’d barely slept in four days. I wanted so much to reach for you then, to take your hand and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again. To cry into your palm and grieve for the world that had only just evaporated, its ghost still visible against our lids like the light from a camera flash.

But I could only sit there and hope that my presence did not add to your grief.

We have so many rules and rituals that govern human relationships. They tell us how to behave in all kinds of situations — dinner parties, weddings, sporting events, first dates, professional lunches, networking receptions, funerals, reunions with old friends.

But where are the rules for grieving? I can’t find any.

We have no rituals for this, no elders to guide us through the motions, to tell us whether we have emailed too often or not enough, whether gifts are welcome or burdensome, when to speak and when to simply sit, when to embrace and when to maintain distance, when to visit and when to stay away, to let us know, most of all, whether we are doing the right thing.

I have no idea what the right thing is. I can’t even find the right words.

I am learning that to grieve in 21st-century America is mostly to grieve alone. At least, that has been my experience. Perhaps it would be different if you were family. Perhaps it would be expected then, and life might offer up more room. I truly don’t know.

As it is, the demands of modern life seem ill-suited to the slow care and tenderness that grieving requires. And this seems somehow deliberate, as if we would rather pretend not to see the black door that awaits us all eventually. As if not seeing would make it go away.

So my life and work and errands go on, much as they always have, except that I am grieving also.

I have been asking myself, what does it mean to grieve?

It would be easy to mistake grief for an empty feeling. It has a great deal to do with absence, after all. But since I learned that you were dying, I have felt only, overwhelmingly full. I lay awake one night not long after I saw you, and I had a vision of my heart as an overripe fruit, ready to burst with memory, sadness, yearning, gratitude. The ache is rich and immediate. It steals my breath.

I used to believe grieving was a process of letting go, but it is not so straightforward. There are no steps to acceptance, only waves of feeling. How does one let go of waves? We cannot. Paradoxically, I have found grief to be a continual exercise of letting go of many things that are not grief — hope, expectation, yearning. Yearning, most of all. But as for grief itself, there is nothing for me to let go of. I can only let it be.

Yet I have found, to my great astonishment, that letting myself be with grief inspires a tremendous sense of wonder. What a strange thing to say, but it’s entirely true.

When I think of you — what you have done, what you have meant, what you have brought forth into the world — I am filled with awe at the possibilities your life has contained, at the possibilities I know you will continue to inspire, simply because you have lived. And there is something truly wondrous about that, about the way grief reveals to us this double-edged blade of mortality. Grief shows us how much possibility is contained within a single human life, how powerful we are that we can touch and transform so many other lives in such a short span of time.

I’ve heard it said that grief is the price of love. I don’t think this is quite right. Grief is not penance; it is only human. I would say instead that we grieve for people who have mattered to us. Perhaps it is the length of grief’s shadow that allows us to see how much they have mattered.

You have mattered so much. Do you know? Can you possibly know what you have done for me and others? What you have been? How very, very much your life has meant?

My grief casts a very long shadow. I have never been so grateful to feel such vibrant, terrible sadness, a statement that makes little sense to me, yet one I know to be ineffably, undeniably true. It wounds me exquisitely, and this is how I know it was worthwhile.

Oh, I wish you could see how you continue to teach and inspire me, even now. Because of you, because of this, because you are gone and I am so, so grateful to have known you (no matter how much it hurts), I am beginning to wonder if grief and joy are perhaps closer cousins than they seem.

They both overwhelm with the intensity of their presentness. They make us ache with our whole hearts. They remind us that we are human.

They ignite our sense of wonder.

They bloom and buzz and brim.

They are here and now and demand that we be here with them. There is nowhere else for them to be. There is nowhere else for me to be when I think of you.

I will love you always. I will be grateful to you always. I would not be myself if I hadn’t known you also.

Be at peace, dearest friend. I am glad you are not suffering anymore, and gladder still that our paths once crossed. The privilege was truly mine.