On Grief: I Found Myself in a Dark Wood

“In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”

So begins one of the most celebrated and difficult poems ever written, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a more than 14,000-line epic on the soul’s journey through the afterlife. The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest.

That day came six years ago for me, when my pregnant wife, Katherine, died suddenly in a car accident. Forty-five minutes before her death, she delivered our daughter, Isabel, a miracle of health rescued by emergency cesarean. I had left the house that morning at 8:30 to teach a class; by noon, I was a father and a widower.

-“I Found Myself in a Dark Wood,” Joseph Luzzi

Grief is Resilience

“Psychologists call this drawn out period “anticipatory grief.” Anticipating a loved one’s death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one’s long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing”.

–The Things You’ll Miss, The Atlantic

Grace note

This evening, a week of reworking my room came to its conclusion and I stretched back on the bed and contemplated the blue-green, peacock-teal walls (two colors), lit with cotton ball bulbs and multi-colored Christmas lights, wound around each other.

The twining, the twosome.

So often they go together.

Two weddings today, of good friends, one of which I went to.

“It is not good for man to be alone,” said my pastor, but also,

“Marriage is not enough to keep a soul afloat”

and somewhere between – and in both – the truth lies.

But I miss a companion.

so much moving, so much travel and change Lord, so few places and spaces I’ve ever called my own. Isn’t it enough – nearly enough? I am so much better than I ever thought I would be at surviving, Lord, at keeping going, at enduring alone –  but I never wanted this skillset.

Stretching out in the blue and the wake of light, a rush of ease and power of my own, my room, my clothes, I have done this – and I know it is good in your sight.

But this beautiful thing, Lord, this fragile, delicate, one-night beauty – who will share it with me? Who will see it, also, and in the seeing make the beauty complete? For I believe the following to be at least partly true –

“One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.”

Had Damon, or someone, been there, to sprawl beside me, in all their ease and the long length of their body next to mine and the smile at this tiny beautiful thing I’d done – my heart would have, for just that one shattering moment, that near-perfect joy and peace that comes from the blend of external beauty and internal companionship. In the same way that your Truth is both law (an externality) and love (an internality), so everything, in its very fullest form, is both at once. The two – an internal and an external reality. This is why heaven, when it comes, will not be just a spiritual plane, but the world itself will be remade. Completion. Twoness. Wholeness.

I want someone to sprawl beside me, Lord. The slow smile and the laughter. And it’s so close and so possible – had I not walked away from Damon it would be him, there beside me, him even now who is four streets away, and also a universe gone. I don’t regret.

But I wish for an ease of heart.

Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden with Koi

My friend Nathan wrote this gorgeous piece.

 

Near the entrance, a patch of tall grass.
Near the tall grass, long-stemmed plants;

Each bending an ear-shaped cone
To the pond’s surface. If you looked closely,

You could make out silvery Koi
Swishing toward the clouded pond’s edge

Where a boy tugs at his mother’s shirt for a quarter.
To buy fish feed. And watching that boy,

As he knelt down to let the Koi kiss his palms,
I missed what it was to be so dumb

As those Koi. I like to think they’re pure,
That that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty,

After he had nothing else to give, they still kissed
His hands. Because who hasn’t done that—

Loved so intently even after everything
Has gone? Loved something that has washed

Its hands of you? I like to think I’m different now,
That I’m enlightened somehow,

But who am I kidding? I know I’m like those Koi,
Still, with their popping mouths, that would kiss

Those hands again if given the chance. So dumb.

-Nathan McClain, The Collagist

Letter

“Why doesn’t the ache go away?”

Because you loved him, beloved.

Because at night all you can remember is it felt to be curled up next to him on his queen-size bed as the evening peace washes over you and you talk or kiss or watch movies until it’s time for you to, reluctantly, disentangle your body and your mind from his and walk the four streets back to your apartment.

Because you remember his kindness in all the seconds – and there are many – life is cruel and hard.

Because you remember how it felt to be standing under the weight of his glance – how for one of the few spaces and places in your life you felt Lovely.

and loved. Precious.

And the ache doesn’t go away because you have,

genuinely,

lost.

But one thing, and one thing only, I can promise you – one day, you won’t remember why it hurt so much.

 

For Those Who Never Know What To Say to Widows

Two months after the funeral, leave your wife and two teenage sons, drive fourteen hours straight from Eagle to walk up our porch unannounced. Open the garage door the way people used to. The remote is broken. Fix it. Take four truckloads of scrap lumber, crumbling drywall, and junk appliances to the dump. Cook a chili so fine we forget our lost appetites. Open a bottle of anything that costs less than a sympathy card. Lie behind us on the futon. Touch us, because other than one 20-minute appointment with a gynecologist’s plastic speculum, we’ve gone from being touched all the time to being held as if we’d spent half a hot day cleaning Cutthroats from Gore Creek. Tell us that story. Again. The one where you and Nick drop acid and drive his flat-black Valiant with no dashboard to Wyoming to hunt jackalope. In a blizzard. About getting to milk one because the females sleep belly up. Say, No, honest. Waking up in the Casper rescue mission wearing other people’s clothes. Say, Hey, it was monomyth, babe. Sleep in the guest room. After breakfast, tie down Nick’s ’74 Suzuki in your truckbed with red ratchet straps, slap the seat once she’s secure. Say, He was an original. Kiss us like you mean something, even though you don’t know what the hell that is. Maybe it’s just three decades of Nick, and we’re the last thing that touched him. Take I-80 east. Manage to keep your shit together until Elko, at least.

–Rattle

Dear Future

Find me.

Please.

Musing

Sometimes the old fear comes back.

That he was the one.

And we missed our chance.

 

But then I remember that I do not believe there is one, and one only, for each person. I used to apply this only to death – if my future husband died, that I would be able to find and love another. But I think it applies to the present and the living, too – I think that perhaps there are multiple people out there in the world whom I could marry. I could marry Jason. I could marry Damon. But God has shut the door on the one and the door for the other is only half open.

In the end, perhaps we can only know once we find ourself in the place God has led us to.

But it is a comfort. He was not my one and only. What we had was real – a real, deep connection. And the reality of that, and losing it, makes more sense when you accept that there are multiple amazing people out there, people you can love and who can love you back, but with whom it may not work out. J ended it between us. And most of the time I’m glad that it was his choice – it keeps me from much of the terrible, haunting wonder whether we lost out on what was meant to be, on what was more alive and vivid to  both of us than anything else has ever been.

It was beautiful. But it was only a piece of the story God has written for me, and for Jason. I am trying to live in the peace and freedom of the knowledge of that.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

–Marie Howe

 

Poetry

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.”

—	Finn Butler