On Grief

“Is he still dead?” a friend’s teenage daughter asked the morning after her father died.

It was a reasonable question, her mother and I agreed—for who can fathom death? Make sense of it? This was one area in which the adults in her life, agnostics and atheists all, had no explanation to offer. We tried; we all try…but even at our best, we fail.

A few weeks ago my seven-year-old grandson asked me why “some people have to die.” Almost reflexively I spouted out a bit of nonsense from the tv program Six Feet Under: “To make life important,” I chirped.

Lowell gave me a long disappointed look that said, oh, all right, so you’re gonna bullshit me too. I was immediately shamed: I’d been so freaked by his question that I’d hastened to provide a pat answer, one that might shut down the subject. I should have done just the opposite, should have said something that would open the topic to exploration. Children’s serious questions are opportunities—and I ‘d blown this one. I tried to salvage the moment by asking if anyone close to him had ever died, and was grateful that he still trusted me enough to respond. He speculated that his paternal grandfather, being his oldest relative, is the likeliest to die first. I’d had no idea until then that Lowell, who shows signs of mathematic brilliance, was keeping tabs on all our ages.

It’s two weeks since Andrea died, and there’s a palpable hole where she used to be. Last night I spoke with her husband Al for the first time; he is, as expected, devastated. During the course of the conversation it became clear that what he wanted from me was my perspective on Andrea: he wanted to hear about our friendship, about the side of her I knew, parts of her he might have missed. He wanted to hear more Andrea anecdotes, though he’d heard tons of them at her memorial service. Not having been there, I needed this talk as much as he did. Since none of my other friends knew Andrea, I’ve had little opportunity to talk about her.

Over 200 people came, on two days’ notice, to her memorial. One after another, Al said, people got up to speak; one after another they said Andrea was the most loving person they’d ever known. I would’ve said the same. She was the best friend I had, and not in the adolescent sense of ‘my best friend’. We met in our forties. Since the age of six I’ve had dozens of female friendships, every one of them imbued with elements of competitiveness, power imbalance, jealousy, even cruelty. Andrea gave me true, mature friendship; from her I learned, finally, what friendship can be. I always knew she loved me and wished me the best. Remarkably, I didn’t even envy her wealth—at least not until this past year, when poverty truly overtook my life. Even then, my envy wasn’t personalized; I didn’t resent Andrea for what she had.

Grief is a deeply private emotion. To a certain extent it can be shared, but the most profound mourning is internal. Even writing about grief becomes a struggle to explain—not, as with other emotions, a re-living. Most of what I know of grief I learned when my father died, when I was 33 and open to such lessons. I sat alone in my house for hours every day staring at walls, not so much thinking or meditating or feeling as being, creating a space for whatever might surface. This wasn’t some intentional endeavor, it was the only thing I felt like doing when I wasn’t busy caring for my kids or at work. This went on for over a year; sometimes I talked to my father and cried, at times I saw and heard him as vividly as when he was alive. So close did I get, that at one point it was as if I’d followed him into the dark silence of the grave. Among other lessons, I learned why people frequently avoid deep grieving.

Al’s feeling guilty that he didn’t give Andrea enough of what she needed when she was sick. I said all the reassuring words—that she adored him, that she’d told me he was wonderful, which she did. In truth, she also sometimes complained about him. But Andrea’s need—and not just during the cancer—was so great that nothing could have been enough. If she was larger than life in her capacity to love, she also had a huge gaping need for it. Everyone knew this, and most people accepted it as part of who she was. On balance, it was well worth putting up with because of what she gave. For her husband and kids, of course, it was surely more complicated.

Al is unsurprised by the guilt, accepts it as an inevitable part of the grieving process, but my experience with grief has been unexpectedly different. From the moment I learned of my father’s death, all the fights we’d had—mostly political in nature—melted away. The negative aspects of my relationship with him—and there were plenty—slipped off like the skin of a snake, leaving only his love. A poet friend who’d experienced much early loss in life put it into precisely those words: “All that stuff falls away,” she said, “and what you’re left with is the love.”

The grieving process I went through for my father left an indelible impression on me. Years later, when Marco died, guilt reared its irrational head, and I calmly observed it, then let it go. It was the same when my mother died, despite the complexities of our relationship. I’m not saying I had/have absolutely no guilt feelings toward my dead—but they seem insignificant compared to much more powerful feelings, and I don’t allow them center stage. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in this area, I don’t know; I can foresee the possibility of drowning in guilt if one of my children were to go before I….okaaaaaay, this is where my courage takes an abrupt nosedive, and we switch to another train of thought.

One of the things poking at Al’s guilt was reading Andrea’s emails. I can’t believe she didn’t dump everything; she used to scold me if a message was the slightest bit indiscreet. The last time I visited she gave me a suitcase full of clothes, some never worn, because, she said, she didn’t want her kids to know she was such a shopaholic. And yet she left emails, journals, and poetry, all easily accessible. I can’t help wondering if she did so on purpose, if she wanted Al, or her kids, or whomever, to know certain things about her. Or maybe it was less specific, maybe she just wanted people to know her, period. I cannot believe, knowing Andrea, that it was an unconscious or even subconscious act, and I’m dying to talk to her about it. The conversation even passed through my mind—and then I remember we won’t have that conversation.

This is the big bitch about death: no more talk. It’s done. Finito. Over. No mas.

When Marco was in the hospital, intubated and therefore unable to speak, all sorts of drama swirled around his deathbed. He’d been married four times, had numerous relationships, affairs and one-night stands. Word spread quickly that he was dying, and women came crawling out of every corner of New York: this one had been in a Marxist study group with him a quarter century ago; another had met him in an ashram; an estranged ex-wife phoned from London. The women came and went in an almost choreographed dance; I stayed nearly a week, leaving the room to allow each visitor private time. During that week there were bitter arguments about whether or not to “pull the plug,” which Andrea, his executor, tried to persuade the hospital to do. There were tears and laughter and story-swapping; old hurts and new revelations, competition and cooperation, acts of revenge and atonement. Each of us subtly staked out our territory: one wife communicated with him using scrabble tiles; they’d played the game constantly when married. I bought picture cards to help him express himself. None of these methods worked–he had AIDS dementia. He still had moments of lucidity, though: one evening, alone with him, I described the loony lunch I’d had with two of his women that day. He responded with expressive eyes, smiles, even laughter; overcome, I burst into tears. “Marco,” I said, “you have to get better so we can talk about all this!” But he did not.

It happens with all of them: my father, my mother, Marco, Andrea, my friends Richard and Barbara: something comes up that reminds me of them, and for a brief flash I imagine telling them about it. Then comes the thud of reality. And that’s what it’s about, finally. Finality. All the grief, mourning, all the fascinating human dramas, the eerie events attached to each death; the ghosts in the night, the strange and wonderful dream visitations–none of it matters one goddam bit. I’ve been shown, through death and grief, that “there’s more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy,” and although I’ve derived some comfort from it, I still have nothing substantial to tell the grandkids. It’s a crazy cruel life, this life that ends in death, and I for one have no idea why it is the way it is.