This is a rewrite of an earlier version.
A few weeks ago my seven-year-old grandson asked, “Why do some people have to die?” Reflexively I spouted out some nonsense from the TV show Six Feet Under: “To make life important,” I chirped, and immediately heard my own idiocy.
Lowell gave me a long disappointed look that said, Oh, all right, so you’re gonna bullshit me too. Shame on me: I’d been so freaked by his question that I’d hastened to provide a pat answer. I shut down the subject, when I should have done just the opposite, should have said something to open it up for exploration. Children’s serious questions are opportunities—and I‘d blown it. 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 speculate. His paternal grandfather, he said, was his oldest relative, and therefore the one most likely to die first. Lowell has shown signs of mathematical brilliance—but who’d have thought he was using it to keep tabs on his grandparents?
It is 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. He didn’t say so, but I figured out that what he wanted was my perspective on Andrea; he wanted to hear about the side of her that only I knew. He was gathering information from each one of her friends, looking for pieces he might have missed. He simply couldn’t get enough Andrea anecdotes, not even after her memorial, to which 200 people came, on two days’ notice. One after another people got up to speak; one after another they said Andrea was the most loving person they’d ever known. If I had been there I would’ve said the same.
Andrea was the best friend I ever had, and not in the adolescent sense of ‘my best friend’. Since the age of six I’ve had dozens of female friendships, all fraught with competition, power plays, jealousy, even cruelty. But with Andrea I learned, finally, what friendship can be. Maybe it’s because we met in our forties–and at the side of a dying friend no less. Or maybe it was because Andrea had so much experience, she’d perfected the art of friendship. With her I always felt loved; I knew in my bones that she wanted the best for me. In turn, I didn’t envy her great wealth or resent her for what she had. This was a new experience.
When my friend Joni’s ex-husband died, her teenage daughter got up the next morning and asked, “Is he still dead?” It seemed like a reasonable question—after all, who can make sense of death? It was an area in which her mother and I, having no religious fables to fall back on, had no explanation. We tried, the way I tried with Lowell.
When it comes to death, we can try all we want but still we fail.
Grief is a deeply private emotion. To some extent it can be shared, but our deepest mourning is internal. Even writing about grief is a struggle—it’s not, as when writing about other emotions, a re-living; it’s more of an exposition.
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 the walls, not so much thinking or meditating or feeling as just being, creating a space for whatever came. This wasn’t intentional, it was the only thing I felt like doing whenever I had any time to myself. 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. I learned, among other things, why people frequently avoid deep grieving.
Al is feeling guilty that he didn’t give Andrea everything she needed when she was sick. I said all the reassuring words—that she adored him, that she told me he was wonderful–all of which were true. But she also complained about him, like any wife complains. Besides, Andrea’s need—and not just during the cancer—was so great that nothing would have been enough. If she was larger than life in her capacity to love, her need for love was just as great. Everyone knew this, and accepted it as part of who she was. On balance, it was worth putting up with because of what she gave. For her husband and kids, of course, it must have been more complicated.
Al was unsurprised by the guilt, accepting it as an inevitable part of the grieving process. I didn’t tell him, but my experience with grief has been unexpectedly different. The minute I learned my father was dead, 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 love. A poet friend who’d experienced a lot of loss early in her life put it into those words precisely: “All the 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, and guilt briefly arose, I was able to observe it and let go. It was even the same when my mother died. While some remnants of guilt or anger still surface from time to time, they’re puny, almost insignificant, next to the vast landscape that is death.
Al’s guilt buttons were being pushed by reading Andrea’s email messages. I can’t believe she didn’t dump them; she used to scold me if a message was the least bit indiscreet. To hide her shopaholic tendencies, she stuffed a suitcase full of clothes for me, some never even worn, on our last visit. Yet she left her emails, journals, and poetry easily accessible. I can’t help but think it was intentional, that she wanted Al, or her kids, or whoever, to know certain things about her. Or maybe it was less specific, that she just wanted them to know her, period. It’s inconceivable to me that Andrea would do something like that unconsciously, and I’m dying to talk to her about it. The conversation even played out in my head—and then I remembered we won’t have that conversation.
When Marco was in the hospital, his intubation preventing speech, all sorts of drama swirled around his deathbed. 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 telephoned. I sat there all week while the women came and went in a choreographed dance, leaving the room to give each one private time. There were bitter arguments about “pulling the plug” — Andrea, as his executor, tried to persuade the hospital to do so. There were tears and laughter and story-swapping; old hurts and new revelations; competition and cooperation; small acts of revenge and atonement. Each of us subtly staked out our territory. One wife tried using scrabble tiles to communicate with him. I brought in picture cards. Neither method managed to penetrate the AIDS dementia.
One night I told him about the loony lunch I’d had with two of his women that day, and when his eyes lit up expressively, 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 the big bitch about death: no more talk. It’s done. Finito. Over. That is what it’s about: finality. The grief, the mourning, the fascinating human dramas; 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 your philosophy,” and though I take some comfort from it, I still have nothing substantial to tell the grandchildren.
