Good Grief
I started writing this in late December because I read some good books last year, and I was going to do a year-in-review thing with book recommendations. I started writing about one book, but then I got stuck.
It’s a book called A Heart that Works by Rob Delaney. He writes about the death of his young son. Super fun. I’m a big fan of Rob Delaney, mostly because of tweets like this:
I also love his series, Catastrophe, and his stand-up comedy, so I’m down to read whatever he puts out there, but I wasn’t expecting this. Fair warning: this book wrecked me but in a cleansing, ugly cry kind of way. He writes about grief and loss in a way that is honest and new, and it helped me look at my grief more effectively than therapy did. I can’t recommend this book highly enough, but I’m also cautious about who I would recommend it to. It’s painful to read, the humor is dark, and the despair is visceral.
I wrote that months ago, and that’s when I got stuck.
I have been trying to finish this, but every time I sit down to write, I tell myself that nobody wants to hear about this. I don’t want to hear about grief, either. I push it down. I attempt to process it and move on.
My neighbor recently lost her sister. I like my neighbor. We toasted the New Year at her house this year, but we’re not that close. We’re not close enough that I can tell her what I want to say to her. I want to tell her not to try to process her grief and be done with it. That is what I thought I was supposed to do, but that’s not how grief works.
At this point in life, I’m not sure if my memories are real or placed there, constructed of stories that I have heard, pictures of my sister in her favorite outfit that suddenly come to mind in these stories I re-live, songs that I think she liked, or I hoped she liked, but maybe only because I gave her the tape. I remember her being into Metallica toward the end of her life, and I can see her in my head dealing with her rage by listening to music too loud, but maybe that’s because that’s what I do.
I don’t know where the real memory starts, and the placed memories begin. Does it matter what she wore on the afternoon I picked her up and folded her wheelchair in the back of the red car that had gone through 3 teenage drivers? I think I placed her oxygen tank in the back seat, and we played pool and ate what must have been cookies and cream blizzards at Dairy Queen. I think we listened to some Mudhoney on the drive, and she didn’t like it but pretended she did, or that’s just the short story detail that fills those gaps in the story that runs through my head.
My grief isn’t for what was lost. It’s here now in the space that could have been. It’s her as a woman with a family, piercings, and kids as headstrong as I remember her. It’s the sadness of that lost support, someone else to call, and someone more like me than most others, or at least that’s the could-have-been that I long for.
She was so young when she died, and that emptiness of the person who should be here but isn’t has been around for years. She became this space that I filled with what I hoped to see, made-up memories, and out-of-focus pictures with a blurry orange date running across the bottom. My memories of that time are not good. Death and sadness were always around. I fill that grief with my own story, and it’s turned down low but a persistent hum.
And the sadness, like a good cry or the clearing out of a decades-long blockage of the emotional pipeline, can bring the blurred into sharp focus. There is truth in that sadness, and maybe it’s just a different kind of crutch, but I go with what rings true, and this sadness screams truth to me. It hurts, but it’s real.
And it’s always there, which this book helped me see. Grief doesn’t have to be processed and dealt with like some TPS report in your inbox. It can always be there. It is always there. My sister died 28 years ago, and her death still stops me. I think about her nearly every day. Sometimes it can be good sadness. And that’s what people usually say about grief: over time, the sadness becomes sweeter, but it doesn’t always work like that.
That emptiness where she should be is not sweet or some kind of tender memory. It’s real grief, and it can feel awful and weigh you down. It’s why religions are made and why people curse God, but it feels right as I fill up that space with what might have been.
I need to mention another great book on my list of recommendations before I got stuck in the grief spiral. My friend Noa Nimrodi wrote a book called Not So Shy that is now available to pre-order. She let me read an advance copy, and I loved it.
It’s young adult fiction about an Israeli family who moves to America. It’s good. I cried (which I guess I do a lot). The world needs this book right now. Kids need to know that antisemitism is awful, and it pisses me off that I even have to write that, but that’s where we are right now. It’s a good, wholesome family story and a quick read.