There was a beautiful Modern Love piece that came out last week called No Love is Ever Wasted. It included this profound bit, a mother responding to her daughter’s grief and wails for the loss of life, of realness and play, in her stuffed animal collection:
And then, despite my years of experience as a hospice chaplain, despite my own experiences of grief, despite everything I knew intellectually, emotionally, professional, spiritually and personally about love and loss — despite all of that, I looked at my weeping child and actually said this: “Well, you know Mary Bear, when kids stop playing pretend, they start doing other fun things. Like, umm, making things! You know, you could” — my brain was racing — “knit sweaters. Or, or, do wood working! You could make bookshelves. Or a little step stool!”
She stopped crying and looked up at me. Silent.
“Wood working?” she said, her words dripping with derision and incredulity.
I had broken every rule I knew about being with someone who is grieving. I tried to fix it. I tried to distract her. I tried to take away her loss instead of sitting with it.
I did my own wailing as I read this part of the essay.
I tried to take away her loss instead of sitting with it.
For all of my (many) faults in life, I have seemingly always intuitively known that other people’s pain needs to be sat with—not fixed, not suggested, not pointed out. Sat with. Kindly, patiently.
I am hurting and grieving right now for many reasons, in many layers. It is a period of life that requires a lot of sitting and a lot of patience and has me only really able to be around people who can do all of that. It’s the kind of hurting that you mark years, ages of your life, by.
I sometimes ask friends—what was the hardest year of your life?—and almost everyone’s face shows a flash of something before they respond with an age or a year. Twenty-nine or 2012 they’ll say and then pause and repeat it, remembering the bulleted list—or one particular almost-killed-them bullet—of what all happened. You can see it in their face. It’s in there. Deep.
Most of the time, if they keep going, they laugh. It’s laughable how bad it was. But only now.
I am sensitive.
I’ve been saying that a lot lately. At first it felt like an obvious confession and now it feels like an offered explanation, a way of saying Hey, I’m going to be OK, but I’m also just like this.
I was born the kind of sensitive that grows up feeling the pulse of every room they walk or are placed into and reads the faces, and the hidden faces, of everyone in it. I spent a significant part of my childhood trying to understand why people didn’t address that so-and-so was clearly sad and so-and-so was clearly angry and so-and-so was drunk and so-and-so was wringing their napkin under the table trying to get ready to say something that probably wasn’t going to be easy for half of the people at the table to hear and that the dog looked thirsty and the cat was not OK being pet by cousin Alex and that the tree out the window, the really pretty one—what was it called?—had a squirrel who was watching all of us and wasn’t that lovely, isn’t it so beautiful that animals watch us?, unless that is animal instinct and did anyone know—was that protective or watchful and kind? Did squirrels have families?—shouldn’t someone go get Uncle Joe a blanket?
It was confusing and isolating and often exhausting then. It still is, but I understand, and can wrangle, it differently now. I also see it more as something more like being a canary in a coal mine now, which is really how I see most sensitive people. Hello, this is wrong, helloooo.
Anyway.
My brother—who knows his sister is wildly and supremely sensitive—flew me on a red eye back to the east coast a couple weeks ago to be with him. He could hear how bad things felt. By the time I got on the flight, I had been crying for three days straight and couldn’t really stop. He picked me up at the airport and then he took me to Dunkin’ Donuts and then we got home and his two dogs flopped down on top of me on the couch and that was that. I stopped crying.
My brother and the dogs and I walked every morning and we ate good food and not-good food and we sat in Adirondack chairs at a winery and discussed our childhood and our not-childhood and I got to listen to my niece talk about her boyfriend and her friend who got caught smoking weed and I watched my younger nephew say ‘I love you’ to everyone every single time he left the room and I bit my tongue while my older nephew talked at length at the dinner table about the fraternity he belongs to and thought, on some sideline, about carrying him over a wooden bridge when he was four and how he’d say ‘Look!’ and I’d look and try to see whatever he could see and I thought about how my brother is a father but he was a mother and father to me first, so early, so young, and I felt love and loved and I also felt grief with me the entire time.
This is how my family sat with me.
There will be a day when I recall this as a hardest year, when I list the things that happened and I repeat at least one of them twice because the impact of all of it at once still feels a little unfathomable, and I’ll look at whoever I’m talking to and—somewhere in there—I will laugh. And I’ll eventually get around to what came after.
Everyone I’ve ever posed the question to—what was the hardest year of your life?—also always says what came after. Who took them in, where they had to move to, how long it took to get back to some kind of OK (thought ‘back to’ feels incorrect—maybe ‘reach some new OK’), how they got from very shitty point A to a slightly less shitty point B.
Sometimes they’re telling it from point C and sometimes point Z. But they’re usually not offering up lessons learned or sharing how joyful it was to move back in with their parents at 30 or to have to have surgery or to lose all their money or to lose someone or someone’s they loved. They’re just telling you some of the slog logistics of how they got through it. Who stepped in. Who helped. Who surprised them. Who left. Who bailed hard. Who they met when they least expected it.
And then it’s usually something like God, that was a shitty time one or two last times. And you nod and nod and nod. If you’re alive, you understand.
I’ve been trying to write this letter for a week. It’s been happening in between walks and face-planting into bed and hours and hours of picked-up work to try and make up for the half of the rent that there is no longer anyone else to pay. I’ve been trying to notice how spring is arriving—that the desert is full of tufts of green and spots of purple and yellow and white where there are tiny flowers and that the birds are out and loud every morning. But everything’s a little blurry, a little muffled. I have no idea what to do next or where to go and, some days, every coping mechanism I’ve got feels laughable and pointless and I think about laying down in the sunshine like a lizard on a rock and letting my responsibilities down and my credit score die and burning all my skin and then a bunch of quail birds come scurrying over for the bird seed I’ve left out and I sit up and I watch them and remember that all I’ve got, all any of us has got, is right this moment and I say some kind of internal hymn of a blendered fuck you and amen.
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