What Grief Does: A close reading you don’t need of a song you don’t care about.

Grief is a weird place. I’m kind of odd. It’s definitely been a strange combo. One of the things grief has done for me is permeate. I find it everyplace, whether I’m looking or not. It’s like a new crush, an upcoming vacation, a job search. Like a kid thinking about Christmas in November: even if you don’t want to, at some level you’re making a list of all the things you want under the tree. Except with grief, you’re kind of obsessed with the coal ash at the bottom of your stocking. 

Because I like to use my energy primarily for useless things no one else cares about, one of the ways I process is by reimagining songs in ways their writers never intended. I’m particularly fond of doing this while jogging or driving. But I guess also now blogging! 

I have a new song theory I’ve been nursing since Nina died: Every breakup song is also a song about grief. I don’t know whether it’s because the images used to for heartbreak are universal, or if I’m just warping everything in terms of my own grieving, or both (NB: it’s both). But since Nina died, I can’t stop listening to breakup songs and being convinced they’re actually metaphors for grief and loss. 

Here’s an example: Ezra Furman’s Love You So Bad. There are dozens, but I like this one’s peculiarities. 

Furman wrote the song from the perspective of a young man looking back at his first love, a high school sweetheart -- pretty far from a bereavement song on the surface. But the “bad” in the title complicates the narrative nicely — it’s meaning is both the commonplace slang for “so much” and a reference to the fact that the narrator is kind of a fuckup. And it’s a pretty great statement of the feeling almost everyone on the planet has when they try to reckon with love that no longer has a present object: it feels bad. 

The opening lines of the song are: You know I love you so bad / I don’t believe in lovePerfect! I LOVE cognitive dissonance. Yum. People with a severely broken heart are precisely the ones who don’t believe in love, and the deeper the wound, the stronger the denial of love – a defense mechanism that sometimes gets deployed proportionally. Grief is many things, but one of them is certainly a powerful form of heartbreak. 

The next few lines introduce the high-school romance, but they’re not anything that actually happened, it’s all overt metaphors for the way the lover feels looking back -- inept, off track, bereft:  

You know I love you so bad / Like the kid in the back of the classroom / Who can’t do the math cause he can’t see the black board

The metaphor continues apace, as the kid goes from being merely inept at math (possibly because his parents never bothered to get his eyes checked, I mean he can’t see the blackboard in high school math? Should someone get CPS involved?), to less and less socially acceptable behavioral metaphors for his angst:  

You know I love you so bad / Like the kid skipping class in the bathrooms / Sneaking cigarettes underneath the football bleachers baby, so bad / You know I love you so bad / Like the kids growing up to be criminals / Tearing pages out the back of the hymnals / For love notes baby, so bad

Furman distances the narrator from these examples by making them metaphors, which is what gives his song its figurative punch. It takes a basic range of teenage tropes and dislocates them from the actual high school context, making them signify for the loneliness, pain, and wistful regret of almost any broken heart. 

This speaks to grief because there is always a fine line between being attached to someone you love and dwelling or wallowing in grief or the past. No one who has lost a partner or other loved one ever wants to be told to “move on,” and I can’t agree more that’s a potentially noxious thing to say to the bereaved. But I also struggle mightily with what my attachment to Nina should be. How much is too much? What is loving even after loss, and what’s loving “bad,” or to excess so that I am not growing beyond that relationship. Even though I want to always have a relationship with Nina, that relationship has to change and grow in very profound ways now that she’s dead. Sometimes I feel like my love is more like the hymnal defacers-cum-criminals than the idealized version I’d rather have. 

Then things in the song get real, or at least, more narratively literal. In the next lines we see the actual people involved instead of the high school abstractions: 

“Still remember so bad / The nights mom got drunker than dad did / She told me never hang out with the bad kids / What can you say to that? / I always knew I was bad.”

But I still only believe these lines metaphorically, or at least I don’t care whether they actually happened to the narrator or, even less to Ezra Furman, which I think is the point. It’s artistic “truth” regardless of the facts, because the metaphors work and speak to our larger, more universal experiences of love and loss. In some ways, even though they’re couched in teen angst, they’re even more universal, because everyone had a childhood, everyone had some bumps along the way, and no one has access to their past except through the lens of memory, sometimes dimmed by nostalgia. And if listen to the song, Furman’s oohs and ahhs throughout the song give the whole piece a punchy, upbeat, teeny-bopper feeling that totally works in tension with the loneliness of the underlying narrative. 

The next bits of the lyrics are the meat of the loss. And it’s a delicious mix of teenage schlock ("came to the beach cause we used to go here”) and lines with wisdom that would apply to any relationship, or any loss ("I know the past is the past / Then again the present’s nothing without it” is pretty great, e.g.). 

Here the lines refer to someone the narrator is never going to see again. Sure, his Ex still sends him the occasional email. But the gulf is absolute here. The difference between leaving their town and leaving earth is metaphorically thin: “you moved away that was that” is a pretty abrupt finality, and “Somehow you got yourself accepted to college … I got a dumb job working in retail” is, on one level, just a description of one person making it out and the other not. But also it’s a wonderful metaphor for grief. 

Grief is TOTALLY a dumb job working in retail!! This appeals to me much more than the literal reading of that line. There are many times grief feels unfulfilling, self-regenerating, all encompassing, like a dead end job.

However, there’s also a strange, almost Zen like acceptance, which somehow doesn’t signify as detachment: “I feel fine, don’t even feel sad about it / I just love you baby so bad.” This acceptance can be read as denial -- there’s clearly nostalgia, reminiscence, and even pining present. 

There is a danger in any love affair, as well as with any loss or grief, of looking at the object of your feelings with nostalgia colored glasses. We all have moments where we romanticize the good, elide the mundane or outright unpleasant. This is understandable and maybe even necessary at some level, to bear up under the weight of loss or longing. But it can also be pernicious, and it contrasts with a sober (remember “sober nights in your car were transcendent” is compared favorably with getting out of hand and buying drugs from a parking attendant), unflinching apprehension of the past that doesn’t seek to elevate or canonize, but simply re-experience it, painful bits and all, through memory. 

The lines about acceptance can also be read at face value – perhaps despite mixing with the wrong crowd, having alcoholic parents who never took him to the ophthalmologist, and working a dead end job, the narrator has a strong, nuanced sense of attachment? Maybe he genuinely knows that his ex is better off without him. He may be “bad,” but he can still want good things for people he loves. I like this too. It implies that even damaged, hopeless, and bereft, we are capable of noble thoughts and feelings. I not only like this, I need to believe it to function these days. 

The freedom and removal where the narrator’s Ex in “I Love You So Bad” exists by escaping “all this garbage small town rat trap” makes a nice figurative depiction of release from the suffering of life. Even the sand metaphor works on both levels: the ocean washing away the name just as he’s written it can be just the ephemera of youth. Or it can be the ephemeral nature of all things, including human life. 

The overall thrust of the narrative is a deliberate attempt to access someone the narrator has lost, despite a complete lack of hope in the song. There is not one whiff in this of reconciliation — he does not expect to get back together. In fact there’s no even a whiff of an actual breakup or fight, just the Ex leaving and “that was that,” which is in many ways more akin to grief than to a breakup. 

Or maybe I’m just in my head too much. Maybe I see grief everywhere, infer loss of life from every expression of loss whatsoever. Still, I think that’s the real power of metaphor: it gives us access to things that aren’t necessarily evident or at the surface, it elicits meaning even where we don’t see it otherwise or might even actively resist it. That’s why I like listening to song lyrics so much. They feed the dialectic of my understanding even when I’m not hungry for it. 

It also it helps if the song has a pretty killer melody and a hook or two. So queue it up, give a listen, and tell me how wrong I am in the comments.  

Dog Days of Grief

Someone asked me last night how our dog, MacDuff, was doing. It was at an event promoting Nina’s book, which features a whole chapter on his adoption. So he’s kinda famous. The question got me thinking that I tend to view the events in our lives as a specifically human drama, but - as Nina recognized - MacDuff played his own significant role. So I’m dedicating this post to him. Dodes. MacDodo. Duffers. Duffy. MacScruff. 

Somehow, in the Fall of 2015, I became obsessed with the idea of adopting a new dog. Nina thought I was crazy for wanting to drop a new complication into the middle of our extant chaos. Her mom had just died, Nina was dealing with chemo and radiation, Freddy was still getting his feet as a type 1 diabetic. But I had a vision of a different kind of dog from the ones we’d had, who had both been lovable and wonderful, but also refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys. This dog would be sleek, athletic, dexterous, trainable, and most of all: fetching. Literally: I wanted a dog who could fetch. Sticks, balls, Frisbees, whatever. I throw it; the dog brings it back. Man’s Best Friend. Call central casting. 

So of course we wound up with MacDuff, a real life Muppet who doesn’t fetch and likes nothing better than to recline with people, preferable ON people. Fortunately, thisfit Nina’s vision perfectly. She said I was crazy, but by the time we stumbled upon MacDodes, Nina’s heart was deeply into the dog search, even if she let me beat the drum. 

I should have known. In 2002, when we adopted our first dog, it was because Nina had twice seen what she called “The Perfect Dog.” He first appeared in a dream, in whichNina also acquired The Perfect Dog’s name: Zilch. Then she saw Him (it was always a boy dog) in real life in a grocery store in Paris, leashless and infinitely well trained, patiently awaiting its owner by the exit. It was a miracle Nina didn’t dognap Him. She took only Zilch’s requisite identifying characteristics: he was long and low, some mix of corgi and hound, and tricolored - black-white-brown. After seeing the oneiric version and the one that waited with so much poise at Monoprix, we walked into the Guilford County Animal Shelter and saw The Perfect Dog waiting for us.  

Zilch was constructed from spare parts taken from several different dogs. 

And Zilch was nearly everything Nina had dreamed of: he was quirky, lovable, adoring, affectionate, and loyal. He looked like he was made of spare parts. His back end was higher than his front and when he ran, his rear would outpace his front end and his backside would swing out to one side a little. 

Whatever his foibles (violence towards children chief among them), Zilch ADORED Nina and was more or less her Platonic ideal of a dog. 

Sadly, he wasn’t The Perfect Dog to everyone, nor as well trained as Monoprix Zilch. For one thing he leaked. Literally: he had bladder control issues. He’d be cuddling with us in bed, get up and to in the other room, and leave a big wet spot on the duvet (typical man). Then he nipped a few guests in our apartment, plus bit our across the street neighbor’s pant leg. And then the kids were born, and he started to bare his teeth at them after Benny arrived and Freddy got ambulatory. Finally, not long after Benny came home from the hospital, he broke free in the back yard and bit a passer-by. So we had to put him down. 

Another vision emerged when it was time to adopt Zilch’s sister-wife, Ellie. Nina read that black dogs have the hardest time being adopted from shelters because they’re so common. This tugged hard at the same instinct for loveable misfits that led to Zilch, but in this case Nina insisted that She (it had to be a girl) be a plain black lab mix. It wasn’t an exotic order, and sure enough we went to the shelter and saw poor, underfed, nearly feral Ellie, who acted like she’d never slept indoors before and very much fit the image of a desperate, unwanted black dog urchin. She made fast friends with Zilch, but never totally bonded with Nina. NER loved Ellie, but she was too high strung to be a cuddly dog. Nina used to say that Zilch was her dog, and Ellie was Zilch’s dog. 

Zilch playing with his new dog the day we brought her home from the shelter. 

This last time Nina had a different vision. What she wanted above all else was a nuzzly mutt, in the parlance of our times (parlance as coined by our then six year old son Benny). A dog who would cuddle, with a massive capacity for affection, not too high energy, who could pass the long days of treatments, side effects, and shortened futures with her. 

It turns out, she wanted a MacDuff. Seemingly sui generis, he immediately became her bosom companion. He would get on the couch or the bed with her and gradually arrange himself so that as much of his body was on top of as much of her as possible. If she let him he would sit facing her with his front paws on her shoulders and his face buried in her neck. MacDuff was like a if your favorite stuffed animal came to life but still let you treat it like a stuffed animal. Nina used to say that MacDuff was a tiny man trapped inside a dog suit and the reason he climbed up on her is that he wanted her to find the seams and let him out.

Couch sitting as avocation helped make MacDuff the perfect cancer companion. 

And Dodes was wonderful with the kids and Ellie, too. Poor, quaking Ellie, who pants so hard during thunderstorms it leaves a sizable puddle at my bedside (where she comes to quake and breathe loudly). She’d just been traumatized by our attempted adoption of another dog who bullied and harassed her for a long weekend before we gave up. MacDuff drew her out of her shell. Ellie showed all of her 11+ years, getting long in the few remaining teeth she had, but his presence seemed to revivify her. He inveigled her into playing around the house, ran in circles around her in the backyard, and more or less brought her back to life. 

Ready for his MacCloseup. 

MacDuff’s timely arrival was quite a turn of events. But it was also not that long before Nina died and, by that time, he was not only a member of the family but Nina’s emotional service dog. Nina’s death hit him hard. First, the dogs just plain got ignored a fair amount after she died. But also, suddenly and with no explanation, MacDuff’s person was just gonezo. I don’t even really grasp human grief, so I can’t imagine how it feels on the canine end of things. But I would guess it’s a total gut job. Dogs literally live for their people, and MacDuff could not have been more dedicated or attached than he was to Nina. 

I don’t want to pluck too hard on the heartstrings, but the fact is he hasn’t been the same since Nina died. He is still himself, just flatter. Literally - he lies flat on the floor much of the day, as though trying to make himself invisible, or as much a part of the carpet as possible. He sometimes refuses to eat, or to go outside for no reason. He still gets excited when Nina’s dad comes over, and he still gets worked up every day when I come home, but it’s almost like he’s just bursting with anxiety, not romping with joy. 

MacDuff just trying to cope. 

It’s not like he’s not still a sweet dog. He’s gentle, affectionate, well behaved, and cuddly as can be. And I try to pay him extra attention. And every once in a while I let him sleep in my bed, just so he can have someone to cozy up to. He seems to enjoy it, but it never makes him glad. Just services his insecurity. As soon as I fall asleep he ambles back down to the floor, or retires to his dog bed, flat as before. 

I don’t know. We all anthropomorphize our pets. Maybe when I’m describing MacDuff I’m just writing about myself, about the feelings of desolation that flow from a loss like Nina dying. But I swear, the Dodes just isn’t the same dog who shared so much joy with Nina in that last phase of her life. So that’s how MacDuff is doing. And whether it’s me projecting or not, he really does seem about the same, he just lays a little bit lower, bounds into your lap with a little less unalloyed joy, and wears his dog suit a little more heavily. I feel ya, Dodes. 

Boundary Riders

I’m giving a talk tonight about Nina’s book, The Bright Hour, for the Greensboro Library and Greensboro Hospice & Palliative Care. I’ve done book events before, and it always gives me a chance to reflect on what it means to stand in the shoes of someone who’s died, to be their stand-in.

It’s weird, for sure. Talking about my dead spouse and her work publicly was odd at first, but that’s not even what I mean. Actually, talking about Nina is one of my favorite things to do, so that was never much of a hurdle, just took some getting used to.

I mean more that I would never have spoken for Nina while she was alive, at least not without regretting it. I’d almost certainly have mangled her thoughts, or at the very least been guilty of some pretty hefty patriarchy fouls (to be pellucidly clear: when your partner is a woman who is also smarter and more talented than you, don’t speak for her). So it’s weird to be her primary spokesperson, even if I’m doing it solely because of her, well, unavailability. I mean, it’s not like she just stepped out of the room to pee and I’m inveighing in a conversation on her behalf. But still.

What’s become particularly clear to me is that of all the things about which I know what Nina would have thought, probably the one I am most positive I DO NOT understand is death and dying. Yet these themes are at the center of her memoir and therefore at the heart of the conversation about her book. I think that’s appropriate, The Bright Hour has a lot to offer the conversation about death and dying. But I’m a consumer of that information, not its font.

Standing close to the abyss might be unnerving, but it is not falling in. And no matter how close you are to someone who’s dying—and I could not have been closer to Nina unless I’d pulled a Silence of the Lambs and worn her skin suit—you are not actually experiencing mortality. You are witnessing it. Bearing witness is important, but it does not mean you are going through it. I spent countless hours with Nina in the year plus we knew that her disease was terminal. I was in the trenches and I thought about it constantly. But I never experienced, as she did, the inexorable shrinking of my world as terminal disease progressed throughout my body. I saw my kids and wondered how they would get on without their mother, and I was wracked with fear and anguish thinking about Nina and what she must have been suffering, both physically and psychically. But I never felt any of it directly.

I don’t care how empathetic you are, nor how faithfully you follow Montaigne’s advice (and I commend it to you) to have death as an ever-present reminder that life’s project is constructing your own end. Until you are walking with that shadow beside you, stalking your life in an immediate and real way, I don’t think there is any way to understand what facing that kind of finality means. 

Nina used to relish any chance to chat with her friend Ginny, who was diagnosed with the same type of cancer at almost the same time. They were friends for only a short while—basically the duration of their course of disease, which was unmercifully short in both cases. But they found a resonance in each other’s words that went beyond the fact that both were sharp, funny, caring, generous people. They heard intoned in those conversations things that I suspect, had they shared them with the world, would have been lost on anyone who wasn’t also dying. I’m not talking about spirituality or the music of the spheres, just the resonance of words, their meanings and connotations in that very peculiar context only discernible to them. I like to imagine the dialogue between them was like seeds being cast, each of them talking to the other across the boundary fence, trying to keep the other’s field yielding up fruits from the earth that would swallow them both imminently. Terminal cancer farming. It’s the next big thing in metaphors.

I also remember the very fact that I couldn’t understand what was happening with Nina—more and more the closer she got to dying—was a source of anguish for me, and possibly the only thing we really fought about while she was sick. There’s a scene in her book that depicts this gulf, and it’s one of my very favorite passages in a book full of favorite passages. It’s hard to witness someone you love suffering and dying. But it’s also hard to feel that suffering estrange you from your person. And yet it’s inevitable. Everyone dies alone, they say, and while that’s maybe overstating it, I certainly believe no one can understand what it means to die until their own death is upon them.

Our most important project as human beings is leading a meaningful life, which if you believe Montaigne (and I do), means constructing a meaningful death. They are the same thing. Parts of a single whole. Life is nothing more than steps towards life's end (death). Every breath we take uses up some tiny quotient of our capacity to draw breath, but it also keeps us alive. Until that day we have exhausted all our vital capacities—or maybe when we've very nearly done so—we don’t really know what death is. My mistake with Nina was clinging too tightly to the idea that she and I shared everything. We never did. She was always her own person. She always spoke for herself. But I loved her so much and held to the idea that she and I were fellow travelers so tightly that it actually skewed my perspective when she needed me to recognize, as her death became imminent, that she was walking a boundary that I couldn’t even approach, let alone understand. I needed to take her word for it, to allow her to travel in that “suspicious country” (after which she named her blog) and try to support her without conflating her journey with mine. And ultimately, I think that’s where we arrived by the time she died—but it took me some hard realizations to get there.

She also didn’t leave any specific answers for what to do when she wasn’t around and lots of people wanted to know what she thought about this, that, and the other thing. But she did give me the basics. Nina told me, not more than a week or two before she died, that I should do as much or as little of the book-related stuff as I wanted. As much as I could handle, as much as it helped me to process, grieve, and move forward after she died. I’m not going to translate that as “carte blanche,” but I’m also not going to feel overly circumspect or self-conscious about trying to represent Nina’s literary interests or promote her work.

On the other hand, I’m never going to pretend like I actually understand what she went through, nor what she’d make of the unkempt scene today, 18 months after she died, wherein I am asked repeatedly about her thoughts, her process, her views, her life. I never rode the boundary with her—that was Ginny’s job. I’m just here to report on how it feels to have been inside the fence watching as she worked.

We are not confused.

This week everyone in the Facebook and Instagram universe is sending their kids back to school, including me. It’s weird as hell but I keep finding myself using the singular to describe my plans, as in “I’m sending Freddy to the Friends school this year,” or “I’m planning to make an effort to be more involved with the boys’ schools this year.” It’s partly just unconscious logic—I am after all, the only one doing these things. But it’s also a semi-deliberate attempt to not weird people out by using the first person plural. I worry I’m implying that Nina is still literally part of our family unit (my Angel-Wife and I have conferred on the astral plane and we agree that the boys really should have less exposure to BPA and WE are therefore buying only stainless steel lunch boxes!).

It also reminds me of a weird quirk Nina pointed out years ago. When I talked about my past—childhood memories, college, anything from before we met—I would often use the first person plural. So my recollections would sound something like: “we used to always think our next door neighbor was a psycho,” or “in college we went to this incredible park near State College.” I used to argue that it was because I’d done those things with a group, so strictly speaking, it was a “we.” Nina felt pretty sure it was my subconscious self-aggrandizing, intoning in the royal We.

Since Nina died, there’s no one to tease me about my Queen Victoria tendencies (We are not amused by this, frankly), but I think I’m a little clearer on why I had them. It wasn’t me being literal (but there were several people!!) or grandiose (ok, maybe a little). It’s a sub-rosa form of what I guess is a self-esteem issue. I think I have a fundamental lack of ownership for my past. Not that I don’t take responsibility for it, or that I even want to deny it (though I sometimes have to ask my older sisters what happened during my own childhood…so maybe something to work on in therapy?). It’s more that by subsuming myself in the “we” of the past it takes the focus off me. It decenters me and attaches me to others, makes me part of a whole, which I don’t tend to see myself as. I don’t fully understand why my brain operates this trick. But Nina dying definitely helped me to see it better.

When my dad died, I felt I was able to see my parents’ relationship clearly for the first time. It was kind of rocky and (sorry Mom!) dysfunctional. And I knew the ins and outs of their stuff pretty well, the things they fought about and the things that made them upset with me. But until my dad was gone, the contours of their INTER-relationship were opaque. With just my mom alive, it was clearer how she operated and how that interacted with the person my dad had been. A marriage is such an immensely complex relationship, it’s hard to tell after a while even when you’re one of the partners in the marriage.

That was true for me and Nina, too. Until she died, I don’t think I had a clear picture of the contours of what was me and what was her (she did, and I can now confirm she was right about all of it, FFS). One of the several things her death revealed for me about the shoreline/shore of me/her was that my first person pluralism was not just a vestige of my recollections, but a very present part of my relationship to her. It’s taken me months and months to get accustomed to saying “I” instead of “we.” And I know some of that is just normal adjustment to loss—there was indeed a “we” until Nina died, an actual two-person referent, not just my quirky self-effacement. But it was also that.

One of the persistent problems in our marriage was my over-identification with it. I subsumed myself in the relationship to such a degree that it became problematic. I lived my life not just with Nina, but sometimes through her. It left her feeling overly depended upon, and me without a support structure that wasn’t her. I knew this, we talked about it, fought about it, told our therapists about it. But I didn’t see it clearly, I didn’t connect it to my broader issues—draw the full contours—because while Nina was alive things hummed along most of the time, more function than dysfunction—which allowed me to only trace it far enough to put out fires, never all the way to the root.

That masked another thing Nina saw clearly and tried to tell me: that it wasn’t just MY dysfunction, but hers as well—she was enabling my self-effacement or abnegation, or just plain abdication of certain parts of our relationship, by providing the structure I depended on. It wasn’t that I was an unwilling partner, it was just that I needed her to be in the lead, to provide the scaffold and tell me where to paint.

It wasn’t the conceptual part that was so elusive. We discussed All the Stuff repeatedly. It’s the concrete reality of it. Now that I do all the things that get done in my relationship of one, I have a fundamental, practical understanding of the levers of my own and my family’s relationships to each other and to the world: what it takes to keep up relationships with friends, with the kids’ friends, family, teachers, doctors, therapists, etc. How to plan holidays, dinners, trips, weekends, so that all our important people remain in their proper orbits. These things sound simple but each of them contains a universe of complex interpersonal relationships that have to be maintained with tried and true techniques and all the other minutiae that (hopefully, fingers crossed, dear god who died and left me in charge…oh yeah…) add up to a meaningful life.

So it’s with not a little sense of irony that I am learning to say “I” instead of “we” by working hard at all the things that I used to depend upon Nina to reckon. But I am determined to not only keep up old relationships, but actually form new ones. I have worked hard outside my comfort zone over the past 18 months and while the progress has been halting—my version of being on top of things resembles Nina’s only in the very broad strokes—it is tangible. And I did send Freddy and Benny off to school and I managed to snap a couple of IG worthy pictures of Our Boys, who of course, despite all my conjugational metamorphosing, will always remain firmly in the first person plural possessive.

Back to the Present, or, Dating Myself.

Things have changed in the dating world since I was last single. Of course, that was 1998, so maybe it’s not a revelation. I got married young in 2000 after a brief, undistinguished career as a serial monogamist, so I never actually “dated” per se.

Fortunately, I found the right relationship early, got married, and never needed to do anything else. That is, until my wife died in 2017 at age 39. We knew the relationship was limited by the whole “til death do us part,” thing, but we had been planning to stay married and alive together for a lot longer. I found myself in the Twilight Zone of involuntary singledom known as widowhood. Widowerhood? I’m a widoweirdo.

My first relationship after Nina died fell into my established pattern: serious, intense monogamy that emerged from a non-dating scenario. The fact that it was my first relationship as a widower, my partner was also widowed, and we both had kids definitely set it apart. this wasn’t a neutral adult relationship setting. My grief was a thing that I carried around with me all the time, even when it wasn’t apparent (in many ways it still is, though the burden eases more often), and the new relationship served to both mask and emphasize my aggrieved state. There was a ton of good stuff happening. But, when things got challenging, and real fissures were revealed, I didn’t have a deep bench of emotional reserves to send into the game. I was the Cleveland Cavaliers of relationship game, if I may so metaphorically flatter my starting lineup (which, to be fair, at least had enough talent to get me there?).

So, now I am forty-two now and learning for the first time what “dating” means and how to do it. My first instinct after the breakup was to crawl into a very deep hole. Deep holes are dark and lonely, yes, but also safe and quiet. There is no chance of anyone dying on you or breaking up with you while alone in a deep, dark, hole. But, no. I have kids. It wouldn’t be fair—or even vaguely pleasant—to live in a relationship fallout shelter with them.

Also a big part of the reason I felt open to having new relationships is that Nina and I discussed it before she died. She’d not only encouraged me to find love again, but articulated reasons why: 1. She wanted me to be as happy as I could during the presumptively long time I had left to live; and 2. She recognized that being in a relationship was part of how I thrived. It wasn’t just because she and I had a long, rewarding relationship that I felt at home in that environment. I was able to function well enough to make things work in our marriage in part because being in a relationship suits me. She was sharp, that Nina. And generous of spirit, even when dying. A multitasker.

Despite the ruination of grief and the uber-ruination of breakup mid-grief, I was determined to get back on the bike. But I also wanted to take a slightly different approach after wiping out spectacularly, ass-over-teakettle, on the first post-widowhood ride. It wasn’t as simple as avoiding another breakup. Breaking up compounded my sense of loss and set me back in ways both obvious (duh, breakups feel bad, breakups after loss feel very bad) and unforeseen (my kids still ask months later why they can’t talk to my ex-GF—"we decided it's healthier for your psychologically" isn't a great rejoinder to “we love her and we didn’t break up with her!”). The barriers to emotional functionality are sometimes (read: for me nearly always) only legible as they’re being written on the page, in real time.

So the plan was built on caution: do not immediately meet the Presumptive Next Great Love of Your Life, both because PNGLYF is a horrid acronym, and that method already warped my few remaining joists of emotional stability. My problem is that I want something--connection, social interaction, new relationships--but I don’t want to jump into another Serious Relationship. So I decided to try the current thing single people do to meet other single people: I joined several online dating apps.

First I had to overcome a mental hurdle. When I was last single, Toni Braxton still needed her heart unbroken, Duncan Sheik was barely breathing, and dating online was not yet the mainstream method of meeting people it represents today. Dating online was dodgy, smacked of desperation, and was located in the popular imagination only slightly uphill on the slippery slope from mail-order brides. I am not a 1998 sex tourist. I am a startlingly conventional cis, white, middle class professional man with poor social skills and recent history of emotional trauma. Why should someone with those sterling credentials have to resort to the fringe dating means of the desperately lonely?

Happily, for the most part, the unseemliness of online dating turned out to be a something of a myth. A quick Google search and a quick consult of my stalwart online support group, the Hot Young Widows Club, provided me with ample anecdotal evidence that dating apps today are by far mainstream, not a unsavory backwater. I downloaded several.

Some field notes on the general status of online dating: 1. There really are a LOT of white women (and virtually no black women) named Becky, with varying degrees of hair quality; 2. Everyone single except me has been to Machu Pichu and taken their photo in front of a pyramid; 3. The most popular activities among the currently single age 30-45 crowd are sarcasm, craft beer, and tacos, so we are a generation apparently raised in a cantina by parents with an unsophisticated sense of irony?

Next I needed to figure which app best suited my online dating needs. It turns out that, while there are many similarities, the apps each had a different feel. It’s a little like choosing your favorite bar—they all pour more or less the same booze, but you go into some expecting atmosphere and cozy conversation, while others promise black-light friendly body paint and test tubes filled with brightly colored liquids. Different venues, differing expectations.

For example, Tinder is sort of the Coke of online dating apps. A name brand, it is expansive, widely used and recognized, and maybe not that good for you? It has a bit of a reputation as a hookup app, though that is not exclusively true (I can assure that I deftly avoided hooking up completely!). Tinder’s interface is conceptually intuitive—the origin of the whole swipe right (rejection!) and left (interested!) trope. If you both swipe left on each other, you have a “match” and you can chat with the person. I found it easy to use and as a general matter not flooded with profiles that make me grimace (though it certainly has those, thank you very much Lady Posing in Bikini with Actual Tiger and self-described “Discreet Bottom Dude” who charges $75 for some services, $100 for others).

I recommend using Tinder if you’re just starting out. If nothing else it will help you understand the baseline for how well-designed apps function. I will also say that I have not advanced beyond the chatting phase on Tinder. No actual dates. But that may have more to do with user error, so I won’t judge Tinder on this factor. And I did engage in a fair amount of online chatting with people who seemed to be real people and very nice.

The second app I tried was Bumble, which markets itself as being more woman-friendly. The key difference between Bumble and Tinder (and perhaps the only meaningful difference in terms of function) is that on Bumble, once you have a match, the woman has to reach out first, there is no way for men to initiate contact. I find this to be a puzzlingly “feminist” aspect to the app at best: true, it gives women control over initiation of direct communication, which could screen out, say, someone you accidentally swiped right on (I’ve done this a few times already, sorry!). But otherwise, you don’t really know if you want to chat until you…chat? And it also puts more of the onus on women, which seems arbitrary and unfair (we’re making up for centuries of misogyny in dating by making women do all the work?!). So I’m not sure how it helps.

Having said that, whether it’s the design & function of the app or just its reputation, Bumble does appear to create a MUCH more tasteful dating ecology than Tinder. Maybe the men who muck up Tinder don’t bother with Bumble because they’re only on the app to send first message dick pics or aggressive requests for golden showers (these are actual things that happen, sadly, as I’ve heard from multiple women, not just me looking for excuses to blog nasty)? This is where the bar metaphor comes in handy. Both places might be filled with singles, but one is a bit of meat market with loud bass-heavy music and the other has darts, a nice jukebox, places to sit comfortably, and enough lighting that you can’t be sexually assaulted without the rest of the room knowing it. I never progressed beyond the chatting phase with Bumble either. But the chats were nice?

Both Bumble and Tinder have paid portions of the app where you can “boost” your signal in various ways or see more information about people who have liked you even though you haven’t “matched” yet. I’m not sure about the value you’d get from any of the enhanced subscription services. But even without the paid tools, you get a pretty complete dating app interface.

The next app I tried is Coffee Meets Bagel. This one varies from the Tinder swiping model. CMB presents the user with a slate of “bagels” every day at noon. It’s just a few, 4-6 maybe, and those are the only profiles you can connect with for free (by liking them). And you have to like or reject each bagel in series, no comparison shopping. If you don’t like your bagels that day, you can go to the “discovery” section, but you have to spend “beans” (coffee beans, get it?) to like these folks (letting them know of your interest). You get some beans just for showing up, but if you wanted to “like” more than one or two people in the discovery zone, you’d have to purchase additional beans for real money. I don’t like the design of the app very much, it’s clunky and doesn’t give you a lot of options without paying for added services.

However, CMB also led to my only actual real life interaction: a date! And it was a nice date, with a real human person who was fun, smart, talented, attractive, and exactly as she appeared on the app (i.e. not a serial killer, scammer, or unsolicited discreet bottom dude). So I have to give credit where it’s due. Coffee met bagel. I still haven’t figured out which of us was which, though.

The final two apps are not for the faint of heart, IMO. First is OKCupid, which is one of the more venerable and widely recognized names in the game. I won’t belabor this, just say that, internally every time I opened the app after the first few I said to myself “OK, stupid…” as a kind of mantra of self-mockery. It’s not a great app, either functionally or in terms of design. The various sections aren’t intuitive and it never presents that many profiles as options—all these apps are geolocation dependent, so the dating pool is limited by your location, but even given my relatively shallow dating pool of Greensboro, NC and environs, OKC lacks depth. I wouldn’t caution against OKCupid, but I wouldn’t rate it very highly either.

Plenty of Fish (PoF, or Puddle of Flesh in my internal parlance) is the last app I downloaded and I only kept it for sheer entertainment value. It has by far the highest per capita use of stupid SnapChat filters (maybe I’m just old and out of touch, but why anyone would want the first thing a potential date to see about them to be their picture with a dog or giraffe face I do not know), inappropriate thong and breast appearances, and outright raunchiness of any of the apps. I will admit I don’t understand porn bots, but there seem to be a lot of them on PoF. Five Points & Fayetteville, NC for some reason are just a total den of iniquity if you believe PoF’s geo-location.

The main selling point of PoF is an attempt to address the depth issue of OKC: there are indeed PLENTY of fish. But the PoF Ocean is overpopulated with varieties of fish that ought to swim in parts of the dating sea were photography, reading, or even oxygenation is rarely possible.

They say that no matter where you go, there you are. This truism is perhaps even truer in the virtual world, where you “go” places without ever leaving your couch. My goal in testing out the dating apps was to vary from my previous experience: connect with and learn about other people, maybe date casually, and hopefully find out something about myself in the process, in order to find out what I wanted from this new, excruciatingly involuntary phase of my life. “Unfortunately,” the first person I actually met turned out to be an appealing woman who, like the vast majority of the interesting people on dating apps, was looking more for a stable, long-term relationship than a half-assed connection with an emotionally damaged dude who was just putting himself out there to avoid staring into the abyss.

If I learned anything from the breakup of my first post-loss relationship, it’s that I’m not ready for a new LTR (online dating parlance!). The breakup set me back on the LTR-readiness timeline not just due to once bitten twice shyness, but to something that surprised me, but is maybe endemic to this brave new world of “dating”: distrusting my relationship instincts. For nearly 18 years I’d honed my relationship skills and ability to problem solve relationship issues, and I figured the one thing I could be ready to do was relationship work. But I’d only learned to function within a single adult relationship. And my first relationship after Nina died had a high degree of difficulty (long-distance, immediate post-grief timing). So it turned out that I wasn’t as prepared as I reckoned and I made a pretty thorough hash of what ought to have been something very good.

I came out of that relationship without my normal fixed emotional navigation points. Also with less zest for maybe the most important part of a LTR: the desire to comingle two complex, adult lives into a functional whole. Introducing someone to friends and family, sharing emotional and physical space, placing a new layer of shared intimacies on top of the ones I am still grieving. Although it was a promising connection, I immediately undermined the CMB relationship—the one real conventional online dating success I’d produced—with the cognitive dissonance of my situation: I overtly wasn't looking for anything serious, but still behaved very much as I had grown accustomed -- like someone in a serious, monogamous relationship. Thus proving in a new and tech-forward way that after 42 years, I am still by far my own worst enemy. Here I am, no matter where I go.

I’ve decided to step away from the online dating world for a while. Despite the foregoing, I consider my online dating experience a success. I met people, both virtually and in real life (that’s IRL, FWIW), some of whom are really great. And I proactively put myself out in the world as an available, single person, which sure beats rocking back and forth in the fetal position or eating too many frozen yogurt pops (OMG those things are good and so expensive!) to fill the void. But dating online to fill the empty spots in my emotional life—with no intention of following through on any meaningful connection I might make—just doesn’t feel right. I need connection, but I’m just going to have to find it other ways (my friends and family are officially on notice. Also: blogging!).

All in all, the online dating world is both everything negative I’d heard—slightly scary, definitely weird, filled with strangers making kissy faces—and a helpful way to meet new people. It amplifies both the power to interact with potentially interesting people (there’s no way to meet that many people IRL) and the potential to be offensive or weird online. It’s a perfect proxy for the state of the single world, which is of course radically imperfect.

Rememorial

Today is eighteen months since Nina died. Part of me is amazed that it’s been that long. My relationship with her was so fundamental to everything I know that she’s always somehow immanent. But at the same time I can’t believe it’s only been eighteen months. So much has already happened. Kids have changed shoe sizes multiple times, relationships have ended, other loved ones have died. The wheels are most definitely still in spin. Things aren't receding exactly, but it wasn't just yesterday either.

I have a love-hate relationship with the anniversaries. They give me a chance to reflect and an excuse to spout off about it (and make sure my navel is lint-free). But the date is painful, to a greater or lesser extent, and there’s always some aspect of it that I don’t see coming. Part of the problem is that my psyche doesn’t really check the calendar the way I do. So it tends to plotz a few days before the actual anniversary. Randomly selects an otherwise unpropitious moment and slams my fingers in the emotional car door of grief.

This time I got the grief slap about a week ago and, rather than having to figure out some unexplained depression, frustration, or general gloom and doom—my usual m.o.—I experienced my first feelings of anger at Nina during a really weird dream. It was SO massively textbook that I’ll save the details for psychotherapy. But suffice it to say, we were in a familiar/unfamiliar setting, I needed Nina, and she was off doing something else with other people I didn’t know and not there to help me through my pain! Then just for good measure there was a semi-unrelated part at the end where I was attending a high school reunion dance/social and everyone there hated me, or I was sure they did, for something horrible I’d done. My psyche needs some work on the sublimation process. It’s amateur hour in there. Hire new writers or something?

I had severe stomach cramps all night, couldn’t sleep after the dream, the whole bit. It sucked. We’ve all had awful dreams. And I have had some pretty sucky bouts of missing Nina and needing her. But this time it was accompanied by being angry at her, which led to me feeling guilty and ashamed about that anger. I mean, what kind of person gets mad at someone for dying (except literally everyone who loses someone, duh, I know, I know…)?

Conventional wisdom says that year two after losing a partner can be even harder than year one. By year two, you’re still struggling mightily, feeling grief keenly, but the world rumbles on apace, so even if you have an attentive, supportive, loving network of people, like I do, you wind up feeling left behind, like things are getting “back to normal” when normal is no longer a place where you live. It’s also hard because it’s not just “the world” or “other people.” I also feel myself “moving on” (I hate that phrase, which itself carries some measure of judgment, but it’s what we call it?). Just by sheer force of repetition of days, you move further from the place you were when your person was with you. That’s where the guilt comes in: are you leaving your partner behind? Losing touch with what you had together, her memory receding too far to be comfortable?

There’s no way around it: the further I get from actually interacting with Nina, the more I rely on an imperfect set of memories and the more distance and noise come between me and the immediacy of Nina’s presence. That’s a part of grief that gets harder, not easier with time.

The other day I was trying to mentally summon a picture of Nina without summoning an actual photo. I couldn’t do it at first. I tried to bring up the many, many images I have stocked away in my brain, but nothing. It was dispiriting. I felt a little panicked. Like she was slipping through my fingers, very waking nightmare like, speaking of dreams. I knew the images were in there, but had no access.

Then I went about it differently. Instead of summoning the images directly, I just started thinking about Nina more narratively, remembering events or even just thinking about her being in our kitchen or our bedroom without any tie to a particular memory. Almost immediately I was not only able to summon her image, but also the feel of her presence, her touch, her scent, her laughter. It was a very welcome turn of events. Especially in light of the involuntary self-laceration of my dream (happily, oneiric Nina is really nothing like actual Nina, so I was able to tell myself that as a sort of differential diagnosis of my own neurosis).

Later that night I picked up this book I’ve been reading for an eternity. It’s by a French thinker—Edgar Morin—who’s kind of an amazing guy. He a theoretician of “complexity,” a philosopher, but his work spans the fields of sociology, anthropology of science, cybernetics, communications theory, and communications theory, and ecology. He’s in his nineties, still writing, has a major research center named after him in more than one country, and is a politically engaged leftist who believes strongly that saving the plant is of vital importance. I kind of want him to adopt me. And I’d want to call him “Pepe Edgar,” naturally.

In his seminal work “The Method,” of which I have been reading part one of six (!!), he theorizes about how complex the world is and how only by starting from a thorough understanding of complexity can we really understand how the world came to be and how it works.

I started reading this book a long while before Nina died. I put it down for long stretches, but kept coming back to it. His work has never been translated and the French is pretty straightforward but the concepts are mind-bendingly complicated. Usually I struggle to get through a section or two—just a few pages of text. Also I think I’m reading it even more slowly now because it’s the last book I have that I was still reading when Nina was alive, and in some weird way that connects it to her—I used to bore her to tears talking about it, and while she had no particular fondness for that aspect of it, it’s still evocative for me. Sitting in bed with that book, it’s easy for me to summon her.

The section I was reading started with the old biology truism that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny—in other words (ones we actually use regularly) the physical makeup and life process of an individual of the species is a kind of reflection of the genetic development of that individual’s species. We are the sum of our genetic history, crudely speaking.

But then he shifts to memory. Memory is also based on a kind of code or registry. Instead of DNA and a code made up of amino acids, memory is lodged in our cerebral cortex. We don’t fully understand how it works, but it’s produced--or reproduced, since all memory is a reproduction of a past event, just as all expressions of an individual’s physical being are reproduced from the source genetic code—by a set of relationships between neurological components in our brains. There is an actual physical place where memory happens. It’s not like a file in a computer, it’s an active physiological process that’s complex and relational—but it exists, there is a human being and they have a brain and without that physical brain there’s no memory.

Morin says this is a key difference between the phylogenic recapitulation of ontogeny and recall of memory—if the person with the memory dies, there’s no more memory, whereas if an individual of the human species dies, their DNA may already have been passed on and in any case, other humans will presumably keep reproducing a similar genetic code and the species will survive. There’s also the fact that DNA produces a physical copy while memory only produces an imaginary one, but this, instead of degrading memory comparatively, should be celebrated, because it is what makes beings with the ability to remember so extraordinary. We can imagine things that are no longer there—like dragons and dead people!

Both genetic code and memory are imperfect reproductions. DNA mutates, particular individuals are exposed to differing environmental factors that influence the development of the species over time. There is “noise” in the system. And that can be a very good thing—if the process worked “perfectly” then presumably we would all just be replicants, not individuals, but perfect copies of the “source code.”

Memory has its own noise: we can’t recall a perfect image, only a degraded one, a version subject to the failings of human anatomy/neurology/perception. But that may be a good thing, too: Morin points out that there have been experiments done wherein certain parts of the brain are stimulated and the subject cannot discern that the memory thereby elicited was not real. They were no longer just remembering, but hallucinating their own past experiences!

This is terrifying and fascinating. But, how does this long diatribe relate to Nina or my grief, you should definitely be asking by now (if you’re still reading)? I’m not sure, is the unsatisfying but true response.

Morin’s book is ennobling of memory, it gives it a place alongside other “real” biological/physical processes instead of locating it someplace in the ether of the ideal. This makes my access to Nina seem somehow less abstract. Like there are indelible, physical places in my memory where whatever version of her I have is located, and I have access to those places so long as I’m alive to carry around my memories.

Morin also points out—though he admits it’s hugely reductive—that the difference between our perceptions of events in real time and our memories is not a great as we like to think. We only perceive “reality” through the same process that we perceive memory—our sensory perceptions. In the case of a memory, we are re-calling or re-producing an image. Either way we only have the equipment we’re given to perceive either one: our brains. And our brains work through a mediated process of translating the reality around us into sensory information we can understand and make sense of. That’s what’s happening in essence in memory too. We are just recalling the information rather than imbibing it for the first time.

This is not to say that we somehow have a greater or more direct access to the people we have lost. It is what it is. People die, their presence fades, it’s still hard to access even if scientifically it’s true that there is a real, biological/physical thing happening every time we recall them. But it does illustrate a kind of underlying continuity to life, death, and memory. Where we see a fissure, biology only sees a different set of experiences and an existing set of recollections. There’s no actual break point where we place it—at the point where the person dies. There is only the more limited possibility of a now-fixed set of potential recollections.

Musing about the physical reality of memory made me recall an earlier passage in the book, much more directly about mortality. Living things, according to Morin, are amazing precisely because they are organized in an incredibly unlikely way (cosmologically speaking, all life is unlikely), yet once organized, they become “locally probable” because the living thing is designed to stabilize the inherently unstable, to maintain order where chaos is the rule.

But, the trick of the complex living thing is that “in the long run, under the effects, either brutal or cumulative, of external vagaries and disturbances, regeneration degenerates, reorganization disorganizes; thus one ages in fighting against ageing. The living being dies not only by accident, not just by statistical fatality, it is also promised death from birth because it must work in order not to die.” For a living being, “short term work is freedom; long-term work is death.”

This passage is a more analytical, modern, perhaps slightly academic way of recapitulating Montaigne (who was recapitulating the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece, it’s all in our intellectual DNA, which is actually a set of texts, and not DNA at all, but the analogy works!), when he wrote “death is the destination of our path; it is the ineluctable object of our destiny” and “this existence you enjoy belongs as much to death as to life. The day of your birth is the first step on the road leading you to death as well as life.”

I have no doubt that Morin read Montaigne (he’s probably the most well read nonagenarian on the planet, and any bookish nonagenarian presumably has read a lot of books, relatively speaking?). And Morin’s interpolation of Montaigne almost involuntarily draws a million memories from my brain about Nina. Her delight at Montaigne’s insights into mortality, the way she sewed his words among her own when writing, the shape of her hunched at her MacBook composing lines that now form the contours of may of my most vivid mementos—those she inscribed for posterity in her final and most fully realized creative act—The Bright Hour.

My dream was upsetting. But it was inevitable. Like death. A part of loss and a part of grief that maybe takes different shapes for different people, but for me is lodged in my brain, at least in part, in a feeling of helplessness about losing Nina, and maybe an increasing sense that that loss goes on and in some ways deepens with the gulf of passing time. But whether they come to me in dreams or in deliberate acts of recollection, my memories of Nina are real things that exist for me to recall. Sometimes it’s all I can do to access them with all the noise of life—work, kids, travel, school, repeat—but it’s also LITERALLY all I can do. It’s the only thing there is.

The rest of my work is to go beyond understanding that intellectually and try to process it emotionally. My dream, my fear of losing the Nina of my memories, my daily undulations through the vast oceans of my grief and self-doubt (does anyone have a scopolamine patch for the soul?), are all recollections and reminders that, even though it’s been a while and lots has happened since Nina died, I still have a long way to go. A lifetime.