Tae Kwon Do or Tae Kwon Don't, either way you'll regret it.

Last night the boys had Tae Kwon Do testing. They’re now the proud owners of a green belt with a blue stripe. Although their master during the belt ceremony reminded all the kids not to focus on the belt but on the discipline and hard work of learning their techniques, let’s be serious, the very existence of the belt ceremony suggests to the kids that the literal earning of their stripes is a big deal.

I tried to reinforce the master’s message, but I’m pretty sure I sounded like a moralistic scold and a hypocrite – the kids are astute enough to know I have always prized the destination over the journeydespite ample evidence that the contrary rule is the right one.

Immediately after TKD, we hustled down the road to TempleEmmanuel for the unity event being held to honor the victims of the recentshooting in Pittsburgh and show ecumenical unity in opposition to bigotry,violence, and hate. It was a whirlwind of a night for us.

As a family we don’t historically “do” much. I mean, we do stuff; we’ve done things - But we’re not “doers.” The kids and I have a running joke that my martial art is called Tae Kwon Don't. Even when we do a thing, we like to take a long breath afterwards and have some down time to reflect upon the doing. Not rush headlong into doing the next thing. This was always true for me and Nina as a couple and remained so when we had kids. Although the having of kids is a pretty big “doing” unto itself, our style of child-rearing was not the type-A hustle and bustle sort. We tended to keep our kids’ schedules as we did our own – with a maximum amount of blank spaces for down time and recovery.

The thirst for down time was equally shared in my marriage. It’s maybe even one of the key values that allowed Nina and I to be a good match. Bailing on a night out to stay home and order Chinese takeout was a leitmotif of our love language. Our ratio of made social plans to fully executed social plans was either dramatically uninspiring or incredibly successful, depending on which end of the I à E Myers-Briggs spectrum you fall.

I wish I could say single-parenting the boys has made me learn to savor the joys of a more socially active/committed lifestyle. I don’t think that’s quite true. If anything, I crave the ability to lie down and stare at the ceiling more than ever. Not having a second pair of hands to help with dinner, or a partner to respond to the umpteenth request from the kids for a new app sometimes feels like it’s eroding my soul. 

  

On the other hand, there’s no question losing Nina forced me to make some strides. I am now the keeper of our family calendar, which would have been laughable only a few short years ago. As our link to friends and family, I maintain ties to people I used to only communicate with at holidays (or when Nina made plans with them and we didn’t bail and order takeout). It’s more than just maintenance, too. In the past year I have made more decisions than I can count, whether it was the addition and remodeling of our house, the kids’ enrollment in schools or after-school activities, vacations, meal planning or, perhaps most importantly, where to order takeout.

Of course, I’m only doing what all single parents do, and I’m not doing it as well as many of them. But I do think when people talk about resilience this is the kind of adjustment we ought to have in mind. It’s not the “I get knocked down, but I picked myself up again” or “try, try again” mantras that matter so much as the continual acceptance that your days will be filled with small challenges you would likely avoid if circumstances were different or someone else would do it for you. 

Last weekend marked 20 months since Nina died. It's taken all of my resilience over that time to keep meeting the challenges of everyday life. But it doesn’t help any of our resiliency that we live in a time of actual, real-world chaos. My twitter feed alone in the morning makes me want to crawl back in bed, irrespective of any innate desire to do so (which was already very strong, admittedly). Events like the Tree of Life, the double homicidein Kentucky, Parkland, and the now-too-numerous-to-name state sanctionedmurders of unarmed people of color really, truly require us to go into the world armed with some serious resilience. But these are the stuff of everyday life. 

That’s part of why I decided to push through my normal instinct for added down time and attend last night’s event at the temple. I felt extra proud because the circumstances were begging me to give up and go home. The temple was mobbed with people. We had to drive several blocks into the surrounding residential neighborhood to find a parking spot. I was still on crutches from knee surgery. The kids hadn’t eaten dinner. There were so many fantastic excuses not to go.

But instead of not doing, this time we did. I hobbled my way up to a friend who helped me skip the half-mile long (no exaggeration) line and get a seat (leveraging my knee surgery for all it’s worth is the new market inefficiency). I’m not looking for a pat on the back here. I only did what thousands of other Greenborenos were doing – including many elderly and permanently disabled folks. And for the record we left early because the two diabetics in our party couldn’t wait any longer for dinner, and also I fed the kids at MacDonald’s, just to temper the self-panegyric.

I didn’t go to the temple because I fight for truth and justice. I’m pretty comfortable in my armchair liberalism, despite lacking an actual armchair (maybe when I have terminal cancer that quest can be my NYTcolumn? What I lack in talent I make up for in lack of originality.). While I believe individual attendance at these events matters, my presence or absence didn’t strike any major blows for democracy.

I’m not even sure I went to temple to work on my personal resilience. The real motivation was the same underlying my drive as a parent and a widower generally: concern for my kids, fear, and confusion. The truth is that I have NO IDEA how to parent two boys on my own, let alone how to parent through the Tree of Life massacre, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, or the President of the United States sending the military to ourSouthern border as a race baiting political stunt. 

I’m afraid I expose my kids to too many bad influences already, but I also want them to experience things and learn to discern for themselves, which makes me kind of a knee jerk censorship parent. I make poor Freddy submit the names of every band before he listens, but allow him access to heavy metal; I have clamped down on violent TV shows and video games, but I occasionally take them to a movie they're scarcely old enough to understand because I believe it's valuable or special. The truth is, like most parents, I don’t know or understand most of the content they consume. And that’s just the make-believe stuff. How much of the actual news do nine and eleven year old kids need? One artifact of our gun-crazed culture is that there are plenty of resources to help guide parents through communicating about upsetting events, but of course it depends on the kid and the context. 

When I was a kid I wanted it all uncensored and that’s what my guys want, too. But I also never lived through a time when white nationalists were running the country. There may have been just as many people of color murdered during my childhood, but the deaths weren’t captured on video and available on YouTube. I remember when Bud Dwyer shot himself during a live press conference. It was sensational and TV stations issued strong warnings about the content before airing anything about the suicide. Today I’m sure it would still be news, but it wouldn’t stand out. 

Tot Shabbat = my favorite activity I've ever done in a synagogue or temple.
Just look at that adorable cartoon challah and torah.
Now imagine tiny Jews signing silly songs about Judaica. Adorable, I'm telling you.  

The temple isn’t exactly our primary niche. We used to attend Tot Shabbat pretty regularly with the kids before Nina got sick. But Nina wasn’t Jewish and, if you need to practice to be good at it, I’m maybe the worst Jew ever. During the event the rabbi asked all the non-Jews in attendance to stand and Benny started to get up until I gave him a “yes, you are Jewish” look (we practice it during the secret world-domination cabals, held monthly in New York and Hollywood). I didn’t bother with the “you’re not quite Jewish because your mother wasn’t Jewish and the State of Israel wouldn’t immediately recognize your claim to citizenship without a proper conversion” look because I save that for the High Holidays.

The Jewish community does have a special resonance for me/us. We keep one toe in the Jew pool, as it were. And I’ve tried to explain to the kids a million times why we’re still Jewish even if we aren’t religious and I’m not even sure I understand it fully myself. But there is a cultural, ethnic, and historical weight to being Jewish. It’s as inescapable as it is hard to define. If you run from your Jewish heritage, well, that’s a pretty well-trodden and problematic path; but if you embrace it, what does that mean? Judaism must be the only religion in the world with millions of self-identifying members who are avowed atheists. 

I've grown to loathe most things about sports, especially the NFL in recent years,
but the Steelers nailed this one, even if just on a graphic design level. 

But we didn’t go to temple last night just because we’re Jewish. I felt by going to the event, by letting the kids see that people do find ways to respond, to come together, no matter how sad the circumstances, and that we can find ways as a family to join them, maybe there’s an implicit message of resilience and hope in the face of fear and despair. I don’t know. I hope that just by doing I’ll somehow be imparting something and maybe that’s wrongheaded or lazy. But I honestly have no idea how to instill the kinds of resilience my kids are going to need, whether that’s the ability to overcome losing their mom or the emotional stamina to withstand the rapaciously toxic news cycle of the Trump era.

I don’t know how to carry things myself, let alone teach two other people how to carry them. For some reason Terrance Hayes’ lines from his haunting, masterful recent collection of sonnets keeps resurfacing for me: “The names alive are like the names in graves” and "For a long time / The numbers were balanced. The number alive equal to the number in graves." Maybe it’s always awful at some level. The world never stops killing us and maybe no particular era has any claim to a more terrible spectacle of death than any other. We just have to keep saying the names out loud, together, for as long as we can.

If anyone has any other brilliant ideas, I’m so massively open to suggestions.

Jews Mourning in the Synogaugue, Sir William Rothstein, 1906

Perspective

Three dudes, three radically different perspectives on most things,
let alone ultimate questions. 

In rereading my post from yesterday on recovering from surgery, I was struck by the fact that, even in taking myself down a peg for my approach to illness and recovery – imagining what Nina would have made of it all -- I was very much stuck in my own perspective. That’s not the post I meant to write. I guess doing a blog about myself, I’m creating a pretty big inherent navel-gazing risk. But it’s also hard to stand in other peoples’ shoes to tell even a simple story. That’s one of the things that makes good writers so amazing. The ability to conjure not only the voice, but the point of view of another person requires not only language skills, but a keen observational sense that goes beyond most people’s normal social skills (in fact, if my experience with writers is any guide, it may be detrimental to them ;). 

One of the perspectives I struggle most to see, let alone adopt or try on for myself, is a kids’ point of view. I’ve always been particularly wowed by writers who can do this well: Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, Maurice Sendak, et al. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a narrative failure. Seeing the world through a kid’s perspective is a hugely important parenting skill I lack. I don’t mean seeing the world with innocent eyes or some kind of cinematic childhood mawkishness. I’m talking about being able to summon the impact of events on my own children, anticipate their reactions to things – quotidian and profound – so that I can understand their needs and reactions. 

Not to ruminate too much in the realm of ostentatious self-deprecation, but Nina was really good at this. She had a knack for understanding what would make for good kid times that I could never summon. I think in part this stems from her love of her own childhood. 

Whenever Nina reached into her childhood memory bank, the contents were magical, wonderful. Her most powerful childhood memories were: 1. A grass fire by a California roadside that left her searching every room she entered for fire exits for the rest of her life; 2. A wolf that came to her parent’s house in San Francisco when she was 3 and asked for cranberry juice; and 3. A bear who approached her during her family’s cross-country move from California to Massachusetts – when Nina was four – and asked to share her scrambled eggs around the campfire (while, according to Nina, her parents had gone for ice cream without her). I leave it to you to decide which of these events were real and which imaginary – Nina swore they all felt equally real to her. 

Consciously or unconsciously, Nina actively cultivated some of that, I’m sure – the mind remembers through the lens we use to sift through it, to a degree. But her access to childhood memories was also just dramatically immediate – like less time had passed for her than it had for me since our respective childhoods. I think she just stayed in touch with her younger self better. This made her a ready guide for the boys and a much more effective cultivator of childhood magic for our own family. 

Even through terminal cancer, Nina's sense of childhood
magic was clearly undiminished. 

I’ve missed Nina’s depth and facility as a parent a lot since she died. I never felt very good at cultivating the magic of childhood even when she was alive. But even on a more basic level – simply anticipating the kids’ needs or how some of the twists and turns of life after Nina’s death would hit them, I feel ill-equipped. 

This week was a good example. I joked in my last piece about what a lousy patient I am and how recovering from surgery alone accentuated some of my negatives. But I totally left out how my surgery affected Benny and Freddy. When I wrote about my spider cancer dream, I failed to mention Benny’s pallid reaction at the dinner table, when he said “but they didn’t see any cancer on the MRI, right?” The look on his face was the most transparently anxious thing I’ve ever seen. 

I also left out the moment a couple days post-surgery when Freddy came into my room, scorching tears of anger streaming down his face already from a disagreement with Benny, though it was only 6:45 am, and when I asked him why he couldn’t be nicer to his brother he blurted out “what difference does it make? You’re not even going to get out of bed today!” His anger, his frustration, always churning close to the surface in that kid, were boiling over after several days of seeing me gimpy and bedridden. 

I realized that seeing me as a patient from their perspective was its own kind of trauma. Like my own experience, I’m sure it was tempered by the fact that it was just a knee surgery – no one talking about terminal disease or survival rates, no chemo, no radiation, none of the scary trigger words. But also like me, they must have been reminded, as I struggled to do everyday things, took medications that made me feel ill, and, yes, lay in my bed – babying myself probably for much longer than another otherwise able-bodied person would have done – of Nina’s two years of medical intervention that ended in her death. 

I find great joy in looking at pictures from the two years Nina was sick.
They remind me how much fun we still had, how much joy was still
in our lives. But what do the boys see, I wonder?  

This isn’t a reassurance seeking post – I think my kids are fine and, ultimately, it may be good for them to see me as a patient. For one thing, if I’m lucky, they may learn what not to do themselves (is male pattern wimpiness heritable?); also it’s normal to occasionally get sick, even need surgery, or worse. Every medical intervention doesn’t end in someone’s death. Some do. But those guys have hopefully many, many years of sickness and health to navigate, and for us at this particular juncture, it seems right that occasional, non-terminal medical bumps in the road are something they learn navigate. Although my kids’ short lives have already been filled with far too many illnesses for my taste – Freddy’s club foot and diabetes, their mother and grandmother dying of cancer – the truth is that all lives are filled with illness and dying. To the extent there’s a “normal,” it’s normal. 

I guess I want them to remember the smiles AND the
loss of hair, the love and the sadness of losing that
love. But I need to learn to see what they see better. 

Even so, kids don’t see illness and mortality the same way adults do – any more than they do cross-country camping trips. If I want to be a good parent to the boys, I can’t expect that. I have to learn to stand in their shoes a little more, peer up from the view of the Under Five Footers and conduct myself accordingly. 

Do any of you have instances that stand out where you missed the kid perspective on something major that happened to your family? Have your kids ever reminded you that they’re kids just by, well, being kids? I’d love to hear about it in the comments if you’re willing. Sometimes having only one narrative voice can be a handicap, as any good writer would know…

Stool softeners, Zofran, and other remembrances of loves past

This week was weird, even for me. On Monday I had knee surgery. It is the kind of knee surgery that’s so routine that the surgeon feels pretty blasé about telling you he does 15-20 of them a day. But there is no routine surgery when you’re the patient, and in my case, there is nothing so simple and straightforward that I cannot make a convoluted harangue out of it. 

It actually started before the surgery, when my psyche visited a cancer spider surgery dream upon me. This set the stage nicely, as it signaled to me that surgery – even a type utterly removed from cancer or Nina’s treatment – was going to be a trigger. 

Well, it turned out to be not so much a trigger as a bizarre trip down bad memory lane. The day of the surgery I took the prescribed opioids, but wound up with sudden onsets of nausea. I tried not taking the opioids. This resulted in me getting behind the pain curve and not sleeping for two nights. I went back on the opioids, this time with Zofran – the anti-nausea medication which handily enough I still have in my medicine cabinet from Nina’s last prescription. The Zofran did the trick – no more nausea – but then I remembered the downside to opioids and Zofran, which I’d also learned through Nina’s experience – massive constipation.

So back to the medicine cabinet I went for the bottle of stool softeners that have been there since Nina died. Her pain and bowel management legacy, it seems, is replete. It was an odd way to confront or revisit these issues. First, it’s just intrinsically odd to be filled with the desire to tweet “I pooped!” after your longest bout of constipation ever (because I am discreet and value privacy, rather than tweeting I texted my sister – who says decorum is dead?). But also, I ought to have remembered the lessons of pain meds and this was my first real encounter with an invasive medical procedure since Nina died. 

Fittingly, my experience was sort of the diminutive version of the kinds of things Nina went through – a friend who messaged to check in on me after surgery hit the nail precisely on the head when she asked if I were really in serious pain or just suffering from Male Pattern Wimpiness. 

But the connection to Nina’s course of disease was striking and direct. I have never been a good patient. My threshold for discomfort is startlingly low, let alone actual pain. It embarrasses me now, but I remembered when I went to have my knee examined recently that I had knee issues in 2016, too, while Nina was metastatic but not yet end-stage. I remember having great trouble getting up and down the stairs of our house. What must she have thought as she heard me groaning my way through the morning, with her metal vertebrae and Fentanyl patches? 

Here is the actual knee, with its two TINY sutures. Don't let the looks deceive you: a cushy recovery was needed. 

Actually I know exactly what she thought. Nina was pretty direct about things like that. But, though I never became even a half-decent patient, I learned to be a good caregiver to Nina. I remembered when she took her meds, reminded her about anti-nausea or anti-anxiety options, helped her track her pain levels so we knew when to ask for bigger pain patches. It was not only necessary, but that level of caregiving was my way of staying close to her, feeling necessary and vital to Nina as she got closer to dying and I faced down the idea of life without her. 

I had lots of help this week (I know Hilary Clinton meant it about childhood, but it will take a village to raise me until the day I'm lowered into the ground), but it’s weird doing the caregiver-patient dynamic alone. Not only is it an added reminder of loss, it involved so many of the instruments of Nina’s illness it was hard not to feel a kind of flashback sensation. It was so striking that at one point in my opiate induced haze I wondered if I had cooked the whole thing up subconsciously, maneuvered myself into surgery as some sort of weird grief pathology. Like I needed to go through it at some level. I am reassured by the orthopedist’s notes indicated my meniscus was in tatters, but part of me still wonders if some of this isn’t too coincidental to be purely happenstance. 

Whatever the precise etiology of my knee injury – grief neuropathology or just aging jogger syndrome -- there’s no question I did it to myself. And there’s also no question that it has already taken me longer to be ambulatory than it took Nina after they grafted a metal cage into her spine – she stood and walked the next day; I’m still using crutches. Make of that what you will. I don’t think there’s any connection, personally. 

Crash Course in Knee Surgery

I am having surgery tomorrow. It's very minor surgery. I’ve had a balky right knee for ages and it finally just gave up during a jog a couple weeks ago. The surgery is just to repair a torn meniscus. It’s the kind of surgery that’s so minor the doctor told me I could opt to have it or not depending on how much the pain in my knee was bothering me. The surgeon said the pre-op takes far longer than the actual surgery, which he estimates at about 15 minutes of actual slicing and dicing. 

But I have never found a straightforward thing I could not complicate. I have snatched the Byzantine from the clean jaws of Modernism more times than I can count. I knew it was just torn cartilage. I had a cortisone injection a couple years ago and the orthopedist told me then that was likely. When the meniscus was officially diagnosed as the culprit after the MRI, it was as expected. But I felt an elevated level of anxiety given the circumstances. 

I’ve never been hugely anxious about medical stuff, despite a lifetime of collecting weird chronic illness (juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, chronic sinus infections, diabetes, chronic urticaria). But I felt a tightness in my chest when I went to the doctor for the MRI results, and I’ve been in a sort of elevated state of uneasiness all week. As an example, I was having dinner the other night with the boys and my father in law when something Freddy said suddenly reminded me of a dream I’d had the night before: I was having my surgery and, instead of the tiny incisions they’re actually going to make, they pulled back my flesh in four directions—like open heart surgery or an autopsy—and found inside that the whole knee was rotting and filled with spiders, which came crawling out in all directions. “Cancer, clearly,” was the doctor’s diagnosis. My psyche has a very subtle way of sublimating my traumas. 

This is my first serious medical intervention since Nina died, so I guess I just have a hair trigger for this kind of stuff now? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’m living my grief out of order. Not long after Nina died, I met someone and had a really intense connection right away. Probably that blunted some of the trauma of my immediate situation. It certainly delayed some of the loneliness. It was oddly normalizing, because she had also lost a spouse, so in a way the state of loss or widowhood was endemic to the new relationship. Anyhow, I didn’t feel the intensity of some of the vagabond pathologies of grief that can lie in wait for people after they lose an intimate partner as directly as I might have. 

More recently, since I’ve been on my own, the intensity of loneliness in grief is more present as are some of the neuroses. I’ve been having trouble regulating my sleep, I’m edgy and more erratic emotionally than I feel most of my situations warrant, and I’ve developed some hypochondria around things like routine knee surgery (I’m reassured by the MRI, which showed absolutely no signs of spiders, but I also remember from Nina’s course of treatment how unreliable imaging can be, so who knows? Maybe they were just imaging-resistant spiders?!). I am having more of the kinds of days my fellow widows on Hot Young Widows Club describe wherein they are just sick and tired of getting through every day without the person they planned to spend every day with for the rest of their life. I think rationally we all know we don’t literally crawl into the grave after our person, but sometimes it’s hard to convince myself. 

 

Life is a marathon, they say, not a sprint. To the extent that’s true, which seems dubious, I guess it's true for life in grief mode, too. But I have never ever wanted to run a marathon--I hate long runs and in point of fact, they’re probably really bad for my meniscus—and I’m not especially explosive out of the starting blocks either. I don’t really want to run the race at all, is the problem. The only way I ever learned how to motivate through life was in the context of my relationship with Nina. It was both my goal and my means of reaching it. Of course, there were/are other things involved—we had kids, families, friends, careers, and lots of other important goals—but those were all either a product of the relationship or in one way or another secondary to it. 

Since Nina died, I’ve been struggling to even conceptualize what the new goal structure looks like. First and most obvious is our kids. Nina’s dead, but I’m still their dad and they still need parenting (well, Freddy says he doesn’t, but Benny still wants to be parented badly as long as it involves a high cuddling to chore ratio). That’s a helpful framework, but it takes an element of my relationship with Nina—the child-having and child-raising part—and elevates it to the primary focus. And that’s fine, it’s what I’m doing. But it’s kind of like living an abstract of my previous life instead of the whole thing.

Whatever intrinsic value I derive from parenting my kids (and even for a reluctant curmudgeon of a dad like me it’s a lot), it doesn’t address a whole host of things that are important to me, and stands in direct conflict with some of them. As any single parent can tell you, it’s hard to focus on being a solid professional and also be a decent full-time parent. Anyone working full-time has the “work-life balance” issue, but I find my need to be a good father sapping my ambition to be a good lawyer more and more. 

And then there’s my personal life. When Nina died I felt sort of wide-open, like most of my normal inhibitions or hang-ups receded. I don’t know if it was just that grief seemed so much more important than any insecurities or if I was just so blasted by grief that it never occurred to me to feel insecure, but I felt an openness and connection to the people around me that I had not generally felt previously. It’s what allowed me to do interviews about Nina’s book, discuss her illness and dying, and be so public about a lot of very personal, painful stuff. 

I think it also helped me be open to the possibility of new love, along with Nina's encouragement before she died. But recently I have started to feel this emotional supernova collapse back on itself. The very force of my immediate experience of grief – the intensity of the feelings of loss, the relationship I had soon after Nina died, the publicity around her book – collapsing back in on itself a bit. It's not just intimate relationships, either. It's just a generalized sense of social anxiety and a lack of social momentum--it's more work to make a social life happen than it was. 

The potential for becoming an emotional black hole is part of the reason I started writing this blog. I figured that if putting all my crap out there on the internet was helpful before, maybe forcing myself to keep doing it could keep me from folding up my tent and stealing away into the desert now that the momentum of grief has slowed and normalized and started to feel like a long-term burden instead of an adrenalized crisis. 

I just read a book about anxiety and grief (it’s good, I highly recommend it) that reminded me of an exercise I used to do for stress relief: I'd write down whatever I was thinking -- a screed of anger, frustration, worry, fear, whatever -- and then tear up the sheet of paper, or delete the file and never look at it again. Both parts, the writing down and the throwing away, were important components of the exercise. 

The blog is different, because I’m not (yet at least) throwing out the posts after I write them. But it serves a similar purpose. It’s not just a way of staying open to the world, but also a place to make manifest and bear witness to things while I’m experiencing them, a checkpoint, framework, and vessel for the grieving process, which is weird and unpredictable and requires more interventions than I even anticipated.

So, I’m having very minor surgery tomorrow, but when I wake up I’ll probably continue to go through a whole bunch of things that have more to do with my psyche than my meniscus and I’ll need some way to process them and explain them to myself so I don’t go crazy or get too sad and so I can come here for that. And, who knows, maybe I’ll post something before the meds wear off and it’ll get REALLY interesting?

Only the lonely (need to read this post, and maybe not even them?)

 

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,

who neither listen nor speak;

Who do not drink their tea, though they always said

Tea was such a comfort.

From Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Loneliness isn’t actually a disease. I checked the DSM-V. But it’s got to be comorbid with a shockingly high number of mental health issues (off the top of my head: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, etc.). It’s also, not surprisingly, comorbid with mortality. This is both apodictically correct and verified with empirical research: when people I love die, I suffer from loneliness. These findings will surprise exactly no one. 

The tricky part about being lonely is that it’s not really about being alone – we all know that, but sometimes forget until we’re actually lonely. I have lots of people in my life: friends, family, colleagues, the woman who runs the coffee shop and remembers more about my kids than I do. I am not alone. But I suspect many of the loneliest people are found in crowds and most of my loneliest moments aren’t cold, long, solitary winter nights (though it WOULD be nice to have some company then – not saying I’ve never considered (and rejected) professional cuddlers). 

Of course being alone CAN make you lonely, but loneliness as I’ve come to know it isn’t so much being by myself as being without someone in particular. And the kind of loneliness caused by grief isn’t just about that person’s unavailability – as in unrequited love – but their annihilation, the total absence of a person and the relationship in all its multifaceted existence in my life. Lonely is what we feel when the one thing we want or need is a specific person who doesn’t exist anymore. 

The startling thing for me about loneliness is how many different ways there are to feel it. Pull on any thread in the ole grief sweater and you’re bound to bare your whole lonely torso completely. Picking out a new minivan is a lonely activity if you’ve only ever bought cars with your partner – even if you bring two kids and a father-in-law along. But so are smaller life events, like deciding what to have for dinner, or which pictures to hang on the living room walls. 

Fun fact: Only the Lonely = not just a song made famous by Roy Orbison, but also
a 1991 cinematic vehicle for John Candy and Ally Sheedy. You're welcome.

Raising kids is an obvious vortex for loneliness. For the widowed, even if the village it takes to raise your kids is ready, willing, and able -- as in my case -- I’m still left child-rearing without the other half of the parental unit. Nothing in my life feels quite so lonesome as holding the parental tiller for two boys who need their mother eve more than I do. That’s true whether we’re deciding on bedtime reading or discussing the birds and the bees. Which: yipes -- I’m sorry in advance to their future partners for whatever it is I’m doing to these poor guys. Hopefully you’ll be very skillful?

Every shot like this one is a game of emotional Where's Waldo
played looking for the dead. 

Everyone who’s lost a partner probably craters a little internally like me with each milestone their child hits. We memorialize the dead plenty, but we can’t sufficiently account for their absence from every living moment – we just look at past photos of the family intact, while taking new ones with an imaginary chalk line overlaid in each in the shape of the dead.

One of the times I miss Nina the most is during our annual trip to Cape Cod. It’s inescapable and obvious, a place so saturated with memories of her that it would be weird if I didn’t feel lonely for her. But some of my most intensely lonely moments have been without any obvious context cues: sitting in bed reading, looking at my iPhone calendar, grocery shopping, driving home from work. These moments are ordinary in every way except that I feel like I might peel the skin off my face, douse myself in kerosene, and run screaming into a campfire to try to relieve the crushing loneliness. Sometimes I wind up sobbing from sheer desperation at the idea that those moments might go on and on forever. 

Cumulative loneliness is the worst. Anyone can get through short bouts of being lonely, especially if there’s an end in sight. But an open-ended future with no promise of extinguishment for loneliness is daunting to me. I’ve tried to be honest with myself about how hard this is for me – I don’t like being lonely one bit and don’t feel particularly well-equipped to cope with it. Not that anyone comes naturally equipped to lose their person, but I can already identify ways in which my reactions to being lonely has influenced my behavior in problematic ways. 

Relationships are a landmine for any widowed person. Part of that is just the general emotional upheaval of loss. It’s the worst kind of roller coaster: badly constructed, unpredictable, poorly maintained, and never inspected for safety. Not the ideal conditions for relationship formation. 

There’s more to it than just damaged sustained, though. In my case, I’ve realized the potential availability of a relationship is like a narcotic – and I’m a bit of an addict. Since Nina died, I’ve had massive withdrawal symptoms and the obvious solution is to indulge my need for intimacy, attention, support, and all the other loneliness-countering properties of relationships. But I’ve also learned that I’m not emotionally equipped for a relationship right now. 

The problem isn’t that I’m lonely and seeking a relationship as a stopgap or palliative measure. I'm not trying to rebound from grief. But, even when I am confident the relationship is solid irrespective of loss, it's fraught. The feelings of desire and intimacy in a newly forming relationship make the same kind of shape as the void left by grief. There’s no way to tell where one starts and the other begins. Even if a new relationship is healthy and strong, it can mask the pain of a loneliness that it cannot cure. It’s a weird catch-22 (which is a tautology) (which is itself an abusive use of elaborate diction). 

I'm not sure how anyone knows when they’re “ready” for a relationship under any circumstance -- I wasn’t “ready” to be in a serious relationship when I met Nina by any rational criteria, and were together nearly 18 years when she died -- but whatever signals this readiness, I’m pretty sure the standard caveats don’t apply after loss. It’s not just the passage of time. I know plenty of people who dated and even remarried happily soon after losing a partner. But there is at least there is an indeterminate quotient of time + other things I need to work out whatever my stuff is that needs working out. 

It’s more of an emotional state of readiness than just waiting for pain to subside before the greenlight. I await the silent, mysterious tumblers that shift our perspectives as we pass through different stages of life clicking into place. I wake up occasionally and things that had me twisted in knots just seem less fraught. I can’t make this happen willfully, but it’s happened enough that I’d call it a pretty regularly event. Eventually, after some combination of time, effort, and experience, the wound no longer smarts quite so much, which in turn makes me stop avoiding whatever I perceived to be causing the hurt, which alters my behavior or thought process in innumerable, imperceptible ways. 

I’m hoping the loneliness will be tied to the mechanics of one of these tumblers. That, even if I’m not savvy to the inner-workings, my gears are set to the right ratios. That one day I’ll wake up and not feel it so keenly -- and not because I’m “over it” or confused by the throes of a new relationship, but because I stop feeling quite so alone. It’s not that I won’t miss Nina then – I expect that every time I think of her for the rest of my life I will have some degree of loneliness – but I hope my perspective will have shifted enough that I don’t feel armed against the possibility of new connection or blind to its potential to obfuscate my grieving. 

In the meantime, I did what any sensible widower would do: I made a playlist of songs about loneliness and listened to it while I watched lengthy slideshows of family pictures with Nina in them. When the kids weren’t around. And the housekeepers were gone. And the dogs weren’t looking at me with accusatory need. And my work was done for the day. And I was left actually, truly alone for a bit with my loneliness, which after all is an artifact of the most significant and dearly loved part of me and my life.

LINK: Only the Lonelys Playlist

Relatively speaking about grief (and other mistakes I've made).

Relativism is not a helpful mode for grieving. By nature it has no fixed position, which is problematic when someone’s already adrift because one of the central fixed points of their life – a loved one -- is gone. Bare relativism isn’t that helpful generally: how many idiotic conversations have been started in college classrooms (mostly by White men…sorry, some of us are working on it, I swear! #Kavbros #Squi) comparing the Holocaust to the Middle Passage or the Irish Potato Famine. These aren’t dumb conversations because of the topics’ importance -- everyone is clear that they were exponentially tragic. But the attempt to quantify them, the comparison of their relative magnitudes, is the world-historical crime against humanity version of a pissing contest and world historically stupid. To have the conversation is to have lost it. 

It’s ok to share your suffering or have exchanges with other people about theirs. This is an essential component of coming to grips with loss or tragedy of any kind. But avoiding direct comparison should be a major priority any time loss or trauma is the subject of conversation. Grief is not social currency. You don’t need to bring any of your own to participate in supporting or bearing witness to someone else’s. 

There are I don’t know how many posts on my online widowhood support group about some well-meaning friend who, in trying earnestly to identify, compares the grieving person’s experience to their own loss – sometimes of a great-grandparent or beloved pet. I encourage everyone in ABSOLUTE terms to avoid this. This isn’t to denigrate these other losses. Just because you haven’t lost an intimate partner, a child, or a parent doesn’t mean you haven’t suffered. These “relatively peripheral” losses may seem to the person enduring that loss -- with a grandparent or pet-shaped empty space in their life – pretty huge and plenty painful. The mistake isn’t in the type of grief being compared, but the comparison itself. 

The rules of comparative grief apply with equal force to those of us who are widowed. Our grief is particular, but not unique. Or, rather, all grief is unique, because, like people, it is idiosyncratic and context dependent. We all follow our own grief groove. But the fact we all suffer is not unique. The minute I start to think that I need some special dispensation or privilege for my suffering, I enter into very flimsy emotional and analytical territory. 

Who suffered more, the person who lost a spouse? The one who lost a child? The one who lost both spouse and child at once? Or the one whose child murdered their spouse and child? These questions lead quickly to a dusky absurd drawing room in a Faulker novel and they all end in the same blind alley as the Holocaust-Middle Passage palaver. All of these hypothetical people have searing hypothetical wounds. Trying to compare them only denigrates an already fraught process and makes an added burden of what is most often intended to be an empathic gesture – the attempt to say “I too have suffered, I too have grieved.” 

I don't know who made this image, I saw it several places, but I love the combination of empathy and thoughtfulness it suggests. 

The problem is that grief is hard. I have dealt with grief a lot in recent years, and I still find myself wishing I could rewind and erase the tape from a conversation I just had where I put my foot in my mouth about someone else’s suffering. There’s not some secret garden of understanding that only the aggrieved have access to that holds the key. 

The key with grief, as with most things, is present awareness: remembering the many threads that get severed when someone dies, the cascading losses that grief entails. It’s complicated, but if we act with an awareness that grief is pervasive an unpredictable, we are more likely to treat grieving people carefully (as we would want to be treated in a like circumstance, as I never tire of telling my kids! #goldenrulebrokenrecord). 

Before I have an encounter with a person who’s suffering, I try to remind myself, prepare myself. I do this already in many situations: when I talk to your boss, during a job interview, meeting with a child’s teacher, or even trips to the doctor. We all arm ourselves with information and context so that we will be receptive to the information we receive and able to offer useful or opportune responses. I’ve learned that I can do this for grief, too. Here are some of the things I’ve learned: 

1. Talk about the person who died. It’s 99% likely that the grieving person wants to do this, even if it’s hard for them and they can’t do it on their own. In fact, if it seems difficult for them to bring the subject up around you, that may be all the more reason to do so – you can grant a form of social “permission” or an overt marking of the subject as safe. Obviously, you shouldn’t drag someone into an unwanted discussion about loss, but a gentle signal that the topic doesn’t make you uncomfortable is a pretty safe bet. 

Bringing up a loss in the immediate wake of someone dying is fairly straightforward. But, even after months and months, I still think about Nina continually. I am not as consumed by the subject now as I was immediately after she died, but it’s still present with me all the time, even if it’s below the surface. That’s all the more reason why bringing Nina up might be good for me – as time passes, there is much less focus on the loss, which can feel a bit like I’m still mired in grief while the world “moves on.” Discussing it can be a welcome outlet, a renewed form of permission. 

2. Don’t look for the silver lining. Grief has no silver lining, except sometimes in darkest jest (“well, at least since Nina died I don’t have to argue about what I want to watch on Netflix…”). A good shorthand is that any sentence that starts out with “At least…” is probably a no-fly zone. At least what? There are no compensations in death and dying. Even if the person who died was problematic, it’s likely that the aggrieved is not celebrating. That’s for cinematic villains. The truth is, the more complicated the relationship, the more complicated the grieving can be. Don’t search for a silver lining.  

The ultimate "at least" approach to death. 

3. Unless it is an accepted core belief that the person currently feels and has expressed to you, don’t say anything about the dead person “being in a better place,” or the like (unless it’s a Good Place reference and the aggrieved is a fan of the show. In that case, go forking crazy, benches!). They may not believe in an afterlife and, even if they do, the “better place” is still potentially just a different flavor of the “at least” no-no. Grief can impact people in foundational ways, and a belief in the afterlife, or God, or anything related to the metaphysics of death and dying can be affected as much as anything. You can’t know, even if you know the grieving person well, how a statement about the afterlife is going to fall on grieving ears. 

What do you think the afterlife looks like? A grieving person may or may not need to know. 

4. Which leads to another generally sound approach: allow the grieving to guide you. If they want to engage the metaphysics of death, by all means, oblige them. But take their cues. In the religion example, if they are sure that not only does heaven exist, but they know which room number their beloved occupies, don’t quibble about the liturgy. If they have cast god from their hearts, the throes of grief are not the context to bring them back into the fold. 

This is applicable to a number of other areas as well – including how to talk about the person who died. Beyond that, if the person wants to talk about the specific circumstances of their loved one’s death, you can engage and try not to make them feel awkward about it. While dying isn’t always part of our everyday conversations, it will almost certainly be at the front of a grieving person’s mind. The truth is that dying IS an everyday occurrence, just not for all of us all the time. Be able and prepared to have the hard conversations when you engage, particularly with someone whose grief is raw and/or recent. Don’t retreat into small talk or steer around the tough stuff if that’s where they are. It will be too easy for them to follow suit if they feel your discomfort. 

5. When someone is grieving, they may not always be themselves, but it may not always be obvious. There isn’t always a black dress, streaming tears, or hairshirt to show you a person’s inner pain. They may be highly functional in many regards, but then plotz completely in unexpected ways (hypothetically speaking, of course: I am amazingly functional and would never succumb to such capricious weakness!). 

I guess the advice here is: see grief as a larger framework than just the memorial service, sitting shiva, the wake, and the immediate aftermath. Read loss into your understanding of the person’s larger narrative, both in terms of the impact of grief being spatially-emotionally broader than just the dead person not being there (the cascading impacts), and temporally lasting beyond the immediate loss. It can be as simple as: be patient and understanding, but in view of grief specifically. I’m not sure I can define how specifically, but I’m virtually certain that if you do it, this will make the person who is grieving feel better and more supported. 

6. Be both a ready and prepared helper. Never ask a person vaguely what you can do, or “is there anything you need?” Don’t put the onus on them, just do something and try to make it as seamless as possible. Reduce the amount of thought or leg work the person has to do. If you cook a meal, make arrangements for delivery and try to pack it in things they won’t have to return. If someone has established a meal train or other procedure stick to that, rather than freelancing.

Before you send anything, check to see whether the family has indicated preferences (“in lieu of flowers, please donate to the United Way, e.g.). I can’t tell you how good this feels on the receiving end when it’s properly executed – the weight lifted by not having to think or organize a thing is tenfold when someone is stricken -- and I have been fortunate enough to feel this feeling many times. It’s not just a boost in feeling emotionally supported, it’s a practical benefit and a much needed one at that. 

Also remember that what people need is not always material. Sometimes it’s just company, or to be left alone. Often it’s just unspoken understanding. Listen and be patient. Whatever else you do when you’re dealing with someone in pain, you should try to hear what they are communicating, even if it’s not overt. There is a tendency to try to make a contribution, bring something to the table, literally or metaphorically. But don’t be so eager to contribute that you miss what people actually need or want. Give space to grief, and even to silence, which can be awkward and painful. But grief, like life, I have found, is sort of endemically awkward and painful.  

  

Okay, these are my hortatory blah blah blahings on grief. Take them for what they’re worth (technically nothing, this blog is non-monetized). Be gentle with yourself and other people. And I look forward to each of you doing exactly what I need now forever, amen.*

*Non-religious invocation, not an invitation for a disquisition on my faith.  

Concentricity, grief, and the spider's web

"the possible settings

of a web are infinite:

how does

the spider keep

identity

while creating the web

in a particular place?

how and to what extent

and by what modes of chemistry

and control?

it is

wonderful

how things work: I will tell you

about it

because

it is interesting

and because whatever is

moves in weeds

and stars and spider webs

and known

is loved:

in that love,

each of us knowing it,

I love you,

for it moves within and beyond us,

sizzles in

to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees

by summer windowsills"

From Identity, by A.R. Ammons


In The Bright Hour, Nina described the strange feelings many cancer patients experience when they are not actively in treatment. When a patient is undergoing chemo, or has major surgery, they often have the outward signs that allow the world to apprehend what’s going on internally (at least physically): lack of hair, weight loss, scars, etc. But for many patients, the end of treatment doesn’t mean the end of their disease, just the effacement of its most obvious signifiers.

Nina’s mom was diagnosed in 2007 with multiple myeloma. She had a stem-cell transplant that wiped out her immune system and, in its wake, Jan looked the part of a cancer patient. Her hair fell out, she was emaciated and weak, etc. She managed to regain the weight and her hair grew back, but Jan was never cancer-free right up until she died in August 2015. For almost all that time, her outward appearance betrayed little if any signs of her disease, let alone her suffering. It used to bother her, understandably – the sense that, without the badges of illness the world didn’t take account of her condition.

Nina discovered her own version of this dilemma when she was diagnosed. After initial chemotherapy and radiation, her hair grew back and she was able to eat normally. While the mastectomy was disfiguring and complicated for a whole host of reasons, both physical and psychological, a cleverly designed, shapely prosthesis hid the outward impact. But by the time her initial treatment was over, Nina’s cancer was terminal. Just as the outward signs of her disease receded, her actual status went from scary to imminently deadly. The disparity between what the world saw and what she felt was never greater.

I don’t know how Jan or Nina felt, only what they described. But their experiences seem exemplary to me in terms of this inward/outward discrepancy. As I learn to navigate grief and loss, I identify with the condition of a surface healing belied by gnawing inner trauma. To be clear, losing a partner or loved one is not like having terminal cancer. In some ways I suppose it is the mirror image – the loss of the other rather than the loss of self – but the experiences are orthogonal at best. I can tell you about the fear of losing my life partner, or the struggle to figure out what to do in the wake of that loss, but I don’t have much insight on watching my own light going out while the rest of my world keeps humming along.

Still, there are at least structural parallels. The initial phases of grief are marked by the familiar trappings of trauma – funerary rites are observed, family and friends rally to support the bereaved, and a whole confederacy of social and cultural markers of support is mustered. As time passes, the outward signs of loss and grief recede and the familiar rhythms of everyday life take over the ground they lost, so to speak, to loss.

This waxing immediacy after trauma or loss brings to mind the concentric rings theory of trauma support: The theory is that the person in need of support stands in the center of concentric rings and that every person outside that center must only “lean out,” or draw support from those situated farther from the center. The idea is not to rely on the afflicted for support, but to offer it instead to those in relatively greater need. I experienced this first as a caregiver for Nina – trying to learn not to rely on her, my most familiar and ready source of traditional support, as she was ill and dying -- then later as I braced myself against many outward rings of generous support as I grieved. 

Concentric rings don't always feel orderly or schematic. 

In the aftermath of a trauma, there is always some level of “normalization” (using the term loosely – there’s no “normal” to return to after a diagnosis, loss, or other life-altering trauma). Though sometimes in dealing with death and dying the trauma seems to go on forever, we cannot always exist in fight or flight mode. Things have to subside or lessen -- in frequency anyhow.

The person who dies no longer needs the concentric rings of support. If there is any compensation for the suffering of the dying, it is that it ends. But the person who died continues to be dead forever. For the grief stricken, this means the grieving process can go on indefinitely, too. Using the concentric model, normalization starts at the outermost rings. People’s awareness naturally shifts from the loss to the immediate needs of their lives. Gradually, even the inner reaches of the concentric structure return to “normal” modes of everyday existence. Meanwhile those suffering direct loss in the epicenter may labor far longer. The outward signs of mourning will have long passed but the grieving spouse, mother, daughter, or child may still be feeling the pains of grief acutely. And the closer to the center of loss, the more potentially acute and long lasting the pain.

This is the basic concentric scheme. I like this version because it presents the Comfort Dump
shorthand for the concentric ring model. "Hey, can you help me with this," he asked his grieving friend.
"Nope, sorry," she replied, "I'm having a comfort dump." 

It is nearly impossible to stand in the center when your place is on an outer ring. When Nina was a cancer patient, I was close to the center ring. I was up to speed on every twist and turn in her diagnosis; I knew her prescribed meds and helped administer them; I attended nearly every appointment with her oncologist; I was her sounding board for most things, I knew her anxieties, her fears and desires; I read her essays and manuscript, I was in sync with her in most areas.

Even though I was closer to her disease and treatment than anyone else, the gulf that separated us was wide. In maybe the most definitive thing of all – her mortality – I was on the far side of Acheron from Nina. There were things she could only find by speaking to her friend Ginny, whose course of disease mirrored Nina’s almost exactly. This separation pained me at the time, but even then I understood intellectually that the mere fact of being in the terminal phase of disease meant that I could never wholly relate or understand Nina’s situation.

The same kind of gulf – though perhaps smaller given the existential vastness of mortality – separates the bereaved from the supportive. Losing an intimate partner is such an amazingly pervasive experience. I am over 19 months from Nina’s death and still discovering the depth and breadth of it. There are so many threads that connected me to Nina that were barely perceptible until they were cut – from the daily routine to our long term plans there is scarcely a thing I have not in some ways had to relearn. Nothing goes without saying anymore. Somewhere, even if it’s just barely audible in the back of my mind, every decision is haunted by a parenthetical or paratactic modification: “I have to decide – without Nina’s input – how much to contribute to the kids’ college funds (and also how strongly I feel Nina would have wanted to keep pushing them to attend UNC or if I need to be planning for NYU). Gulp.”

While the world around me has gradually adjusted and normalized -- and me with it to some extent -- I feel like a fly at the center of a massive web. I feel the vibrations of every new development, even fairly remote ones, through their connection to my loss. I try not to let myself be devoured by grief, I engage my new reality, make sense of life for the boys and me, seek renewed footing in a world that felt, only a year and a half ago, almost entirely without purchase. But the web is still there, even if I don’t always focus on every thread, let alone the giant spider that wove it.

This isn’t a plea for sympathy. I receive more than my share of gentleness and generosity. It’s meant to be observational and analytical. Nothing complicates like life, and nothing in life is more complicated than losing it. Survivors have a complex task. My life is multifaceted, constantly shifting, but most of my efforts aim in one way or another to craft a simple, stable narrative. I need something I can rely on to guide my beliefs and actions.

When my narrative was shredded, I had to craft a new one. But the original script isn’t completely gone; many basic plot elements remain and the overall arc is intact: I was born, I’m living, I’ll die someday, to be sure, but also I am a parent, a sibling, a friend, a son, and – hopefully, aspirationally anyhow, a partner again. I guess this is just a reminder that, no matter how attached I am to the storyline, or no matter how obvious the storyline of others seems, there is a good chance that underneath the narrative artifice that presents recognizable traits of “normalcy,” there lies the brooding, chaotic, first draft of something new and unfamiliar. Something that requires me to stop and apprehend it before I can appreciate what it means: the tug of something remote but familiar from the past, or an immediate sensation of spinning new connections to the world.