An Unpaid Internship at the Nonprofit of Life

Cartoon is from ScoopCharlotte:
https://www.scoopcharlotte.com/2015/05/08/moms-need-summer-internships/

Raising kids is hard work. The hours suck and the pay is worse. Parenting is an unpaid internship at the nonprofit of life. You get exploited, taken for granted, shat upon (sometimes literally), and all you have to show for it are some “intangible” rewards and “life experience” the baby boomers seem to think is a necessary rite of passage, but which sadly cannot be monetized or even converted into filial appreciation when you retire. Whatever parenting is, solo parenting is worse. It’s an unpaid internship at a Syrian refugee camp. It’s a total mess, you run around like your hair is on fire, and at the end of the day everyone has PTSD and dysentery despite your best efforts.

When I grieve, sometimes I miss Nina herself – the intangible experience of her, you might say -- the way she smelled, which was never just the lotions, shampoos, or perfume she used, but the combining of those things with Nina’s skin, hair, and body. I can open up a bottle of everything she ever wore, but it won’t recapture it. I miss hearing her play guitar and sing while I’m making dinner, and no matter how many times I play her favorite songs on my iPhone, it can’t recapture that.

But lots of times I’m also grieving the more prosaic loss of the second unpaid internship position we used to have here at the Duberstein-Riggs Emergency Resettlement Program (DERP). Nina was an indefatigably dedicated intern. She held executive director level responsibility, yet had no benefits or salary. Irreplaceable.

In the time since Nina died, like any dynamic non-governmental agency, our household has not stood still. Both of my formerly tiny boy children decided that right after Nina died was the absolute best time to start their sexual awareness and development. I was fully prepared to be on the front lines of this discussion. I believe Nina’s exact words were “don’t look at me; you’re handling that” to me, and the time-worn, yet remarkably effective “ask your father” to the kids themselves.

But I intended to strategize with Nina, even if I carried out the plan. And I wasn’t prepared for the discussion to also entail nascent sexual interest, which, for god’s sake why do boys even need any more?! The world is overpopulated, does not seem to need any more sexually active white men than it already has, there are so many video games, and we’ve got VR simulations that are starting to be frighteningly realistic, I mean, couldn’t they just e-onanate? Online dating is already a thing, why not online relationships?

Actually, I like to think I faced this crisis squarely, with uncharacteristic skill, though I had input from friends and a helpful review of some very good kid-level books on the subject over at Cup of Joe.

But that was only the most immediate and salacious solo parenting crisis. Kids are complicated, and they get increasingly complex as they age. My younger son, Benny, was an adorable little kid, all cheeks and grinning. His proclivity for cuddling only enhanced our notion of him as a sort of nuzzly family mascot. Nina had a special bond with Benny. Not that he and I weren’t close, but the two of them were peas in a pod. I cannot imagine a mother-son tandem with a greater shared bond for cuddling something soft and warm.

These two have always been thick as nuzzly little thieves. 

Turns out that a lot of Benny’s nuzzly, fuzzy ways are, as with most people, mechanisms he uses to cope with and mediate his reality. They are cute and delightful at times, but they are also masks. And the older he’s grown, the more he’s taken to living in his head, and the harder he gets for me to access. I am dying to hear Nina’s breakdown of Benny. I’m sure she’d be anxious for him, but I'm confident in the depth of insight she would offer.

You wouldn't know it from this picture, but these two can push each other's buttons. 

Meanwhile, his older brother Freddy has never met a maturation he didn’t crave. He started talking about getting his driver’s license not long after learning what a car was, and as soon as he could make interrogative statements, he was questioning society’s strange, inequitable distinction between children and adults. He is a wonderful and challenging kid, and a lot to take on by myself. My analytical approach to life is not so well suited to nurturing Freddy's artistic side, which Nina treasured and understood in ways I can't.

Freddy’s personality trends type-A and he struggles with obsessive-compulsive behavior. Benny’s is a strong Type B-. I call him my child Bartelby: he’d prefer not to. Not surprisingly, as the two of them have grown into more distinct, mature personas, they’ve been fighting like cats and dogs. They adore one another – just watch the two of them plead to be able to sleep in the same bed on a school night and you can see they are each other’s security blanket – but as siblings competing for what turned out to be remarkably scarce parental resources, they butt heads a lot, too.

The agony (above) and the ecstasy (below R) of brotherhood. 

This is an area where Nina was not just a contributor, but the Thought Leader of our family dynamic. Nina would be giving the TED talk on DERP’s domestic policy approach. She not only researched and implemented parenting strategies with real skill, she had really keen instincts for engendering kindness and good will in the family. Without Nina, I feel like the director of development at an agency with no executive officers. I keep the lights on, but that just reveals the total chaos in here.

Our parenting dynamic wasn’t all Nina, to be fair. Even before she got sick, I did my share, or at least tried. But our parenting was 100% about collaboration. We both thrived on constant discussion: the dynamism in our dynamic was dialectic. Now I feel like my parenting style is devolving into a really bad monologue, a frustratingly ineffective echo chamber. I can hold myself to account – I’m Jewish, after all, the guilt comes free with the life force – but I am never certain that I’m holding myself to the right standards, nor for that matter if I’m being too hard on myself or not hard enough. There used to be someone on staff for that.

The division of labor for a solo parent is stark and unbalanced. You can delegate tasks – and to be clear, I get plenty of help from many sources, the paid and the press-ganged -- but you can’t outsource the mental and emotional labor of being a parent. If there is a thing to be done, you either do it, or you make it so someone else can. There is no punting in solo parenting football: doctor visits, schools, diabetes management, dentists appointments, Tae Kwon Do, music lessons, playing with friends, and all the minutia that go with this continual barrage of events (immunization records, course fees, numbers of friends’ parents, recital dates, science projects, parent-teacher conferences, etc.) have to be stored in a readily accessible place in my skull. I really need to hire someone to build a database and find someone to manage it. I need an intern!

Then there’s the housework. Ugh. I have immense amounts of guilt for my formerly lax attitude towards housekeeping. Don’t get me wrong, I always did the stuff – washed dishes, did laundry, the normal tasks. But I never conceived of a clean house as fully my responsibility. I remember arguing with Nina about tidying up ahead of when the housekeeper came – it seemed absurd to me, but Nina understood that the tidying was just a way to get more out of the housekeeper’s visits, which we could only afford every so often.

Now the world has been turned upside down by Nina dying, I find myself hounding the kids to tidy up before the housekeeper comes. I feel guilt, both for my former recalcitrance with Nina, and for pushing responsibility on the kids with so much fervor (I have been known to play the occasional “I’m the only parent now and I need more help” card, which is a crappy thing to lay on an 11 or 9 year old with a dead mom).

I’ve also had the experience of parenting sick or, as women have been calling it for centuries, “Being a Mom.” Before everyone rolls their eyes, I want to point out the fact that I am a man, and so this is more than just the added challenge of maintaining parental equilibrium while feeling poorly. I am mourning not only the loss of my spouse, but also the loss of my former ability to lie prone on the bed moaning over my agony while my partner picks up the slack.

Seriously, though, even if Nina was vastly tougher and more functional than me when sick (she unequivocally was), she had a partner helping her. Solo parenting with a stomach bug is the pits, and that’s just a minor part. I’m also a diabetic parent, and sometimes I’m a diabetic parent sick with the flu, which, like everything to do with parenting, is much less fun solo.

I want to acknowledge the obvious fact that, although I’m parenting solo, I’m not alone: many people parent by themselves. Some, like me, do this by circumstance and others by choice. We are past the cultural age of nuclear family hegemony. But society still isn't set up for this. Every form I fill out presumes some kind of other parent and there is no adequate affordable system of childcare or parental leave in the United States, which affects solo parents even more profoundly than couples (not that it’s a picnic for them, either). So if you have one of those people in your life, give them a break. Or a day off.

Doing my best under the circumstances applies to both this attempted family portrait and my parenting since Nina died -- it works well enough, but there's always something missing. 

I wasn’t ready to lose Nina for all the reasons you can imagine not wanting to lose the person you love. But I wasn’t ready to lose her for the boring, everyday reasons, too. And it turns out our lives are made up mostly of the everyday, and one of my biggest challenges (and Nina’s greatest strengths) is turning the everyday grind into something beloved and magical.

The other night Benny came bounding into my bedroom fifteen minutes before our reading aloud time, when the boys normally join me. “I just want to cuddle and tell you about my ideas for a Halloween costume,” he said before I could stop dozing over my book. “I’m either going to be Master Chief from Halo or I’m going to be a ghost tree. Which do you like better?” Though I wasn’t yet seeing clearly and there was spittle attaching my lips to one another, I found a response right on the tip of my tongue, as if Nina had laid it there while I drifted off: “I think you should be a ghost goat tree, and we can stick Moroccan tree goats in your branches and they'll all wear sheets.” Gales of delighted laughter ensued. If you know Benny, you'll understand how nothing makes him happier than a furry animal pun. This was maybe my proudest solo parenting moment so far. Of course the next day I found out Benny hasn’t been doing his homework and Freddy got his first disciplinary write up of the school year. So: Still really missing my co-intern, but staying on top of at least some aspects of my workload of intrinsic only value and enjoying its intangible rewards.

The Fates of Alamance County

The motel immortalized in Nina's memoir sits by the side of one of the busiest highways in North Carolina. And it used to feature this hairy chested bather by the (no longer extant) pool.
  

There are a lot of things that remind me of Nina. There's the obvious: pictures, songs, books that belonged to her, movies we enjoyed together, our kids, trips to familiar places, rituals we observed -- from the Christmas stockings to the afternoon nap.

But some things are more subtly linked to Nina, or more specifically, anyhow. When Nina was being treated at Duke, we made a LOT of trips on I-40/85 en route to Durham. On these trips she started to notice that the same scooter was always outside the Embers Motor Lodge, a shabby roadside motel that’s right behind the (scenic) on-ramp from Hwy 54.

At some point she noticed a woman who seemed to belong to the scooter as well. Over months and months of drives to Duke, Nina developed a name and entire persona for the woman -- Lyla -- which was included in her memoir. Nina took the real-life person -- Lyla may or may not have been her real name, but I can verify she was a real person, I saw her -- and conjured a literary foil for herself in the throes of her wrestling match with mortality and illness.

The fact that Nina did this at a roadside motel in Graham, NC is both completely random and totally appropriate. Alamance County is, well, not much goes on in Alamance County apart from discriminatory policing and VERY minor league baseball. And even in the shallow pool of Alamance County lodging establishments, the Embers Motor Lodge is not the crown jewel. But it is absolutely unavoidable if you are traveling I-40/85, the main East-West artery in the state, with any regularity. You may not craft a whole literary narrative out of it, but just like Nina you’ll see the Embers Motor Lodge, sure as your born.

The Embers Motor Lodge that was has passed into oblivion, like so many things in Alamance County. 

As if to perfect the literary device, or maybe add an unfortunate amount of preciosity to it, depending on your view of neat endings, the universe maintained the real life Lyla storyline only as long as the narrative thread of Nina’s life held taut. I drive 40/85 constantly even without a spouse in treatment at Duke for my work. The next time I went East after Nina died there was no scooter. Soon after, there were work and utility trucks in the parking lot and someone was storing sheds in the grass obscuring the view from the road, making it hard to discern while passing what was going on at Embers.

When the sheds cleared, the motel had been redone (touched up might be more accurate, it’s still the Embers Motor Lodge) and there were no further scooter sightings, no further evidence of Lyla at all. The façade of the motel had been outfitted with pillars around the entrance, and the drab brick had even been completely whitewashed, a very literal effacement of Nina’s completely figurative use of the setting and its occupants in her book.

There aren't a lot of pictures of the Embers Motor Lodge online, surprisingly, and this one is pretty pixelated, but it shows the stately new facade nicely. 

I don’t believe in magic. I don’t see any connection stronger than the emotional and literary. So please don’t @ me, people, with your metaphysical gobbledygook. Blech. I am an impermeable rock of querulous, sciency, agnosticism. But I do sometimes wonder if Nina’s book somehow found its way to Lyla (not judging, but she didn’t look like a reader?), got fed up with being someone’s literary-device stooge, and was finally motivated to pull her life together and stop living week-to-week at the Embers Motor Lodge.

Maybe Lyla wasn’t ruled by fate, but a free-agent, acting in defiance of the Alamance County roadside lot those insufferable, patriarchal gods handed her. Something about this appeals to me beyond the storyline Nina crafted and my attachment to her work. As if somehow Lyla may have taken on the oppressiveness of fate in a way Nina was never able because of cancer, to live in defiance, even if only momentarily in the grand scheme, the finality of all things.

Whatever the reason, both the real scene and the trope that Nina summoned from it failed to outlast her. And now every time I pass the 54 exit, instead of a reminder of the thing itself, I see only its absence.

Not gonna fade away just yet (but gimme shelter).

A partnership is a kind of shelter. Giving cover is inherently part of the intimacy of intimate partners: we divide household responsibilities, comfort one another in times of need, and even make excuses for failures to attend irksome social events when necessary. We shelter one-another.

In this way, losing someone you love is way more than a window in your heart. It’s having the windows shattered, door kicked in, living room trashed, rug peed on, and roof damaged so badly the rain comes in. The place is no longer livable. But the thing is, this particular shelter is existential (unless you lost your partner in a tornado, hurricane, or other natural disaster in which case I am VERY sorry not only for your loss but also my incredibly insensitive metaphor). No matter how badly damaged it is, you gotta live there.

I keep wanting to write things like “the hardest part about being widowed is…”. But then I realize that, no matter how hard something is for me, there are millions of others who have been through harder things, and also there keep being new things that either exceed my prior sense of what was most difficult, or simply redefine it. 

When Nina died, I felt overwhelmed dealing with the raw pain I felt. I think it was actually a minor form of PTSD. Watching Nina die was painful. She and I had discussed this very thing before it became acute, and avoiding it was her overriding concern for end of life care. “Please do not let me suffer prolonged oxygen deprivation” was her seemingly modest end of life request to me, her principal caregiver. So watching her in anoxia was doubly hard -- her suffering, obviously, but also my guilt as a caregiver. And Nina was tough. She didn’t complain and she suffered a lot. So if it rose to the level of concern for her, I knew it was really a major issue. I felt I’d failed her.

My initial “hardest thing” was learning to live with what I witnessed and learning to forgive myself any mistakes I made. An obvious but problematic element of this: Nina wasn’t there to help. That may sound dumb, or at least obvious, but for a trauma of any magnitude, she’d would have been my go-to person. Instead, my lack of access to Nina was part and parcel to the need for shelter from the biggest trauma I ever knew. 

I took a variety of alternative steps to ameliorate this. I talked to friends, read books and articles, spoke to my psychologist, even got input from experts on what Nina was feeling in extremis. In the end, these things helped me limp to the point where the passage of time gave space to my rawer emotions to lose some of the tensions in their springs. It’s not that “time heals all wounds,” which I think is hogwash. Time not only doesn’t heal all wounds, it can nurse some and aggravate others.

No actual therapists were harmed in the writing of this post. 

But time is a necessary (if insufficient) condition of healing. In some cases it’s critical not only because the feelings diminish in intensity, but because it provides distance and perspective. When I was first told Nina didn’t feel everything that I perceived her body going through, I understood, but didn’t totally believe it. The look on her face, the sounds she made, her body’s graceless articulation of dying, stuck with me and prevented me from accepting that the drugs she had on board kept her brain from feeling or perceiving all of it.

As I lived with both the fallout from Nina’s death and the information I was given, the input began to sink in. The same information and reactions from folks I'd spoken to sounded differently months later, and today it has a whole different feel. I'm not at peace about her death, and if my shrink could chime in who knows what he’d say about me and PTSD – maybe I’ll have him guest post – but I have a much changed relationship to those facts than I did in the immediate aftermath.

Insight on my psychological issues courtesy of the Atlantic. 

As the initial impact of Nina’s death receded in the months (and now closing in on years) passed other, less obvious elements of losing her emerged as my new “hardest things.” This is where the contours of my missing relationship as shelter became evident.

Partly the shelter aspect is endemic to our particular relationship: Nina and I huddled regularly in our safest spaces -- usually the bed or the comfiest available couch. We both needed time and space to process our experiences, and to hatch our plans and coping mechanisms. Nina and I were pretty different, but our personalities intersected at the “I” sections of our Myers-Briggs types.

Maybe not all of us are trying to escape the world (though I definitely am and let’s be serious: any sane person would at this point, for crying out loud), but we all want a niche within it. A dugout. A place where everybody not only knows our name, but our tastes, predilections, quirks, peccadillos, timbre, rhythm, and even our scent (and not only doesn’t mind the latter, but is maybe even turned on by its raw pheremonal power…look, it’s my blog, I can write aspirationally if I want to, and Nina’s dead and can’t contradict me, so if I’m describing my scent it’s going to be “semi-frequently sensually musky” not “sometimes objectionable.”).

Without Nina, my instincts are even less helpful. Before she died, one of us could retreat and the other remain more or less socially operational; now if I recoil from the world, my whole family loses contact with it. When Nina was alive I was retreating from something, but also towards something: Nina and our Katy-bar-the-door approach to marriage. Now it’s more like I’m going to my Fortress of Solitude, which is not a crystal palace constructed of alien technology at the North Pole, but a half-decorated master bedroom that, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, is likely messy and smells like I haven’t left it in too many hours (but, hey, sensually musky!). 

Picture me here, but smaller, less modern decor, and muskier. 

This is the unrelenting long-term cost of losing your person: there is no one to turn to on those many occasions when the only one to turn to is the person you lost. Need to plan, cook, and plate dinner? You are the purchaser, chef, server, and dishwasher. Seventeenth kid crisis of the weekend? You get to be 0 for 17 instead of just 0 for 9. Parent teacher conference? Your turn. Problem with the internet provider? Get ready for muzak and frustration. In need of comfort after a rough day at the office? Hope you stopped at the liquor store on the way home. Had too much to drink last night? Hope you’re still ready to go at six thirty tomorrow morning.

I feel like I’m running a long-distance relay race and there’s no one to take the baton. Or I’m in a tag team wrestling match alone, and the other guys just keep jumping from the top rope onto my weary, bewildered, spandex-burned head.

This is grief. That's me in the sharp red onesie and boots. 

If you’re wondering how any of this is different from any single parent: it’s not. Solo parents have no shelter, either, and they all deserve childcare subsidies, a raise, and semi-regular amazing sex, just for starters. But if you’re going through the solo parent learning curve on top of the trauma of the person you love dying, well, there’s that. 

The point is, the relentlessness of the storm – not just its raw power – is the reason we need a good shelter. Your roof normally isn’t often going to get caved in by a tornado, but if you let enough sun and rain beat down on it, eventually even those everyday rays and droplets will wear it out.

So I guess I’ll just be here in my musky dugout trying not to get pelted too hard, pondering the concept of a growth mindset. And if you have a spare umbrella, slicker, or some top notch roofing skills, come on over (just call first, I'll shower and straighten up).

Grief is Hard Work (Happy Labor Day!)

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell


There are lots of books about grief; Podcasts about grief; Whole conferences about it, too. There are any number of ways to engage with the subject of grief and most of them are readily available -- including this blog (thanks for coming! Also: sorry in advance!). So I’m left wondering why, with so many resources and potential sources of grief information around me, and considering the fact I’m trying to wrestle with grief earnestly and directly, I so frequently get jerked by the grief collar and wind up sobbing uncontrollably in the bathroom to avoid frightening the children?

I don’t cry easily and that’s likely part of the problem. It's definitely why I'm worried about frightening the children. I don’t know if it’s because of the whole guys don't cry thing (Rosie Grier song-messages aside), or maybe it’s just constitutional: some guys may cry much more readily than me and some women may cry even less? All I know is, there have been times since Nina died when I desperately felt like I needed to cry and physically couldn’t. It got to the point where I had to go looking for ways to access the tears. Because it turns out Rosie Grier was right, crying does get at least some of the mad/sad/frustrated/despondent out.

I started writing about grief, loss, and survivorship mostly so I’d have an “outlet.” Or at least that’s what I told myself and others when the question “why are you writing publicly in a very confessional mode about painful personal things?” would come up. It wasn’t really planned. Before I started the blog, I would just periodically send out effusions of thoughts about grief, or Nina, our family, etc. And I would fire off social media posts about it -- my ad hoc outlet of choice. It was a good way for me to connect when so many of my normal connections had been severed or damaged. And it did have a kind of buildup and release to it.

But now I think maybe that characterization is wrong. I don’t think this is an “outlet,” at least not in the sense that there’s just grief stuff packed inside me ready to come flowing out. I’m not a pressure-packed keg of grief IPA. Or, to the extent I am, the stuff that came out would not be drinkable or look much like a blog post. And writing isn’t cathartic, it’s not like crying. I feel good when I write about my grief and loss, but I don’t heave, spasm, and snot like a distraught toddler when I’m done writing. And writing doesn’t feel like a visceral requirement of the grieving process, the way crying sometimes does.

I’m writing because I want to grieve actively – to shape and control the flow, to the extent that’s possible, and also examine it more deliberately. Writing forces me to channel whatever psychic cud I’m masticating into something with form or shape. But even more importantly, having the prompt of writing pushes me to mine for things in places that I might otherwise not explore. A writing project is important to me not because I’m necessarily overflowing with grief or things to say about grief all the time, but because sometimes I’m not even in close touch with grief, or at least the parts that are beneath the surface.

Even when grief is really obvious – when your partner dies, for example – it can hide in plain sight. Most of the time grief doesn’t look like much of anything at all. Without context, you might miss it altogether.

Yet grief is always there. At first it’s easy to identify. As long as I get up afterwards, I can always see the truck that just ran me over or the cartoon anvil that keeps falling on my head. It gets harder to see later on, though. For me it became a kind of verdigris on the surface of my life. Maybe my normal lassitude at the sight of a sink full of dirty dishes is a little heavier than normal, my frustration at the internet provider a little more testy, or my rebuke to the kids for not closing the door is a little sharper than it would be otherwise. But it’s not clearly separable from what any of those things would be normally. Grief is life, life is grief, it all blends and mixes together.

I can’t just write myself into clarity on grief. I don’t have access to it. Maybe real writers do? Or maybe that’s why so many of my favorite writers had problems with addiction or mental illness? Regardless, it’s not enough for me to want to delve. My grief isn’t an archive. I have trouble raising the immediacy of grief to the surface. Like my grief’s tears, its truths are hard for me to access.

So what I do is, I crack myself open. I have some practiced methods to help obviate my own defenses. Sometimes I do this by reading Nina’s book – an obvious and tremendously effective solution. Nina already wrote about all the stuff up to her death and did it better than I will ever do. But she didn't write much about what happens next. And grief is like chemotherapy, you can’t tap the same vein over and over again without diminishing returns.

So other times I read old text messages. There are so many! It’s a goldmine of grief spasm inducing material. Some of it is actually Nina and I discussing death and disease and trauma. And some of it is us arguing about who should pick up groceries. As a partner, lover, and self-flagellator, I love it all.

Typical text exchange between NER and me, including the mortal and mundane. We never got to watch The Americans because Nina died a couple weeks later. But we DID make it to Turks & Caicos, portable oxygen condenser in tow.   

And then there’s pictures. Worth a thousand words? Ha. I think easily 2500 apiece, but I won’t try to prove that point here. I can't explain the role pictures of Nina have played for me since she died. They provide both much more than other sources (actual images, clarity that memory can’t retain or recall) and much less (insufficient context: a single moment frozen in time, like one cell of an organism trapped on a slide, can never tell you what that whole creature was like in life).

I haven't got enough words to describe everything this photo of Nina on the beach at Tartane in Martinique in the Spring of 2003 evokes for me.  And this one doesn't even show her face. 

But maybe my favorite and most effective way in to the parts of grief I can’t even name, let alone map out, is poetry. One of the first things I did after Nina died was buy a terrific anthology of poems about death and grief, and I still read it periodically on a regular basis. Maybe it’s because Nina was a poet, or because poetry uses meter, image, metaphor, line, and form—so many tools at its disposal to cut to the marrow, the densest, meatiest, least accessible parts of us.

Poetry not only cracks me open and leaves me invariably sobbing, it reveals grief feelings I didn’t even know I had. And I want to have all those feelings, to experience it as completely as I can.

Here are some of my recent faves. May they leave your eyes as puffy and your nose as sniffly as mine. Just don’t scare the children.

Grief, by Matthew Hickman
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/05/grief-6

It Was Like This: You Were Happy, by Jane Hirshfield
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/it-was-you-were-happy

The Comfort of Darkness, by Galway Kinnell
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/comfort-darkness

Practice, by Ellen Bryant Voigt
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/practice

The Trees, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/trees

Enigma, by Leonora Speyer
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/enigma

The End, by Amy Lowell
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/end-2

The End, by D. H. Lawrence
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/end-1

Insomnolence, by Charles Rafferty
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/insomnolence

An Arundel Tomb, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb

The Mower, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48423/the-mower-56d229a740294

The Dead, by Billy Collins
https://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2011/02/the-dead-billy-collins/

The Truth the Dead Know, by Anne Sexton
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/truth-dead-know

A Song, by Joseph Brodsky
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-song-3/

Grief Stricken Kids Say the Darndest Things

They don't LOOK emotionally damaged, but don't think I'm not trying! 

I’ve done several book events for The Bright Hour like the one the Greensboro Library and GSO Hospice put on the other night (which was awesome, thank you again for making NER the community read!). I always enjoy discussing Nina’s work. It’s a welcome impetus to get in touch with Nina and my feelings about loss and grief. To talk to other people about it cogently, I need to boil down that stuff for myself, which is grief work I find helpful and productive.

And there’s the fact that I genuinely love The Bright Hour and can’t talk enough about Nina. Honestly, I go through cycles where I crave access to her so badly that I can’t imagine what I’d do without the book. Seriously, what does anyone do if they lose someone and that person hasn’t written memoir?

Still, as much as I like processing and talking about it, there are a lot of ways I’m blinded by, or at least myopic about my grief. Partly this is just due to the fact that grief is so constant and affecting. If you live with something long enough, you adjust to it without even realizing, the way the posture of someone who slouches out of insecurity or timidity seems to become their actual physical form over time (or the way people grow to resemble their pets – beware any blobfish owners!).

Beyond the sheer force and persistence of grief, I have an unconscious tendency to see Nina’s death as something that happened primarily to me, which is an obvious yet problematic distortion. Nina was a daughter, a sister, a friend, and—maybe most importantly—a mom to other people. Her death was dislocating for all those other people and causes them ongoing pain, too.

I know this intellectually. I try to remember it in practice – to ask others about their experiences of Nina’s death and not only focus on mine. I’m successful to varying degrees. But the book events make a good object lesson / reminder that I can probably never be too vigilant about not placing myself too much at the center of grief over Nina’s death. At an event I’m the literal center of attention, the person speaking, or being asked to answer things about Nina’s death and its impact, about her book, and about what life has been like without her.

The funny thing is: I am not the actual center. I didn’t write the book. I’m only doing it because Nina’s not there. I’m not the only one who can answer the questions about the impact zone left from Nina’s death. Her dad, her brother, and my kids at least are others who are all pretty directly situated to respond to those issues.

It’s not that I think it’s wrong for me to be the one speaking for her. She and I discussed me doing it before she died, it’s what her editors wanted, and I do think I’m in a better position to be Nina’s vicar here on earth (you can call me Pope Not-so-Innocent I). We spent the better part of 20 years together and I was her confidant and aide-de-camp through the book writing process (as well as the rest of our lives, which was the subject of the book, after all). There are other people grieving for Nina, but for the most part, I think it’s ok for me to take the lead on this stuff, because if Pete (Nina's dad) or Charlie (Nina's brother), or one of Nina’s friends is feeling displaced or dislocated in their grief, they can talk about it, communicate about it, problem solve their own grief (or tell me when I’m being a dufus). That’s not as much the case with my kids (though the older one is so emotionally articulate it sometimes scares me – like I may be playing catch up here soon, and he’s definitely capable to telling me when I’m a dufus).

For instance, I asked the boys what they thought after the event the other night. Almost in harmony they rejoined: “it was OK, but your jokes really weren’t funny.” D’oh. I pushed back a little and pointed out that I wasn’t really telling jokes or going for laughs, more trying to occasionally lighten what can be a very heavy subject -- the death of a young mother from breast cancer (And also, my jokes were too funny, you overly-critical, unemancipated little ingrates!).

That’s when they opened up a little more about how it feels to be Nina’s kid at one of these events: adults looking over at you, thinking you’re “cute” or “adorable,” and generally making a fuss about you. And your dad sometimes mentioning you or even getting a laugh specifically about you. In front of over 100 people. Apparently this feels bad for nine and eleven year olds, which any dad less thick than a (very readable, yet literary) memoir would have known.

It should not have come as a surprise that, while I might enjoy positioning myself to maximize exposure to all things Nina-related, the boys may not want any part of that. It turns out that kids can sometimes be self-conscious (who knew?), and also may like defining themselves instead of being characterized by their dead mom or living but unfunny and inconsiderate dad.

I didn’t even think twice about bringing them, and not because I think they make good showpieces. If anything, I’m always a little terrified that one of them will recite the lyrics to an inappropriate song I’ve played in the car and some attendee with call social services. I brought them because I view them as integral to our family, obviously, but also to our loss. Like my father in law (who was also there, and frankly, also being cooed and stared at—sorry Pete!).

But there’s the rub: of course they are integral, but they didn’t get to make the decision for themselves. It’s the whole dilemma of childhood. They also don’t see themselves in the same way I do, or the audience for Nina’s book does. It’s not that they’re not interested in Nina or her book. And they don’t generally enjoy FOMO. But the fact is, a book event on an adult memoir about death and dying in the evening at the central library doesn’t scream “kid friendly,” even if it weren’t your mom’s book.

That’s the part I think I get most wrong. These guys don’t always get to choose how they grieve or mourn. This makes some sense, they’re too young to really understand or generate solutions for the issues that come after a tremendous loss. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have input or control over whatever engagement with their mom’s death they have. And the last thing in the world I want is for the kids to wind up resenting The Bright Hour or any of the events organized around it.

Which brings me back to my sometimes problematic focus on my own grief. Parenting is hard not because it's made up of tasks no once can handle. It's because there's so much important stuff lying way down in the granular detail of childhood development. In retrospect, I saw the event mostly in terms of myself: what did I have to do to get ready, what was the format, who made up the likely audience, etc. I made arrangements for the kids – made sure there was someone to look after them, fed them dinner, etc. -- but I never took the time to look at it from their perspective. If I had, they might not have come at all. Or at least they might have helped me tell fewer (or better) jokes.

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.