Even though our funeral home is consistently busy, I’ve learned that one of the best things I can do for George is to push aside my to-do list, take a deep breath and just listen. So I did. He told me that losing his wife was so much harder than he thought it would be. He recounted how his pastor wisely told him that there was no timetable for his grief and that he should be patient with his feelings.

“I’m throwing nothing of hers out,” he told me. “I’m keeping all her stuff right where she put it.” He went on to say that every morning he makes her breakfast like he always did when she was alive and that he even bought her a Christmas gift.

“It helps,” he finished. “It helps to go through the motions; even though she’s not here I still love her just as much as I did when she was.”

A couple of years ago I might have felt uneasy with George’s insistence to make his wife breakfast, his keeping her stuff, and his gift-giving, because it smacks against the acceptance stage of grief work. Like many others, I had mistakenly believed that “The Five Stages of Grief” in the Kubler-Ross Model were meant for people grieving the loss of a loved one. I was wrong. The model was a reflection of what Kubler-Ross saw in people who were dying.

As new grief models have come out, it seems that this whole idea of reaching the last stage, or of closure, is a myth altogether, because our grief lives as long as our love. What George was experiencing and doing wasn’t morbid, or weird, or pathological, it was . . . good. He was, in a sense, living in the liminal space of Halloween. He was still connected, in love and life and memory, with his dead — but still alive to him — wife.

Dare I say he was living with her ghost?

Every year Halloween comes around, and with it those classic horror flicks, with their dated special effects and well-timed scare scenes that make us jump even though we know they’re coming. Who doesn’t love seeing children dressed in costumes? The weather. The fall leaves. The Pumpkin Spice everything. It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But beneath the cute and fun is this flirtation with the spiritual — albeit the dark side of the spiritual — that abides talk of ghosts, spirits and hauntings.

In the traditional Irish calendar, there are four “quarter days” that mark the beginning of a new season. The first of November marked the beginning of winter, considered the “darker half” of the Irish year. But the day before the first of November (October 31st) was seen as a liminal, in-between period where the Otherworld seeped into this world, allowing spirits — some good and others bad — to visit the living. Instead of shutting their doors and pouring some pre-Christian version of holy water around their houses to keep the spirits away, people would often do the exact opposite. They’d open up their homes, set extra places at the dinner table, and even prepare a meal with the hope that maybe the dead would bless them with health and wholeness through the winter months.

I want to believe in the spiritual kinds of ghosts. I love how the imagination can dance around these ideas, but the rational part of my brain usually wins over the mystical. You’d think a funeral director would’ve seen something, right? Maybe a ghost in the funeral home late at night? Or something misty and creepy at the cemetery? I’m often awake at the witching hours, going on late-night death calls, strolling through the silent corridors of nursing homes. There is a silence to the witching hours, a calm that can be disarming, but it’s never been an eerie silence for me, even when I’ve been handling the dead. I can say that the tragic deaths — the murders, some suicides, and some grisly accidents — have a presence to them, but I’m not sure if the presence is spiritual, or just the weight of the horror.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are spirits. Or maybe spirits do exist and they’ve always been kind to me because I care for the dead. I’m willing to entertain the maybe.

I do, though, believe in another kind of ghost. One that can be much scarier. Much more damaging. And much more haunting.

There is this liminality between the living and the dead, an in-between where the bonds of love can still dwell. Liminality is something that makes us uncomfortable. We like binaries, like yes or no. On or off. But some things exist in the in-between. They are yes and no. Dead and alive. Present and absent. The liminality of our dead is like a ghost, like Halloween. Because our loved ones are gone and they’re still here with us. Their actions, character, and — yes, I think I can use this word — spirit have literally helped form your neural pathways, so that the way they thought, their little idiosyncrasies, are dwelling in you. I write in my book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director,” that behavioral epigenetics have found that our experiences can be passed down on a molecular level. I write, “There are literal pieces of your loved ones in you from generations ago. And there will be pieces of your love for generations to come that play out in joy, confidence and bravery. Love may not be the same as power, and it may not always lead to survival, but love, unlike anything, finds a way to live on.”

Like my friend George, and the traditions that shaped Halloween, instead of closing out these liminal spaces — these ghosts of our loved ones — we’d do well to let them in. Ghosts get mad if we shut them out, if we don’t acknowledge that love lives on, if we force them into binaries. Repressed emotions, repressed bonds, repressed loved ones can haunt us for the rest of our lives if we decide to shut them out. This doesn’t mean we have to keep all their stuff and make them scrambled eggs and bacon every morning, but it does mean that closure is a myth. Not only is it a myth, it’s also harmful, for the living and the dead.

The dead can be scary if we don’t give them space. But, if we make peace with our grief, peace with our liminal spaces, and peace with our dead, it might provide us with favor during the cold, dark winter that lies ahead.

The post Finding peace with your ghosts: Advice from a funeral director appeared first on Salon.com.

In a new essay in the Washington Monthly, Dr. Gail Christopher shares this account of America’s grieving and mourning from Trump’s return to power:

This autumn, I stopped by a local nonprofit run by a friend who helps refugees, immigrants, and formerly incarcerated victims of abuse get jobs that can transform their lives. I was there to donate, and when I found my friend distressed, I asked why he was so down. He had recently lost his dog of 14 years. Then, days later, his mother passed. I embraced him, expressing my condolences. As we embraced, he said, “And then my country died.”

He referred to the election, which put one party in charge of the White House, Senate, and House. And in that moment, I realized that perhaps half of the nation’s voting population is grieving what they perceive to be the death of their country.

I contemplated how America came to this. After an election marked by harsh and extreme rhetoric, whatever the outcome, half the country would dwell in grief, convinced that the world’s oldest democracy was finished. Why?

This moment warrants a much deeper examination of what happened, how it happened, and the impact on our health, well-being, and hope for the future. It’s a bit cliché, but this must become a teachable moment. We must learn from this campaign never to be so divided again….

Our country didn’t die on November 5, but our country needs us to have open hearts and open minds during these transitional times.

Unfortunately, as shown by public opinion polls and other reports, what Dr. Christopher’s friend is experiencing is widespread. Anecdotes are not data, but I have heard and directly experienced and witnessed many such accounts of political-personal grief and mourning in these weeks since the election and now Trump’s return to power. So many are hurting. That so many other Americans are jubilant and excited by that pain and fear of what Trump and his agents’ have threatened and promised to do to “the enemy within” as they purify “the blood” of the nation is another sign of how pathological and self-destructive American society and culture are in this time of crisis.

Donald Trump was inaugurated on the same day as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Remembrance Day. This is a source of mourning and grieving as well for pro-democracy Americans and other Americans of conscience and honor. The pain and insult of that coincidence of those days is likely deeply felt by the freedom and hope warriors who sacrificed so much in the battles of the civil rights movement.

Donald Trump and Dr. King’s political and social projects are antithetical to one another. Dr. King fought and died for racial equality and social democracy. Donald Trump is a White racial authoritarian and the country’s first White president. In that role, Trump will further reverse the gains of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement. Trump and his allies’ attempts to end multiracial democracy (which is a work in progress, very much imperiled even before the rise of Trump and MAGA) are so extreme that they intend to overturn the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which was put in place following the end of the civil war and the end of White on Black chattel slavery to guarantee the full and equal rights of Black Americans — and by implication all Americans — under the law.

In his 1967 speech at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. King issued this warning: “If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.” Some 60 years later, King’s warning has proven, again, to be prophetic.

In another version of America, Kamala Harris was inaugurated as the country’s first Black woman president on Monday. There would have been tears of joy and celebration of the symbolic meaning and power of her ascent to the presidency on Dr. King’s Remembrance Day. Instead, there were tears and fear at Trump’s return to the White House and what that will mean for the further gutting of Dr. King’s legacy.

In an attempt to make better sense of the emotional dimension of Trump’s return to power and the collective feelings of mourning, grief, fear and overall distress that many tens of millions of Americans are likely experiencing, I recently spoke to Dr. Gail Christopher, an award-winning social change agent and author with expertise in the social determinants of health and well-being. She is a senior scholar with George Mason University’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being and became the Executive Director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity.

This is the second of a two-part conversation.

Roughly half (really a third) of the country is in deep mourning and the other half (third) is celebrating and excited about Trump’s return. Trump’s threats and promises to punish “the enemy within” and the overall permission structure he and the MAGA movement have granted for the worst of human behavior. Given these realities, how do we reconcile as a national community, if at all?

This moment accentuates the need for cross-racial engagement in authentic experiences that increase capacities for empathy, compassion and shared understanding of the history of the United States. Our country has never attempted to build the civic connective tissue that is required for us to function well as a whole diverse culture and democratic society. However, if this multiracial, multi-religion, multi-ethnic and multi-gender democracy is going to survive, we must begin to do the work of building individual and collective capacity for empathy, compassion and understanding of our shared history. When this is accomplished at scale it will help to insulate our body politic from the kinds of political manipulation we have just experienced.

I prefer to think of it more as transformation than reconciliation. Reconciliation often connotes putting something back together. It is time that we recognize that we have never been together – that the factions and divisions were built into this society from its inception. These divisions remain as fault lines in our social fabric today. The work that is required is transformational. We must replace the belief in a false hierarchy of human value with a genuinely felt sense of our interdependence and interconnectedness as a human family. This is the work of the 21st century and this election outcome provides an opportunity to accelerate healing efforts throughout the United States. We call this work racial healing or community healing work.

Reading your powerful essay in the Washington Monthly about mourning and the election and your friend who is being impacted by so much loss all at once resonated with me. It also seems like the public mood is one of dread and zombification. The election and its outcome have amplified the existing pain and troubles that many people are feeling – and have been experiencing for a long time.

If we give in to the fear and anxiety or self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, the opposition claims victory. This is a time in which we must practice disciplines that calm our nervous systems and generate positive emotional responses. Our thoughts trigger our emotions; the mindset that we choose to create for ourselves through various self-care practices is needed during these times. Conventional medicine has minimized the power of emotions, but advertising executives and social media designers are exploiting the power of emotions. Just as marketers of beverages, tobacco and alcohol used emotional images and slogans to addict consumers to their products, today the social media world uses heightened, particularly negative emotions to entrap people within disinformation realities that can be overwhelming and destructive. The recent announcement that there will be no fact-checking on specific social media platforms is one of the most dangerous aspects of this political moment. I believe people should exit such platforms. The market will create new ones that adhere to better standards.

The power of our mental focus and our mindset is our most important resource during these critical times. We must stay focused on the future we want to see. We must envision a just democracy and use our creative energy to create that reality. In my work with communities, I always emphasize the importance of focusing on what we are for, not simply repeating what we are against. Every time we reiterate what we are against, we help to amplify it in society. We must paint different pictures of the possible. During the Biden administration, every federal agency developed an equity plan. Those of us in the progressive movement should all have and read those plans.

We must come together in a more robust and resilient way than we ever have before in modern times to stand for truth and to stand for fairness, but we can’t become like the opposition we face. We must transcend the shrill negative feelings and emotions that characterized the campaign season. The campaign season has ended. Governance and its many consequences will begin next week. The vast network of non-profit organizations working for justice will be prepared to challenge the absurd. Rational voices denounced the family separation immigration policy in the first administration and it was challenged in the court system; there will be comparable responses to absurd practices and policies that are put into practice by Trump in his second time as president. We will all need the strength that comes from disciplined emotional resilience and self-care practices. We must do the individual and collective work together.  

What role has social isolation, atomization and loneliness as a public health crisis played in the country’s democracy crisis and its related troubles and causes?

During the Biden administration our surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, MD has done a wonderful job of releasing reports and calls to action that offer guidance during these critical times. His book “Together” shows the health benefits of relationships and the harm that comes from isolation and loneliness. It is well-documented that protracted periods of screen time increase feelings of isolation and loneliness. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this vulnerability. We have to put more intention into creating positive social connections. Dr. Murthy also released a report on social media and youth mental health. He also has a new report on the causal link between alcohol consumption and increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer.

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I emphasize Dr. Murthy’s leadership and the tremendous efforts of this Biden administration to move us towards health equity and justice. My deepest regret is that the Biden administration did not do enough to amplify their good work throughout the last four years and remind the broader American population of the benefits they were producing. There were legislative victories to create opportunity for all people and there was a steady drumbeat of work to create equity, particularly health equity. So now we must embrace the resources and fight to protect the gains. We must leverage these resources to help us make better decisions in the mid-term congressional elections in two years, as well as with our state and local government leaders. We all have to be very active participants in our democracy.  We have to make our voices heard. We will have to become our “brother’s and sister’s keepers.”

Black people are a “blues people.” We are also some of the most astute students of American politics and society and its potential and failures as a democratic society. We are also weathered and suffer great health disparities because of our experiences in a racist society and how we are the miner’s canary. Black women especially carry that burden and pain from the double marginalization of gender and race in America — and their roles as leaders in the long Black Freedom Struggle. So many Black folks are exhausted from the 2024 election and are stepping away from political life. We can’t carry the burden of defending and improving this democracy when so many of our fellow white Americans — and not just them but a growing number of Hispanics and too many young Black men — are willing to support Trumpism and what it represents and that betrayal.

The United States electoral system is deeply flawed. The Electoral College structure was created to support the Southern states’ power base that relied on slavery. Trump was victorious but the margin of victory was less than five million votes and it was the states that yielded the most electoral college votes that made the difference. Granted there was a popular majority vote, which is now being phrased as a mandate, but a closer look at the numbers shows a smaller margin of victory.

 I don’t think despair should be the dominant reaction. We need to grow from this experience and put more energy into rebuilding the multiracial coalition that elected Obama for eight years. Our institutions, churches, organizations, fraternities, sororities and associations have been the source of our strength and resilience. They will continue to do so now. We must allow ourselves to be inspired by our ancestors who created the movement to abolish slavery. We should also be inspired by our Black ancestors who were soldiers in the Civil War and literally won that war for the North. I am reminded of the Harlem Renaissance era and the poetry that embodied our humanity and our strength. Langston Hughes’ poem "Mother to Son" is a favorite of mine. To paraphrase, we can’t sit down because we find it is kind of hard. We must keep climbing.

Trump became president of the United States for a second time on Monday, which was Dr. King's holiday. Channeling Brother King, where do we go from here?

We gain the strength and inspiration to move forward by better understanding the progress that has been made in the 20th and early decades of the 21st century. Ending slavery was a 100-year struggle. It took another 50 years to end Jim Crow. I highly recommend the book, "Waging a Good War: A Military History of The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968" by Thomas E. Ricks. The author, a war journalist, draws from his understanding of strategy to instruct the reader about what I view as the complexity, redundancy, modularity, robustness, resilience, communitarianism, and agency that were employed to achieve victory during the Civil Rights Movement era. I grew up during those times. My parents were part of the great migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South (Alabama and Virginia) to the Midwest and the North. My high school years were filled with the sounds and images of Dr. King leading that movement.

The movement was so much more than Dr. King. It was comprised of a vast network of courageous, determined, loving human beings. These times are dominated by technology and new forms of media. This will require new strategies. As I continue this journey, I believe the most important strategy that has been omitted to date is holistic healing for our body politic. We must jettison the belief in a false hierarchy of human value. We must learn to appreciate our own and others’ awe-inspiring humanity. We must be humbled by the gift of life we live and have received and do our very best to make the future more viable and more just for our grandchildren and their children.

The post It’s time to ditch toxic social media platforms appeared first on Salon.com.

Per his own words and policies, he will rule as a dictator on “day one.” Trump’s “presidency” will be a form of autocracy and personalist rule as shown by his Cabinet selections and the policies he and his allies have already outlined and are rapidly putting in place. The Democrats do not appear to be able to act as an effective opposition or resistance party. Moreover, to this point, Democrats have prematurely surrendered by announcing they will work with Trump and the MAGA Republicans on areas of common concern that ostensibly will help the American people, specifically the working class. The so-called Resistance that mobilized to confront Trump during his first presidency is, to this point, also silent. Both the Democrats and the resistance are still shellshocked and cowed by Trump’s easy victory in the election.  

Far from having overwhelming positive support, Donald Trump’s return to power is a function and result of an American democracy and society that is in deep crisis. Public opinion and other research show that the American people are generally unhappy, worried about the country’s future and overall direction and have low trust in government. In total, the 2024 election was a referendum on “the system.” The Democrats, as the incumbent party, were punished by a majority of American voters and the larger public who chose not to participate, even as they were told that the election was a referendum on democracy and Trump (and more importantly Trumpism) and supposedly an existential threat to the country.

In the end, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement were viewed as change — destructive change and “shaking things up.” Trump’s campaign and its allies were also smarter, bolder and more innovative than President Biden’s and then Harris’. In total, Trump and his campaign were, in many ways, a default option, a national protest vote and an authoritarian “populist” rejection of the status quo. Donald Trump won the same number of votes as he did in 2020. Kamala Harris and the Democrats experienced, by some estimates, more than a 10 million drop-off in the number of votes as compared to 2020. The Democratic Party was both defeated at the polls by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement and a victim of its own collapse. 

This rage at the elites is global and not isolated to the United States.

Trump’s victory and now second presidency has caused great emotional pain and collective grieving and mourning for those Americans who voted against and generally oppose him and the authoritarian populism of the MAGA movement. This pain and mourning and grieving are also intensely personal and immediate for those groups of Americans who will be targeted by the Trump administration and its enforcers as “the enemy within” and as the poison in “the blood” of the country to be purged. That Trump is being inaugurated on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Remembrance Day adds another level of pain and dismay. Dr. King was martyred for leading a movement to force America to become a multiracial democracy and a more humane and equal society. Trump is an enemy of that project and will reverse the won-in-blood gains of the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement.

Trump’s victory is a source of other forms of mourning. For those many (white) Americans who truly believed in American exceptionalism and that the American people “were better than this” so would never return someone like Trump, a proven aspiring dictator who has no respect for the Constitution and democracy, to the White House, this is all a great narcissistic injury. Today should be the death of those naïve beliefs and fictions.

Healthy healing and mourning allow a person to move forward in their life and to reconcile and learn from their loss in a productive and perhaps even cathartic way as they try to make themselves whole again. Unhealthy mourning and grieving are potentially destructive, whereby a person is not able to reconcile their loss and find proper meaning from it and engages in unhealthy coping behavior. They can be stuck in loss and pain — and in the worst instances direct that rage and anger outward to cause other people to have similar experiences. These dynamics are true of groups, societies and individuals.

In an attempt to make better sense of the emotional dimension of Trump’s return to power and the collective feelings of mourning, grief, fear and overall distress that many tens of millions of Americans are likely experiencing, I recently spoke to Dr. Gail Christopher, an award-winning social change agent and author with expertise in the social determinants of health and well-being and related public policies.

A prolific writer and presenter, Dr. Christopher has contributed to 14 books, hundreds of articles, presentations, publications and more. She retired from her role as Senior Advisor and Vice President at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, where she was the driving force behind the America Healing initiative and the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation effort. In 2019, Dr. Christopher became a Senior Scholar with George Mason University’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being and became the Executive Director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity.

This is the first of a two-part conversation.

Given the dire state of American democracy with Trump’s return to the White House, how are you feeling? What does it mean to be “healthy” in such a moment of extreme distress, anxiety and fear? 

Thank you for beginning with that question. Feeling and emotion are central to this challenge and era. Western conventional medicine did not understand, explore, or honor the power of feelings — psychologically and biologically, until the 1990’s. How we feel actually greatly determines how well we heal and ultimately how well we are.

I think it is critically important to learn to manage our emotions and feelings even during the most challenging times. I am feeling hopeful. I believe that hope can be viewed as a synonym for democracy. Democracy is about the hope that people can live their lives with freedom and to pursue happiness. Democracy is always forming; it is never complete. 

I often recommend the book, “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition” by Manisha Sinha, because it documents the 100-year struggle to abolish slavery, but it does so in a nuanced yet comprehensive way, which helps us to understand the long view of forming a more perfect democracy in the United States. The aspirational ideas expressed by the Founders where just that – ideas.

The context in which they were introduced was a total contradiction to those ideas to the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that contradictory context was shaped by the belief system and mindset of the White male property owners of those times. They genuinely believed in a false hierarchy of human value that relegated people of color and women to have the least value in society. They lived with those contradictions for two and a half centuries.

It is important to note that the 100-year movement to end slavery was a broad-based multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic and gender-diverse coalition, but at its heart were the efforts of those most directly harmed. Enslaved and free Africans led the abolition movement. So, I am reminded that the journey for justice is a long and hard-fought one, but I believe that victory will be ours.

How are you processing these events in different ways and finding a balance — if at all? 

I am spending quality time with my family and experiencing the absolute joy that comes from welcoming a new grandchild into the world. I have the benefit of a totally contrasting emotional experience to the negativity and uncertainty of this moment, but I also feel that it is my responsibility to share the insights that I have gleaned over the many, many decades. The recent birth of my grandchild has reminded me of the nature of life itself. It is always forming and becoming. This is why I think our system of government – a constitutionally based democracy, aligns with the natural forces of life. Just as the human being emerges from the fertilized ovum, the creation of the possible is a natural gift and phenomenon we have been given as human beings. There are certain principles that must be understood.

Biological life like a democratic form of government is based on complexity, redundancy, modularity, robustness, resilience, communitarianism and agency. Unlike authoritarian systems, our democracy is grounded in these natural principles, and again, it is always a work in progress. I highly recommend the recent book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball. As I read it, I kept thinking about our political and social struggles for justice.

This political season, the presidential campaign and election results offer lessons about the power of what I call the “three M’s” in American society and those are Money, Media and Mindset. If Trump as president demonstrates one power, it is the power of the mindset. One of the most generous and kind leaders I met in the 1980s was a union leader in Chicago, and he would always say, “You really can’t beat a made-up mind.” Trump embodies this: he inherited an understanding of the power of mental focus and having grown up with financial wealth that insulated him from the consequences of the vicissitudes of life. Trump learned to apply his mental power as a means of achieving his desired ends. With enough money and enough media access to amplify his intentions, he successfully bamboozled enough voters to win. There are many aspects of work and change required now. Campaign finance reform and media regulation are critical areas for intervention.

Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Remembrance Day. This is an abomination and a cruel coincidence of dates. The two men’s lives and missions are juxtaposed to one another. How are you reconciling these contradictions and the overlap of these days?

One of my favorite quotes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” This cruel coincidence gives us another focus. We should celebrate the legacy of Dr. King in our homes, with our families and with our communities, churches, schools and organizations. The King holiday should be our reason for getting up that morning. We might even avoid all media that distracts us from the power of Dr. King’s life’s work and legacy.

This will be the ninth year of the annual National Day of Racial Healing. We deliberately set that for the day after the King holiday so that we can be reminded of the work that is required to overcome this nation’s legacy belief in a false hierarchy of human value. For the last nine years, tens of thousands of communities and groups have commemorated the National Day of Racial Healing and they will do so again on Tuesday, January 21, 2025. 

Many Americans are in a state of mourning because of Trump’s victory in the election and now his presidency and what it will mean for the future of American democracy. What exactly is being mourned?

I think it is important here to recognize that this nation has elected 47 presidents and only a small portion of them have stood for justice and fairness and yet our system of governance has enabled continued progress.

I can’t say what Trump’s victory will mean. I can imagine based on the tone of the campaign, the people that have been selected to lead federal agencies in the new administration, as well as the policy priorities that have been expressed that there will be efforts to shut the borders, deport undocumented immigrants, and reverse efforts for equity throughout the government agencies. These efforts or executive orders will be challenged through our legal system and met with state and local push-back. I think it is very important to remain hopeful and to be as organized as we possibly can to meet the challenges ahead.

What is healthy mourning for an individual? For a collective and/or society? What is unhealthy mourning and grieving?

Whenever we experience loss, either real or perceived, it can trigger negative emotions of fear and/or helplessness. There is considerable research that documents the harmful health effects of negative emotions. Chronic states of anxiety and stress are associated with many of the debilitating chronic diseases that disproportionately affect communities of color. Hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative conditions and inflammatory conditions are all associated with high-stress levels. An emerging and well-researched body of literature focuses on the health benefits of positive emotions. Healthy mourning includes a balance of positive thoughts to trigger positive emotions despite the temporary experience of loss. This requires meditation. Music can be helpful, and most importantly, positive social engagement with family or friends. In this moment of political loss, self-care in the ways I described above must be augmented with actual engagement in concrete activities that are working toward a better future. Community organizing, legal defense funds, voter registration, and activism of many types will help create a more positive mental and emotional state. These circle experiences may help to ease the sense of loss and replace it with hope and deeper more meaningful human connections.

The post Hope is at the heart of “healthy mourning”: Finding positivity while grieving Donald Trump’s return appeared first on Salon.com.

Outside, a ramshackle cemetery ringed the church, its worn gravestones toppled this way and that like fallen dominos. Those whose inscriptions were not smudged out by time revealed little of the people buried beneath.

Nearby, a tractor buzzed lazily around a hayfield, the aroma of the newly cut grass wafting through the church’s open windows. Even with its pews and stained glass removed, it felt somehow sanctified.

“There’s just no separation,” the young woman mused. “I want to love it, but that cemetery is just depressing.”

“The only good part about owning this house would be that we would be all set for Halloween,” the man smirked. They quickly left.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, was not put off by the cemetery. He was entranced. “I like the graves,” he said. “Think of all those stories.” I didn’t know it was possible to fall more in love with him, but I did that day. 

Despite being featured on the Zillow Gone Wild Instagram account, the house sat on the market for nearly a year with no offers, its price steadily dropping. I kept coming to see it with my boyfriend, drawn by some connection I only dimly understood. Perhaps it was because death was very much on my mind.

I’d recently turned 50 and had become preoccupied with what it would feel like to attend my father’s funeral. He’d been the man I’d most loved and hated in my life, and now he was dying. Years earlier, after a series of unresolved conflicts and missed birthdays, I’d lost contact with him. Already feeling like our relationship was one-sided, I’d conducted an experiment: If I stopped calling him, how long would it take him to call me? The answer turned out to be never. I hadn’t intended our relationship to end, but when a year passed, then two, I had to admit that it probably had.

For most of my life, I’d idolized my father. Nothing mattered more to me than his approval, even adopting his sneering disdain for my mother to please him. But after I had kids of my own, to my surprise, my father took little interest. “When they can hold a conversation, I’ll be happy to call,” he joked. My mother, on the other hand, sent them artfully curated book collections and handmade valentines. Did I have it wrong all along?

Then, after her own health scare, my mother said she had something to tell me.

“There are things you never knew,” she said. “Your dad used to hurt me during our conflicts. He would grab me. Hard.” Reflexively, she rubbed her upper arms. 

“How hard?’ I asked, realizing immediately it was the wrong question. The instinct to defend him was hard to shake.

“Enough that I had to wear long sleeves to cover up the bruises,” she responded, softly.

I’d already come to view the way he had recruited me into his contempt of her during their almost 20-year marriage with revulsion. Still, when she disclosed the physical abuse, I had the vertiginous feeling of falling. Was my whole childhood a fiction? Sometimes that worry makes me feel like I’m parenting without a map.

In third grade, my eldest daughter earned a place in her school-wide spelling bee.

“I don’t want your help!” she cried when I tried to quiz her on the way to school. “I’m not even sure I want to do it.”

Do it? When I qualified for a regional spelling bee at 11, my father prepared elaborate flash cards and put me on a strict schedule for weeks until letters and words filled my dreams. I could still feel the intoxicating fizz of his attention, and the sticky shame after I got knocked out in the second round. When my daughter’s turn came up to go on stage, she turned on her heels and marched back to her seat beside me.

“What are you doing?!” I hissed.

“I changed my mind,” she said, crossing her arms.

“Get on stage! Hurry, it’s still your turn!” I could hear the shrillness in my voice. In the silence that followed, I realized that nearly everyone in the auditorium had heard it too. I sat down heavily, a lump in my throat.

“I hate you! You didn’t even ask me why!” my daughter screamed at me later that day.

She was right; it hadn’t even occurred to me. My darkest fear is that I am not all that different from my father. That dread is especially hard in the moments I find myself acting exactly like him. 

My complicated history with my father has made it difficult to let any man in. Whenever anyone got too close, I would sabotage things. Most of the time, though, I just picked the wrong men; it made being disappointed easier. Deep down, I believed I did not deserve better. Then I fell hard for a man who made me feel, for the first time in my life, both known and loved. Of course, it made me want to end things with him immediately.

When I tried to shake him though, he held tight. Even so, our relationship had a certain tenuousness. How do you create a life with someone when you are in your 50s and not going to have children together or get married? What did we have that was just ours? The closer we became, the more I felt completely out on a limb.

“Let’s do this,” my boyfriend said about the house after one last look on a bitterly cold winter day. Rain puddled around the gravestones, making them seem as if they might sink into the ground. “Halloween will be great,” he said. 

We moved in on a beautiful clear spring morning and I promptly picked a huge fight with him.

“Can you please lower your voice?” he asked, trying to de-escalate.

What I heard was: “I want to break up.”

“What? No,” he sighed. “Here’s how this works, Sarah — I am staying. We are in this together.” He brought my fingers to his mouth and kissed them.

In high school, we read "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in philosophy class. “On a cycle, the frame is gone,” Robert Pirsig wrote. “You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

Living beside a cemetery is a lot like riding a motorcycle — the sense of presence is overwhelming. Mourners make their way onto our property where they kneel beside their chosen headstone. Then there are the Girl Scouts who plant flags on holidays, the volunteers from the cemetery nonprofit who prop up the stones that have toppled over, and the curious passersby. “I feel like you are taking care of my grandfather,” one woman told me, giving me a hug.

I look out on the crumbling graves while drinking my morning coffee, mist rising from the yard, and feel a swell of love for them. Cemetery ownership can be challenging, but the responsibility I feel to care for the graves also brings a deep connection. I trim the grass and pick up the vases when they fall. After I started putting poetry up on the church marquee outside, poetry recommendations began slipping under our door. I hang them dutifully. The Girl Scouts have come to expect hot chocolate. I’m never too busy to engage with a mourner about their loved one.

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Since buying our house, I’ve stopped thinking so much about what my boyfriend and I don’t share. Stewarding other people’s stories, it turns out, has strengthened ours.

A few months ago, multiple family members encouraged me to come say goodbye to my father as his death rapidly approaches. For a while, it was all I could think about: Would I regret not mending our relationship, or at least trying? “You have to go,” my boyfriend advised.

Weeks later, I sat in my father's room in the retirement home where he will no doubt spend his remaining days. There he was, sitting on the edge of the bed, his thin, frail frame doubled over. That day, I realized I’d been struggling with the wrong question. It wasn’t about whether he deserved my absolution; it was about whether I would be the kind of person who could give it. Forgiving my father wasn’t for him, so he could die in peace. It was for me so I could live in it.

I’ve learned that cemeteries, too, aren’t really for the dead. They’re for the living. They give us a chance to remember people as we wish, maybe to wash away some of the bitterness or hurt feelings we might have felt when they were alive. Our cemetery has been like that for me. But it’s also been a reminder that all things broken and complicated deserve a home and to be loved. For the first time in my life, I’ve started believing that I do, too.

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In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

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After experiencing firsthand that the aftermath of loss does not progress neatly in five stages, Delistraty began exploring a variety of grief treatments, from approaches as traditional as ritual and community support and as futuristic as AI and memory deletion. His odyssey took him back to the history of our modern conceptions of grief, and coincided with a d new reassessment of the experience within the psychiatric community, with the addition of prolonged grief disorder to the DSM.

Though the loss of his mother and its aftermath “showed me how brutal pain is,” as Delistraty tells me during a recent video chat, it also showed him why grief can be something to “keep with us and to work through, as hard as it is.” Ultimately, it’s not something to be cure or reach the end of. But like a painful chronic condition, it can be managed. And Delistraty reminds, “It happens to everybody.”

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You pose a variant of this question right at the start of the book, so let's get into it. Is grief a disorder?

No. Grief is not a disorder. I found the research interesting and I've had trouble exactly coming down on precisely where I think, but I have some broader takeaways. Prolonged grief disorder, as I write in the book, is something that came out of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] by the APA [American Psychiatric Association] two years ago. Clinicians who believe in it said that their reason was to differentiate it from normal grieving. They're characterizing it as lasting 12 months or more, although they say it's really more like six months.

Then it has to meet at least three of the symptoms happening every day for at least a month. That’s a sense of meaninglessness, marked sense of disbelief, identity disruption, numbness, that sort of thing, and it has to be outside your cultural contingencies. So if you're celebrating the Day of the Dead as a Mexican, you're not suffering from prolonged grief disorder. 

It's obviously had a ton of opponents. When I was on the phone with different researchers and talked to different people over Zoom, both sides were super passionate about it. I do think everyone is acting in good faith. People want the best for people who are grieving in these very intense, persistent, and as prolonged grief disorder people say, unchanging ways. What is tricky is diagnostic culture more broadly. Putting something like grief into a lens of medicine is always going to be tricky, and is always going to elicit pretty intense feedback and responses. 

I took the questionnaire to get confirmed possibly for prolonged grief disorder, but I wasn't myself confirmed. I never walked around with that label. I can see how that legitimacy would be valuable to someone, though. Just think of the fact that the average bereavement time off in the U.S. is five days. You tell your boss you’re grieving, and they say, “Sorry, deal with it.” 

If you say, “I have prolonged grief disorder,” are they going to respond differently? Are our family members going to respond differently? That is more of an indictment, though, of how we treat people who are grieving than it is of any one diagnosis. The conclusion I've come to is to be careful with how much we center grief within diagnostic culture, while still understanding that there are possibly valuable avenues within medicine to at least draw attention to this and give some credibility and legitimacy to it.

In the book where you introduce the invention of grief as we understand it in a modern sense. Tell me about what we have typically thought of grief in the modern era, and how maybe we're starting to change that. 

We have to look at it from an even broader scope. The French medievalist Philippe Ariès was giving lectures at Johns Hopkins that were somewhat controversial at the time, because he was painting with a broad brush of Western attitudes. Prior to the 18th century, his claim was that there was what he called “tamed death,” where there is a real sense of social acceptance of the normalcy of loss. And that was due in part to higher mortality rates, but it was also due to people coming together, being around the bedside, religious rituals being done. Then you fast forward to the early 20th Century. The First World War is where I put it, where you start to see how with mass death happening and with this top-down desire to privatize grief, it gets driven underground. 

One of the most interesting examples was President Woodrow Wilson. The war effort wasn't a popular one. His constituents weren't excited for the U.S. to enter the First World War. He kind of brokered a little deal with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, prominent women's suffragist. He basically said, “What if instead of all of the women who you oversee marching in full black mourning to protest the war, we converted that to patriotism? What if instead, those women wore a nice band that has a star on it to memorialize if they have a dead spouse from the war?” And so you have this conversion of public grief into something that's quieted, something that's privatized.

Walter Benjamin in 1935 is writing about the covering up of grief and public spaces, how it's no longer the news of death. It's just the news. You have the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, writing in 1965 off a study of about 1,600 British citizens. He says that people are weary of talking to their neighbor now about grief, weary of burdening them. He attributes that in part to happiness culture, which I thought was funny, because I thought of that as a more recent phenomenon. But even in the mid 20th Century, people are starting to think of grief as something that could be almost harmful to others. You get this vicious cycle, and you see it today, all the time. 

I saw it in my personal experience. You say, “I don't want to burden this person,” and then the person who should be there to help them says, “I don't want to open the wound by asking about it.” So you get this miscommunication when, for me, just saying, “Hey, I'm here for you. Want to have a coffee?” is one of the most valuable ways of dealing with and helping other people with grief. 

We've had this evolution from the 18th Century until the late 20th Century, and early 21st Century of public into private. But I'm optimistic because I've seen a hybrid form, starting with what Crystal Abidin, an ethnographer of internet culture, has called publicity grieving.

It sounds exploitative and not great at first. In 2013, there was a big brouhaha over funeral selfies, where people were taking photos of themselves in front of gravesites. In the most optimistic, charitable viewpoint, I see that as people trying to put their grief in the public space somehow and not knowing how to do that. We don't have the language for this anymore. We don’t want to be a burden. But what if we're able to show death in spaces that are more public? Funeral selfies? Not great. But I do think that grieving people on social media, the rise of things like the dinner party I wrote about, where you're not in the formalized therapist's office, but you're not in full public either, there's a move toward the public.

My great hope would be that, ultimately, grief is something that everyone is open to talking about. And we don't fall into that vicious cycle of thinking we're going to be a burden, it's a burden.

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As you say, there's the imperative to avoid grieving too much. 

I think it's being good at grief. In my sense, that was keeping it low being getting through it. People would even say, “You’re dealing with it so well,” which doesn't mean you're talking about it a lot. It means you have shut up and you're doing well at work, right?

At one point, you write about grief as a bodily experience, and how it could manifest as aggression. What were you feeling? And what was the feedback from people around you? 

I had this desperation to be good at it. I'd been an okay high school student, an okay athlete, these sorts of things. In college, my mom gets sick, and I'm like, I’ve got to be good. I was studying way harder than I'd ever studied. I was doing strength training regimens, going for really long runs, trying to push myself. I thought if I could be good enough at those things, it would somehow save my mom or somehow help her make her proud or provide some usefulness. 

Then when she died, it flipped from, be a good student, be a good athlete, to be a good griever. I think in the year of our Lord 2024, we have gotten better at men being able to have a higher EQ and be more expressive. But for me, the physicality of it and needing a catharsis, that most easily came through things like training for the Paris marathon or getting into strength training. The feedback I got was, “Wow, you're doing great with this. Your mom would be so proud of how fast you've moved on.” And so the physicality of it was fascinating. With laughter therapy, I found that to be a fun way of opening and liberating the diaphragm, as Carla Brown would say.

If I was breaking down a lot more, there might have been more questions asked or a fear that I wasn't doing as well.

When someone is sick, you’ve got something to do. In the immediate aftermath of death, even a sudden death, you’ve got something to do. And then there's nothing to do anymore. You just lost your job. The purposefulness of that relationship with that person is also something that is gone and is part of the grief. Did you experience that?

The received wisdom I had and was part of me being a good griever was going through the five stages of grief, which as you know, is so deeply misinterpreted. 

Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross came up with it as she was doing research on people coming to terms with their own death, not with people who are dealing with grief. There have been some interesting studies on grieving people. There's one from 2007 that found most grieving people do kind of move forward through these stages. It is a decent reflection of that.

But there's so much misinterpretation, and if I could go back, I would tell myself, that's not a blueprint, that's not a prescription. You don't get to acceptance, you don't get to a great place in grief by hitting these steps. I talked to one psychiatrist who said she had a client come to her and say, “I'm asking my husband to make me angry because I'm trying to get to the anger stage faster.” Oh, no, you've misunderstood entirely. I was in that space of thinking “closure,” thinking “five stages.” That was the work I was able to give myself. It was the part of being a good griever. Of course, I had to rethink all of those things to ever get anywhere in my grief. But early on, that was definitely the thinking. 

You went through so many different therapeutic interventions, things that I didn't know were available in the real world. What did it teach you about what other people are going through in this community of grief, and this community of seekers? 

It showed me how brutal pain is and how pain is just something that our first and understandably, evolutionary, feeling is, “Get it away, get it off, get it out of my head.” When I researched, some was for me, but also I thought things Chat GPT would be interesting to the reader.

I wanted to see what the technological recreation of my mom would be like. I was doing that in 2020, before all the media hit on it. I thought, this seems like a futuristic thing that a lot of people probably will try. A lot of it was trying to look at it as a mode through which we could, hopefully ethically, consider it before it's mainstreamed into something like optogenetics or memory deletion. I spoke to one ethicist in neuroscience who thought in 10 to 15 years this could be something that humans are dealing with. 

I wanted to look at that kind of thing and say, there are parts of grief that are hell and the pain is seemingly unbearable. What does it mean if and when we get these possibilities with something like AI? I was working with GPT-3, now we're way above that. You can have way more complex conversations. I'm sure we will have some kind of video component or even more holographic, even more human component. What does it mean to really grapple with those questions now and to say, yes, loss is brutal, grief is brutal, but there is some value in it? And there is some reason to keep it with us and to work through, as hard as it is, rather than erasing it.

What do you think would help us in it as a collective? As you say one of the problems is we don't have communities now, we don't have the social structures. We have to seek out other people who are sharing this experience because grief is isolating. It's like you're the injured animal in the herd.

It's hugely isolating. The loneliness is a big part of it. That's part of the fear of engaging with someone about it. I found throughout researching this book and going on this quest, so much grief bubbling just under the surface of people. You give them just a touch of, “I'm working on a book about grief,” and you get so much. People that people crave that license, I think. 

You're talking specifically about grief where someone you care about has died. There other ways of grieving too. You can grieve a relationship, you can grieve for a thing that you wanted that you didn't get. You’ve experienced so many different ways of looking at it and dealing with it, processing it. What works? And what works for us, in caring for each other? 

Being present was really what I found. The book ends on me finally going home and being able to get over that roadblock of talking to my dad and my brother in an open way, talking to friends from back home. I had felt isolated, and also did a lot of self-isolating.

I was living in Paris for a few years. There were several nights where I wouldn't go out, or I would sit and listen to my mom's interviews on on my laptop that I did with her at the end of her life, and feeling like, I’m not normal. I shouldn't be burdening others. I shouldn't be within the mainstream social sphere. And having the wherewithal finally to be there with my family and have that presentism and searching for that community. 

I am sanguine about the rise in communities. I think more and more people are understanding this. There has been all sorts of understanding recently about how modern society is screwing us over. We need to start reconnecting and recreating communities in real life. All these things are part and parcel of how we'll get better at facing loss and helping others through it. And just understanding that it happens to everybody. It's not abnormal, and it shouldn’t be treated as such.

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Only days before, I’d received notification my grandmother had died from one of the four roommates I shared a house with on Harvard Street in Washington, D.C. It was 1982 and I was a student at Howard University. I’d gone to the fall Homecoming concert featuring musical groups Time and Vanity 6 at Crampton Auditorium on campus. This was before cellphones, texting and other instant communication, so my mother had to call the police station in D.C., give them my address, and ask them to send a patrol car to our house where the message was relayed to me before I was about to go inside the auditorium.

I remembered being in that church — numb, unsure of how to act or respond to death. I’d been close to Grandmother. I loved her dearly; yet, I did not cry.

I wanted to display a sense of love and affection, that tenderness death exposes. I wanted Grandmother to know the crater she left inside my heart was gargantuan, unfillable. However, it is difficult to escape the lessons of supposed manhood from neighborhood cats that specialized in the art of misogynistic behavior, believed in preying on the weak, and being a real N___ was the only thing in life to aspire to. What I mean is from an early age both inside and outside the home, I was taught real men don’t cry. They bet not.

The majority of this I had learned by the tender age of eight, from pouring shots of white and red liquor in my grandmother’s shot house.

My grandmother’s shot house was frequented by men hardened by the weatherworn elements of time, those tiny particles of memory that refuse erasure. They held it all in. There was no crying. The emotive was damn near mythological and prohibited by the innate laws that governed these men. I watched them. I learned from them. I wanted to be them.

It was an environment my mother was accustomed to as well, having come of age in that old veridian clapboard house, an experience she never wanted to talk about, especially what it was like for a young woman to be present in a place that sexualized women on the daily. Even before my grandmother died, my mother and I always had this sort of brokenness, a fractured claim to connection. It seemed like we would never find a way to bond as mother and son, or wade in an emotional state of comfort.

By the time I was in that southern church processing Grandmother's death, I’d become a participant in the national narrative of cocaine through a Cuban cartel operating out of Miami.

In the future version of Randall, there would be twin-engine planes, cigarette boats moving through Caribbean waters with fiberglass kilos headed to Miami. There would also be homelessness and prison. There would be near-death misses, near-deaths attempted. I was a lost human drifting through the corridors of consciousness. What I am trying to say is I had become immersed in a culture of drugs. At the time of my grandmother’s death I was a college student in name and appearance only.

I was straddling a wafer-thin allegorical fence: The young man my parents wanted me to be versus who I was becoming.

During this transformation from college student to drug seller, my mother and I had a difficult time being in the same room without arguing about my life choices. To be honest, I did not make it easy. I rebelled at authority. Our disagreements were intense, mainly because, in the end, I wanted her to love me in a way I could not express. So I acted out, even as an adult. Perhaps my father saw this dynamic play out more than anyone, and when I was alone and angry, he would only offer, “You and your mother are just alike.”

My mother was never easy on me. Even as a boy she demanded I be tough, that I not cry. One time when I was homeless in D.C., I called the house late one night, and while my dad wanted to talk to me, my mother told my dad to hang up the damn phone. If I am honest with myself, I know why. I needed a tough love because a conventional love wasn’t working. It would take many years to understand my mother, that the silence she lived with growing up around her mother, the things she witnessed, it all played a part in how she raised me as her son. She saw how society withered those men up and took the joy out of living before they returned to the dirt. The booze, the women of the night, the gambling, the cons, all of these factors of the living she grew up around, as did I.

The day before my mother passed, I was at home in Birmingham, Alabama.

My mother had recently suffered a mild stroke, so mild she wasn’t aware until she went to the hospital and the doctor confirmed bleeding on the brain. The prognosis seemed to be good, so I did not fly home. I came two months later on my way to a literary conference in Dallas.

The night before my flight departed for Texas, I was working on my panel presentation in my father’s office downstairs when I looked up and saw my mother lingering in the doorway with the most angelic smile. At that moment, wading in my own silence, I felt the sincerest connection I’d ever shared with my mother. Her glowing face was full of innocent youth. It was as if she were a teenager, and I was meeting her for the first time. My mother proceeded to explain she’d backed the car out of the garage and back in. A simple task, but for her it was validation that she was on the road to full recovery.

When I finished my panel the next day in Dallas, I checked my cell phone only to see way too many missed calls from my brother-in-law. The sheer volume told something was wrong. My mother had suffered a severe stroke. I needed to return to Birmingham immediately.

At the hospital my dad, sister and I received the prognosis there was nothing else to do, that she would never regain consciousness.  My mother would hang between the balance of life and death for the next five days. I could only think back to our exchange in the doorway of my father's office, that moment when whatever we were battling against with each other was over. In many ways that moment told me that whatever connection we had or did not have, I was her child, and she was my mother. The only way I knew to deal with the impending loss was to visit mother every day in the hospital and read her passages from my soon-to-be published book, "Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays."

The first essay I read was from “November 2nd and A Mother’s Love,” in which I recall my mother and I attending the Inaugural Ball in honor of President-elect Barak Obama.

I wanted my mother to know how special that moment was when we shared the first dance, dressed to the nines in formal attire in the nation’s capital. This dance came after a five-year bid inside the carceral state, after two years in a drug program, a bachelor's degree, an MFA, and a PhD. After the PhD came my first tenure track job. I was now following in the shadow of my mother, also a lifelong educator.

The second passage came from my essay, “Eleven Days.” It took my mother 57 years to reveal to me — or rather, to my wife, on a visit after our marriage — that after my premature birth in 1961, I’d been separated from my mother for 11 days, for the sole reason of race. I recount what it must have felt like for her to have a child and then not have a child. For all the reasons in the world, this revelation made sense in terms of our broken claim to connection, and why we’d been on this journey since my birth.

Though my mother could not formulate words, I could stare into her fading eyes, and as I did, I became in sync with her every breath. I’d like to think she saw the passion, the writer in me, and never imagined this to be my destiny. I uttered the most difficult words I've had to speak when I told her, "It is OK to let go." 

Author at 5 months old (Photo courtesy of Randall Horton)

I cried at the foot of her bed like I’d never lived by the code that weeping is for the weak. I didn’t give a damn. Whatever it was that I could not articulate had to come out. And in the crying came the baptism, and after the baptism came a sense that our love had always been that of mother and son, and maybe in the progression of death we truly understood each other. This was my mother’s final gift to me.

At the funeral, it was assumed, that I — the writer — would say something.

I sat in that same basement study where I last saw my mother alive, and after another good cry,  the first words I wrote were: “Come celebrate with us this life of longevity, a life realized through a commitment to service and achievement, taking every inch of what this social order gives, with all its constructs and ideologies within a nation that never could have imagined the existence of the strong Black woman — who is often cloaked in a sort of invisibility.” I wanted my mother to know she was never invisible.

I returned home a motherless child.

The next morning, while working on a creative nonfiction essay on my backyard deck in North Jersey, two doves appeared on the wooden railing. It is a backyard visited by darting sparrows and dignified blue jays lingering in the skeletal tree branches of spring. Sometimes against the background of a shed and garden, cardinals flash their emblematic red wings. But never doves.

As a poet, I viewed these two birds as Grandma and Momma, the two most important women in my life, checking in on me, letting me know they are always here, there, everywhere. 

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They call us motherless daughters. Or more clinically, “female maternal orphans.” And for us, Mother’s Day is a painful communion with the unknowable.

She was one of many, my mother. How many exactly, I don’t know. If the US Census Bureau has an exact count of dead mothers who’ve left behind living daughters, then the strands of its URLs are so awash in a sea of pages and jargon that neither my editor nor myself could reasonably fish it out. Our 11th-hour data trawl came on the heels of my other trawl. Having searched at length for quantitative research into the particular long-term trauma faced by motherless daughters, I’d resurfaced with only a thin stack of close-enough studies. 

Research on the sex-specific impact of father loss abounds in pediatric literature, as does sex-unspecified parental loss — but finding useful research on the unique needs of female-sexed children and women drowning in mother loss takes the kind of work most laywomen shouldn’t have to do when sobbing with grief. Too many peer-reviewed studies are outdated, removed from our readers’ Western experiences, or simply useless to me behind journal paywalls. You can imagine how little material I found addressing our sister-orphans who are trans. 

Even the most recent studies acknowledged the dearth of sex-distinct pediatric research. Finding research on adult orphan daughters is harder, and even good work is mostly parental-sex unspecific. Some of it reads with attunement. But more of it approaches insult, blind to repeated findings on mixed-sex adolescent bereavement which chart higher rates of suicidality, premature death and employment struggle — along with worse education and health outcomes, earlier and more frequent sexual, drug-related and criminal encounters. 

“The majority of children overcome the loss of a parent during childhood without experiencing increased mental health problems, reduced functional limitations or a greater need for mental health services during adulthood,” reads one from 2006. 

Feminist researchers haven’t let us down, though. Their qualitative work on the severed mother-daughter dyad has yielded wholly nuanced theories and praxis rooted in the unique “self-in-relation” analysis model. Even skimming a summary feels like quenching life-long thirst.   

Just last year, Australian women conducted what’s thought to be the largest known study of motherless daughters. Searching for answers, the researchers put out the all-call and hoped to get 100 responses. They got that many within two hours. By October, more than 2,000 women came to them, searching for answers where mothers once were. 

— 

I didn’t know my mother was dead until I was in my 20s. The last time I saw her, I was three and she was buckling my seatbelt in the back of my father’s car. Later, still much too young to hear it, he’d say this was his clever cross-country rescue after tracking her down. She was wild-eyed and feral, I was told, dangerous as she was beautiful. Gravid with me in her ninth month, she’d thrashed as if possessed, and had to be pinned down to keep from lunging into an obliterative cocaine frenzy. We’d lived on a little fishing trawler then, as it goes, and it wasn’t long after my first lungful of squall met the air, that a squall far bigger found us at sea. 

Towering waves, taller in each retelling, bashed us broadside amid a merciless downpour. My father was clambering to get us leeward against capsize when my mother took to the starboard bow. He says he heard my screams above the storm and turned to see her there, cradling me in her arms for a moment before she flung me overboard — jetsam into the devouring mouth of the sea. He dove into the waves and wrenched us back aboard somehow. 

More than 20 years later, my setting out to find her took some gall. And tracing her paper trail took some journalism. Months of records work ended in an online archive with a grainy newspaper clipping. She’d died while I was a teenager. No one had come looking for me. I couldn’t find a grave, nothing about ashes.

Caught between antidepressants and the bottle, she’d flipped her car three times before she stopped moving. But she’d left something behind for me in Alabama — a baby brother. I counted the years on my fingers to 18, dove back into records, and didn’t resurface until I fished him out. She’d named him Strongheart. We both drove all night to meet in Tennessee. Last time he saw her, he was three years old. He’d fought to graduate, an outcast with nowhere to go but our cousin’s couch. He hugged me hard and frantically. His hands were the same size as mine.

“I have a sister,” he cried.

“I’m gonna take care of you,” I told him.  

— 

I’d spent most of Thursday evening diving deep into the narrows of archived reports and dead-end URLs for fractions of percentages that might give me a headcount of my sister-orphans in the Dead Mom Club. Diving like there was a bottom I could hit. Like she’d be there if there was. But all I found was more sisters and brothers mixed together, our sibling-count growing as the world moves on. 

In the wake of COVID-19 deaths, an estimated 300,000 children were orphaned by one or both parents. Between April 2020 to June 2023, that number rises to 379,000 when you include “primary or secondary caregivers,” according to research from Imperial College London. 

As reported by the Guardian, Imperial’s collaboration with the Center for Disease Control notes Black children in the U.S. are twice as likely as white children to be orphaned under similar conditions. Worldwide in the same period, the Global Reference Group on Children Affected by COVID-19 and medical journal BMJ peg that number at about 10.5 million orphans. 

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In a pre-print study from a powerhouse line-up of academic and government health researchers, the spike in orphan numbers from COVID-19 arrived as the rate of US orphanhood was already growing, accounting for a roughly 50% overall rise in the number of orphaned kids. 

“From 2000 [to] 2021, orphanhood and custodial/co-residing grandparent caregiver loss annual incidence and prevalence trends increased 49.2% and 8.3%, respectively. By 2021, 2.9 million children (4% of all children) had experienced prevalent orphanhood and caregiver death,” the researchers wrote. 

1.7 million of those 2.9 million were aged 10 to 17 — kids far less likely to be adopted. Now add those 300,000-plus COVID orphans to the data published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, concluding “an estimated 321,566 children lost a parent to drug overdose in the U.S. from 2011 to 2021.” 

129,000 of those kids lost their mothers. If half of all children are girls, we have 64,500 more motherless daughters now.

— 

It was just a month or so after I’d found my teenage brother, and time to fetch him home for good, when he died with our cousin. Caught between a bender and the bottle on a hot July night, they’d reached highway speeds before passing out behind the wheel. My race to Alabama is still a blur. Behind the chainlink fence of the impound lot, I saw his car crumpled bloody. The relatives that had cast him out never shed a tear, and they hid his ashes from those who did. I still didn’t know where they’d hid hers. 

In a motel for days, I scoured databases and worked phones. Still diving, still searching. An angel in some distant judicial call center happened to be from the same town I was sitting in; she slipped me his father’s number so I could tell him his son died. Before I hung up to write the eulogy, she prayed a blessing on me that’s never come off. It took intervention, but the relatives broke down and revealed where my brother’s ashes were. They’d put him with our mother — flung him into the water. 

After nearly 30 years searching, there would be no finding her among the numbered, no archive of her bones but my own. A lady at the gas station helped me draw a map to the spot. Down an old country road, off a winding gravel trail, I found the little swamp marsh that will someday be devoured by the rising sea. It was close to sunset when I took my shoes off and waded deep past the bank of reeds and cattails. 

There is nowhere you can not be now, I thought when the rain started. The human heart is 73% water, and mine is 50% you, and ours are these salt tears — near identical to our shared blood, that’s near identical to sea water. 

I washed my feet that were her feet. Anointed, I’d done what I could.

This is my body, this is my blood. I cupped a handful to my mouth and drank them both.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.

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Ian, who was more of a music connoisseur than I, informed me that he’d listened to Taylor’s entire catalog driving our oldest to school each day, and not only did she have more songs, she largely wrote them herself and played guitar. Our 9-year-old feminist’s favorite song was “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together.”

I was skeptical but in spite of myself, I kept skipping to “Stay Stay Stay,” right after “Never Ever Ever” on "Red," because it reminded me of Ian and our relationship — despite the muddling hardships of middle-aged marriage, we always chose to stay. It tickled me that 22-year-old Taylor had written, “Before you, I'd only dated self-indulgent takers.” How many narcissists could she have dated in her short lifetime?

When Taylor came to nearby Philadelphia in 2018 and Ian wanted to buy our daughters premium seats, I balked. Why ruin all future concerts for a 10- and 7-year-old? I figured they should sit in the wet grass in general admission like we had for our first shows.

We compromised on second best. The girls were ecstatic in their own ways: our younger one dancing in the aisles, while our oldest stayed seated and sang quietly along, intently studying Taylor and how everything worked together on stage.

I was struck by how well Taylor understood her audience and how well she tailored — pun intended — her performance to the young girls filling the stands. While some artists might be disappointed to have a following of preteens, Taylor seemed to relish it.

As it turned out, it was our last normal Friday as a family of four. We returned home to Baltimore, where the following week, Ian was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

While he was in treatment, he worked on introducing the girls to a deeper well of music—Neil Young, Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian, Willie Nelson—but their favorite was “Woman” by Ke$ha, with the hard-to-forget lyric, “I’m a motherf**king woman.”

When he died 10 months later, “I’m a motherfu**ing woman” stuck. I played Ke$ha’s "Rainbow" album over and over on a road trip to Massachusetts and Maine that summer, eventually adding in P!nk and Adele, although we all agreed that Adele made us melancholy. I wanted the girls to have strong female role models.

Missing the chatter and clatter of the office during the pandemic nearly a year after that, I told Alexa to “play Taylor Swift’s latest album” — I didn’t even know it was called "Lover" — as background music.

I tried my former go-to artists, but it was too easy to get overly introspective sitting alone in my room while I tried to work. Taylor’s upbeat-sounding songs, which didn’t demand too much from me, turned out to be the perfect pandemic soundtrack.

I loved the playful optimism of “Lover” and “Paper Rings.” And when I really listened to the lyrics to “Soon You’ll Get Better” — about Taylor’s mom’s struggle with cancer — I was stopped in my tracks. So many lines in that song hit home, but “I'll paint the kitchen neon, I'll brighten up the sky/I know I'll never get it, there's not a day that I won't try” captured the utter helplessness of being a caregiver.

That summer, “Miss Americana” came out on Netflix, and though my 13-year-old thought she had outgrown her, we all emerged from the documentary impressed with Taylor’s newfound feminism, perception — and depth. I liked what she had to say about her struggles with body image and how she navigated finally opening up about her politics.

After getting my heart bruised by a friend I had hoped would be more, I discovered that "Red" was my favorite Taylor album. Not just “Stay Stay Stay” but especially “Treacherous,” which reminded me of how scary — and risky — falling in love again can feel.

It turns out that Taylor gets her heart broken a lot. And even at 22, she possessed a sageness about relationships.

In Susan Cain’s "Bittersweet," she talks about what draws us to sad music over happy music.

“People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average,” she reports. “But those who favor ‘bittersweet’ songs listen to them almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a ‘deeper connection’ to the music than those whose favorites made them happy.”

“They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcendence, nostalgia and common humanity — the so-called sublime emotions,” Cain writes.

Similarly, I associated Taylor’s music with my lost friendship and my missing husband and my newly wild hormones.

When I felt like I was coming out of my skin as the never-ending pandemic raged on in the winter of 2021, I took long, freezing nightly walks with my reluctant Shih Tzu and listened to the whole "Red" album in order. I did the same thing as I started writing down my experience with cancer and grief for an hour each night. During the day I told Alexa to “shuffle songs by Taylor Swift,” switching over to "Red" at 5 p.m. to write.

At the same time, I was going through a “red” phase of my own, trying to brighten up my widowhood with first a cheerful red coat, and as the seasons progressed, red strappy sandals and three red bathing suits — culminating in a sporty red car.

My daughters watched this transformation with fascination, not having the words for “midlife crisis.”

When she released "Fearless (Taylor’s Version)," my 25-year-old co-worker and I bonded, not just over our love for Taylor’s music but also her project to rerecord all her old songs so that she would own them outright. We loved the example she was setting for young artists, particularly women.

"Red (Taylor’s Version)" came out two years after Ian’s death, and my daughters and I cheered. My 14-year-old, who once considered herself too cool to watch Taylor’s documentary, asked me to go on long drives. We drove north on I-83 in Maryland toward the Pennsylvania border and dissected every song.

So when presale tickets for Taylor’s Eras tour came out on what would have been Ian’s 51st birthday, it seemed fated that we would get a code. Except fate, as my daughters and I know — I might say as we know all too well — doesn’t work like that. I put a plea on Facebook and after hours of effort, a friend found us just two tickets to the Philadelphia show, where we’d first seen Taylor with Ian.

As the date grew closer (it would be in May, just days before the fourth anniversary of Ian’s death) I purchased three tickets from a third-party reseller so we could all go. To appease my guilt at spending this much money on concert tickets — an amount that would make Ian blush, despite his desire to get them front-row seats the first time around — I decided to pay the original two forward. I gave them to a friend, and when she got sick and couldn’t go, she passed them on to two thrilled teenage girls.

On that perfect-weather night in May, we danced and swayed with the nearly all-female audience as Taylor gracefully — and when she couldn’t pull off graceful, then humorously self-deprecatingly — moved through her eras. That July would mark four years since we’d seen her as a family of four, and I wondered at how much we had all changed.

My oldest, the introspective one who’d stayed in her seat for the first concert, never left her feet. At almost 16, she was just beginning to emerge from a long depression that started when her dad was diagnosed with cancer, compounded by the pandemic and her ADHD, which made getting caught up difficult. My younger daughter, the extrovert in a family of introverts, planned her outfit with care, choosing to rep the "1989" era. She wore a white mini skirt, a sparkly white boa, and a powder blue halter top with matching cowboy boots. At nearly 13, she was the one who occasionally sat down with me to rest her feet.

I tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears as Taylor entered the stage at exactly 8 p.m. to wild cheers from the audience, my own children and to my surprise, myself. I marveled at this near-sacred space Taylor represented for her fans and our family, and at how far we’d come since the early days of Ian’s death — when my daughters could hardly stand to be in the same room together and I would sometimes shout at them until my throat was hoarse. When my older girl disappeared into her room for long hours and my younger one slept with me every night, worried about letting me out her sight. Here we were, arms linked, experiencing this hallowed moment together.

"The Tortured Poets Department" dropped this Friday, and we spent the weekend listening, looking for clues about Taylor’s life, and ultimately our own. Though it’s an album devoted to the grief of busted romance, we see ourselves in it too. In the “manuscript” of Taylor’s life, she — like us — has learned to “do it with a broken heart.” And, she seems to be saying, it hasn’t been all bad.

As my now teenage daughters and I move into our own unknown and increasingly separate eras, we’ve reached a place not unlike “Florida!!!”: “Well, me and my ghosts, wе had a hell of a time/ Yes, I'm haunted, but I'm feeling just fine.” We know there will be inevitable heartbreak and grief along the way — but also touchdowns and comebacks and even the “alchemy” of new love. Throughout Taylor’s eras and our own, there is room for it all: joy, adventure, pain, wanting, rebirth. The best is yet to be written.

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Judd spoke candidly about the recent loss of her mother, Naomi Judd, who died in 2022 and how the death was “traumatic and unexpected because it was death by suicide, and I found her.” However, she also said she was "so glad" she had been present. "Even when I walked in that room and I saw that she had harmed herself, the first thing out of my mouth was, ‘Momma, I see how much you've been suffering and it is OK . . . I am here, and it is OK to let go.' "

Cooper shared his own story of familial loss. His brother Carter Cooper took his own life at age 23 in 1988. “One of the things I have found so hard about losing my brother to suicide was, I get stuck in how his life ended and the violence of it,” Cooper said.

“I think we all deserve to be remembered for how we lived, and how we died is simply part of a bigger story," said Judd. She also advised listeners to "pay attention" to thoughts and feelings related to their grief. "Consider it a nudge, perhaps from your loved one," she said. 

If you are in need of help, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Hours of operation are 24/7 and it's confidential.

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As she writes in her new book "Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss," whether it's for a loved one, a relationship, or a job — grief is a complicated and deeply individual experience. "Our histories will teach us how we perceive our loss," Moffa, who is also a mental health educator and author, explained in a recent conversation via video chat. "The way that we grieve will often echo the way that we cope with hard things in our life." 

Drawing on her research and her own candid experience of loss, Moffa's book is a balm for anyone who's ever fumbled through the darkness of grief or felt they were somehow doing it wrong. "We are a grief illiterate country and society," Moffa says. But we don't have to be. With self-compassion and an understanding of how and why are brains are making us feel this way, we can weather the pain even if we can't stop if from coming.

Moffa and I talked about how to grieve for someone we had a complicated relationship with, coping with those unexpected "secondary losses" and why we need to understand that "Grief takes a lot of endurance." 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You start by talking about this idea of letting go, which is often ingrained in our concept of what grief is supposed to look like. What are these mindsets that we can get ourselves into when we're faced with loss — and how can we reframe them in a way that is more healing and constructive?

I think we are a grief illiterate country and society. We are just not in a place where we're adept at losing in any in any part of our definition of the word. We're also really bad at emotions. In the book, I even say that I was really bad at it. I wouldn't know what to say when people are going through a loss. And you learn by getting it wrong. 

From the standpoint of the brain, we really actually aren't equipped at knowing how to continue the bonds. We're attached to something or someone or an animal that's significant to us. In our brains, we have an idea that it's predictable, that they're in this place at this time. This is how our attachment is defined. When they're no longer in that place and no longer in that time, we have to figure out how to keep the attachment. That's so hard for people that they shut down and they don't know how to deal with the emotions that come up. 

Grief is not linear. There are anniversaries, there are things that bring it back up again, and the circle comes around. How do we prepare ourselves for that? And how can we be more sensitive to other people about that as well?

We're talking about all of the triggers and awakenings that come up that are unpredictable. It's really hard to prevent that from happening. It's understanding that it will happen — and how to react in turn. I talk a lot about self compassion. I talk a lot about reaching out to people and about understanding what our triggers are. But we can't understand them until we have them and they throw us off base. From there, the best way to do it is not necessarily prevention, but getting really clear about what those things could be ahead of time. 

We come face to face with these things, they can smack us dead in the middle of a street. The body will tell us when something is coming up before our brain will register it. I've had an anniversary of my mother's death. I almost forgot about it, because I'm in the middle of like launching a book. I'm sitting there, and I'm like, "But what is this feeling?" Then I inevitably see something on the calendar and realize that something is coming up for her.

A lot of it is very biological. So I don't think we can prevent grief, we can just be compassionate with ourselves when it comes up and be as in tune with our body as we possibly can be, because grief lives there. And once we know something will hit us in a certain way, we can do whatever we can to then prepare. 

Grief rarely walks alone. You talk also about the side effects of grief, including anticipatory grief and secondary grief, where you miss certain rituals, or you miss the house. It is a unique thing that a lot of us who've lost parents or who've lost friends to disease have experienced. Talk to me about what those what those other kinds of side partners of grief are that you may be blindsided by.

With all due respect to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the five stages of grief, I think it does make it seem like it's very clean. You have these five stages and then you're done. One of the big misunderstandings is that we miss all of the layers and all of the things that come along with a primary loss. 

If we're talking about losing a parent to an illness, I may have taken some time off work to help care for my mother. Now I've lost that sense of meaning that I had. I may no longer have perhaps the money that I had and I have to rearrange where I live, so then I lose my livelihood and my home. Maybe I woke up and had coffee with my spouse every day and we did it in a certain way. Everyone has these little threads that lead us back right back to our losses. It's about the relationship and the bond. 

Most of the time, the secondary losses or attachments don't come up right away. That's the sneaky jerk that grief can be. You don't really think about it until much later, after the funeral and after you've paid things off and after you've called the credit card bills or the lawyers. It's when you sit and you think, "I'm just making this coffee by myself now." It's both tangible and intangible — and so innumerable. It comes up over the years. I didn't realize I lost the only person who would call me at midnight on my birthday and think of me in these specific ways. 

So many people are ashamed to talk about these additional losses, because they don't seem important. But a lot of the time, they really help define the intensity of that grief and that loss. It's really important that we acknowledge as much as we can to the people around us, because each one of those layers holds so much meaning for us. 

You talk in the book distinguishing trauma from grief. Explain to me why they're important for us to get clarity on, within those spectrums.

You can have grief without a trauma. You can't have trauma without grief, because there's so much loss inherent within a trauma, especially safety. The most common and probably the biggest part that relates them is the nervous system. 

Our histories will teach us how we perceive our loss. If your nervous system, which is a smoke alarm, is always looking for danger, if you've already had trauma or neglect or abuse in your life, instances where you haven't felt safe either in your body or your environment, you're going to then perceive whatever comes next as more traumatic than it is, as per your nervous system. 

It's really tricky, because it is so individual that you really can't make a blanket statement that all grief is traumatic. But initially we have this attachment that is predictable in time and space. That fresh, brief moment is always going to be a little bit traumatic for somebody, because what was there is no longer there. And our brains have to work at trying to figure out what to do with that attachment. Over time, we do figure out what to do with it. It does take work and it takes active grieving. But for a lot of people who don't cope well with change, or who already have a history of trauma or anxiety or mental illness, they're going to have a much harder time and it will be categorized as traumatic.

It's really individual, and no one can say whether or not somebody is going through a trauma or having a traumatic loss unless they get to know them, and they're safe in order to share that and what their history is. 

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This whole book also touches on the duality and the complexity of grief. I loved Jenette McCurdy's book, because she showed you can grieve for someone who hurt you. You can grieve for a marriage that was bad. Talk to me about how those feelings and emotions play with each other, because it can be very confusing to the person experiencing it.

We are a western society that mostly deals in black and white [extremes.] It's this or it's that. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy can teach you to hold both realities at once. That's why I always say DBT should be in schools. We need to learn very, very young that we can feel all sorts of things at one time. 

It's because of that sense that we always think in black and white that people don't know how to wrap their head around the idea that somebody can be relieved that their loved one isn't suffering — and also miss the hell out of them. It is especially more common for people who have had troubled relationships with somebody they've lost. A lot of it is so nuanced. It's, "I really will miss the idea that this could have been better, or that I could have had a different experience with this person." That is where the deeper grief lies. It's in those little moments of "What if?" 

We look at a western society, and when somebody dies, we put them on this pedestal and only look at them through this joyous, beautiful way. And then you're like, "Hey, I thought  her dad was an abusive alcoholic. Now he was the best dad?"

I think it's because people couldn't accept if somebody was like, "My dad was actually not the greatest, but he did the best he could and I'll grieve for the dad I never had and never could, or the person I am now. I grieve because I wish I could have been somebody who had a better relationship." It really always boils down to, what if we could be taught to hold two opposing belief systems at the same time? And what if we allowed other people to do the same?

You talk about the fact that your needs are going to fluctuate and there are going to be days when you really need people around you and others when you need to be by yourself. Doing that kind of checking in with yourself regularly is hard, because we don't give ourselves a lot of space to do that. How can we cultivate that in the face of a loss? 

A lot of times we don't know what we need. One minute, I want solitude, the next minute I want to be surrounded by people because I'm completely lonely. Sometimes it's about slowing our world down. Sometimes it really just boils down to taking a breath, putting your hand on your heart, saying, "What do I need?" Maybe it's a glass of water. Maybe it's I need to actually like get away from my computer screen for a minute and look out the window. Maybe I need to call somebody and say, "I'm having a hard day and I don't know why." I don't think there's any shame in adjusting our expectations of ourselves and also leaning into what our rhythms are. 

That is why I talk about grieving rhythms. It's about leaning into the moments that everything can shift, because the way that we grieve will often echo the way that we cope with hard things in our life. Do we run away from them? Do we come to them head on? Do we keep things busy and moving? Or do we lean straight into that pain and get dark and emo? Are we people who isolate when things are hard? Are we people who reach out to others?

It's very multilayered in terms of understanding what we need and being able to communicate those needs. When we don't know what it is we need, let's shrink our world and just take care of our bodies, because that's the first thing that's going to go and grief takes a lot of endurance. 

I want to ask about this somewhat newly introduced idea of long term grief. It is tricky because we don't want to set timelines for ourselves, but we also don't want to pathologize grief. Are there some certain signs that can signal, maybe I need more help, or maybe I need to be looking at the grief as part of a bigger picture?

The key words associated with that would be relief and intensity. A lot of people are able to still have relief while they're grieving. That may mean that their support system is there, they're able to go to an event and let in joy or at least a laugh or two, they're able to go back to work and even if it doesn't feel good, are able to focus at times on things. The intensity will shift and wax and wane. 

Whereas if somebody is really getting themselves into a place where it would be a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder, or getting stuck in their grief, it would be about the idea that there's just no relief for them. They're constantly in a state of vacillating between reality and the "What if?" and the sense of guilt, which keeps them in rumination. When that's the way that it is, the reality of the loss is not accepted. There's a sense that that intensity will never go away, the relief will never come. They become very isolated from their peers and their support system. That is where it's a good time to be in therapy if you're not already. That would be the time I would say, all hands on deck. 

Grief really does take a very long time. The other side of that is people can feel guilty when they start to let some of their grief go, when begin to another relationship or forget something that used to tether them to the person who was gone. Part of the grieving experience is giving yourself permission to not be grieving and to feel happiness again.

That is the biggest thing people talk about, especially after time passes. There's that fear of memories fading, or that life is coming in bigger than the loss itself. One of the things about grief is it has science and mystery in it. It's hard to figure out how we bring these attachments with us. We just know that we need to and we want to, and that it will look different all the time in how we bring that person with us.

I think about the Andrew Garfield interview where he's like, grief is love — grief is all of this love with no place to go. But it does have a place to go, and we get to create the place within ourselves and in our lives and our own rituals and how we continue that bond. It's going to be really individual and that's where the mystery lies. So I don't have an amazing answer for you on this, outside of saying that we go on, because we must. 

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The 54-year-old actor was discovered in his Los Angeles home on Saturday, Oct. 28, apparently having died in his hot tub. He was pronounced dead on the scene by Los Angeles Fire Department officials. 

That headline caught me on my way out the door from a post-funeral gathering for a family elder – precious time spent with a brother, sister and cousins I don't visit enough. Given those circumstances, maybe you’ll understand my delayed ability to appreciate what Perry brought to the world beyond his work in “Friends,” the part to which most of our thoughts race first. That's natural, although what Perry represents on that show and everything he did afterward provides a more lasting lesson.

A year ago, in conjunction with the release of his bestselling memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry told People magazine,  “If I did die, it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody. And that’s a very scary thing to be living with.”

This is one of many observations people have called “prescient” in the days since the news of his death first broke. 

In his 2022 book, Perry says he spent more than $7 million and had been to rehab at least 15 times. In various interviews, he stressed that he wanted his life story to serve as both an example of sobriety and a journey of never giving up.

We knew none of this when “Friends” introduced him as Chandler Bing. Instead the decade Perry spent on the show cemented how closely his character came to represent people we knew well or thought we knew. 

Some of this was a matter of emulation, since Chandler is the funniest of the New York sextet. Like the show's theme song promises, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Monica, Joey and Phoebe demonstrate all the ways they are there for each other in every episode. Chandler, though, stands out as the one who strolls into every situation with a flawlessly quotable sardonic reaction locked and loaded. (If you ever prefaced your reaction to some scenario with a smarmy, “Can [you/it/this] be any more . . .” then you have, at some point, fallen under Perry’s influence.)

Other critics have sorted through Perry’s talent and career highlights more extensively and meticulously than I could without simply relitigating what he brought to one of the most consistently popular TV shows ever. His career successes stretched beyond NBC's top Must-See TV comedy, including starring roles in theatrical rom-coms, acclaimed work in Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and more praise for the criminally underappreciated 2012 comedy “Go On,” where he nails his performance as a grieving sportscaster who reluctantly joins group therapy.

But as Perry revealed more about his lifelong battle to maintain his sobriety over the years one might have reconsidered the ways his performance represents a mask many of us wear to fool the world into thinking we’re OK.

Although Perry was consistently candid about his addiction struggles, we never saw them in Chandler. Yet the intergenerational appeal of “Friends” translates to millions of people ruminating on Perry’s loss through our relationship with that show. And that lends to some contemplation about the ways his character reflects a truth about loved ones whose boisterous natures guard vulnerabilities and bruises they’d rather hide. 

The not-so-secret charm Chandler disguises in sarcasm is his kindness, generosity and the level of forbearance he affords his friends that he doesn’t always extend to himself. (There are also aspects of Chandler that, like the rest of the show, did not age well.) We all know people like that, and we probably don’t appreciate them enough. Perry says as much in that People profile, where he gives himself credit for “being sober today, for caring about others, for never giving up” and “helping people as much as I do.”

Loneliness, he adds, taught him “to treasure the people that really love you. And there are some.” 

Hearing about Perry’s death did not make the previous hours and days my family spent weathering our grief any heavier. Instead, it prompted me to recall the people I’ve told myself over the years that I’ll get around to checking in on eventually, some of whom are alive and others who aren’t.

I thought about the college friend who improvised dizzying jazz piano compositions, spun heady, wild prose and tumbled into addiction sometime after we graduated.  At some point in my 20s, he reached out after he’d gotten sober to let me know he’d moved to my city and gotten a job in a popular local bookstore, asking if I'd like to hang out. I told myself we’d get around to seeing each other eventually. A relapse and overdose ensured that would never happen. 

I thought about my childhood best friends whose lives diverged from mine because we all became busy – me with my career, they with their children and their related social obligations and networks. These aren’t absences, not deaths, but they nevertheless carry the risk of leaving questions unanswered, love unexpressed and truths unsaid. 

I thought about the ever-present possibility that someone, anyone I love, will simply go to sleep one day and not wake up. That can happen to any of us, regardless of health or age. It seems to happen more often in the era of COVID. Yet we — I — still put off reaching out to those who pass through our thoughts, assuming there's always more time to pick up the phone.

Perry was by all accounts in a good place, maintaining his efforts to help others to get sober and remain sober, and keeping in shape by playing pickleball. The officials who found his body said there was no evidence of drug use or foul play, although a toxicology report is pending.

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In an interview conducted last November in Toronto, Perry told Canadian musician and broadcaster Tom Power that he didn’t want “Friends” to be the first thing people remember him for when he died.

"I'd like to be remembered as somebody who lived well, loved well, was a seeker," he said. "And his paramount thing is that he wants to help people. That's what I want."

Don’t take that the wrong way; seeking comfort in a “Friends” rewatch is as acceptable now as it has been in past bouts of depression and mourning, valleys we've traveled regularly since the pandemic exploded in 2020 and that many are slogging through now.

This time, though, perhaps we can make a point to seek comfort in our people: the ones we check in with regularly; the ones that need more attention but don’t necessarily show it or say so; the ones we may assume are done with us but whose frayed bonds aren’t beyond restoration. That may be a better way to honor a lost "Friend" than anything we may see on TV.

The post Matthew Perry’s death reminds us what we need to be doing right now appeared first on Salon.com.

There were some exceptions. With each Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I connected with a growing spirituality brewing within me. I appreciated this time of reflection to consider how I could behave better in my life and to feel into a heaviness in my heart that reminded me of the dark side of Jewish history. 

But two moments as an adult were what solidified my identity as a Jewish American. The first was my choice to marry a Jewish mate (to my parents' relief). Upon committing to him, I found myself swimming in a sea of Berkeley, California Jews. It was both exciting and overwhelming. "Welcome to the mishpucha," older members of the community kept whispering in my ears while hugging me. I'd never in my life experienced such a fervent welcome. 

The second pivotal moment occurred when I discovered a West Coast brand of Judaism — one that featured guitars, services in redwood groves and kids frolicking in gardens. I could hardly believe my eyes and ears. During a Kol Nidre service in Oakland, California, I crowded into a rented space-turned-synagogue with nearly 1,000 other attendees. Three female rabbis swayed, drummed and sang. When I closed my eyes, it was hard to know if I was at a High Holy Day service or an Ani DiFranco concert. 

This style took some getting used to. At first, I teased my partner about how “far out” these services felt. Ten years later, they have really grown on me. Only two weeks ago, I sat with him at Shabbat services in an outdoor amphitheater at a Jewish family camp. Our two daughters, ages six and eight, were perched on a nearby boulder with other kids, listening, singing and making hand gestures to go with the songs. Rain drizzled, and my heart felt plucked with each chord of the guitar. I felt a rich sense of belonging. My Jewish identity had finally clicked.

And then that identity was assaulted at its core. The worst imaginable horrors occurred as Hamas massacred civilians in the morning hours of an exuberant Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. The emotional aftershocks resounded across the world, and they are being experienced right now in the hearts of Jews everywhere.

Over the last few days, intermittent crying episodes have crept up on me. Of course, I understand why I’m experiencing these tears. But there’s something more than immediate empathy happening. It's as though someone else's trauma has invaded my body — or surfaced — demanding that I come to terms with it. There’s also a nagging fear that grips my stomach, especially while reading the latest developments in the news. If I’m feeling this deeply from the other side of the world, I can't even begin to imagine what those in the region are feeling, are experiencing, are living through on this knife edge of uncertainty. 

For those of you who have experienced trauma handed down from previous generations, you know what I speak of. We feel a cross-generational transmission of trauma as descendants of persecuted peoples, as slaves, as targets of hate crimes, and as survivors of genocide. It lives inside of us, in our cells.

This cultural trauma hurts. But what hurts even more is the politicization of these recent events. At times, there has been a turning away, a finger-pointing, that does not recognize the tragedy and deep suffering of a bloody massacre, nor does it permit time for grief or healing. I’m witnessing a desire to quickly make a lesson of this attack. "Well, Israel had it coming," I've heard, a shared sentiment amongst antisemites and some liberal Americans alike. Nobody deserves pain inflicted upon them so brutally: not Israelis nor Palestinians. All suffering humans deserve empathy. 

Adding to the complexity of my pain is the question of how best to parent in this moment. What do I tell my kids? Is our synagogue secure enough to send them to Hebrew school? What about the cognitive dissonance of their attending a public school that continues to operate as if these events don't matter and don’t affect them?

As I grapple with these issues, I'm discovering these darker facets of my Jewish identity, and doing so is wrenchingly painful. While reading descriptions of civilian hostage seizures, I think of the pogroms that sent my grandparents packing from Poland and Romania to New York City. I think about my mom's cousins, who survived Auschwitz by digging up and eating raw potatoes at night. I think about those family members slaughtered in a Romanian village in 1943 and about the grandchildren who never met them. 

Little by little, like it or not, my own memories are flooding back to me from different points of my life. The 8th-grade trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., after it had just opened. How I felt somber in a way I couldn't explain to my non-Jewish peers. My visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in my 20s. How easily I related to Anne’s journal entries and imagined myself in her position. A trip to Israel at age 16 to visit my relatives on a kibbutz. How I felt afraid to ride the bus alone because I knew suicide bombers could be lurking. 

But that wasn't all. I remembered the Spanish guy I dated in my 20s while living in Madrid. He dumped me as soon as he found out I was Jewish, saying, "My father would never let me date a Jew." He acted as though this was a rational, rather than racist, explanation. I thought about a trip to Idaho with my Jewish boyfriend to visit my aunt and uncle. His first taste of the place was a farmer walking up to him, giving him the eye, and exclaiming, "Wait a second, you're one of them, aren't you?"

To this day, I take a few seconds longer than I should to fill out the demographic information on most surveys. Should I write "Jewish" in the "other" section? Sometimes I do. In those moments, I feel unseen, confused, alone.  

Amidst current events, what's really solidified my identity as a Jew is a sense of otherness and separateness from the rest of the community — a feeling that I’ve experienced for most of my life. It’s been reinforced by the fact that only a few non-Jewish friends have bothered to check in on me and my family during this time when Jews everywhere are under threat.

Right now, I am finding solace in my local Jewish community. Thank goodness I have a much more robust one now than I did when I was younger. I've gotten phone calls and texts from numerous members of my congregation. I’ve invited other Jewish friends over for dinner. Grieving together is something, and I'm grateful for it.

This week, my parents will fly in from the East Coast to visit me in California. As I prepare to spend time with them, I remember when they attended Rosh Hashanah services with us in a local redwood grove, one year ago. “What are they thinking?” I wondered, while eying them curiously during the service. I watched as both of my 70-something-year-old parents leaned back in their sling chairs, taking it all in. Jewish lyrics to Leonard Cohen and Santana songs were resounding across the field, and tie-dye shirts abounded. The scene was a far cry from the one at our old conservative shul in Danbury, CT. 

"So?" I asked them, as we made our way up the hill after the event, shlepping picnic leftovers, blankets and chairs. "It was wonderful," my dad said, smiling wistfully. "Something completely different." 

My mom's eyes sparkled. Her smile was enormous, and she was still drinking in the scene. "Well," she said, "I've never experienced a service quite like that before . . . but it was lovely."

This moment was a profound reminder of a deeper sense of connection we experience as Jews. The feeling is powerful, regardless of how it manifests on the exterior. And it's what will get me through yet another tragic chapter in the history of the Jewish people.

The post Grieving together, and also apart: A Jewish American wrestles with identity, belonging and trauma appeared first on Salon.com.

I’ve avoided Sotheby’s auction of singer/songwriter Freddie Mercury’s belongings being conducted on behalf of his longtime girlfriend and confidant, Mary Austin. In a BBC interview, Austin stated she had to be “brave enough to sell the lot,” to let go of the belongings of a man so creative, so compelling, so damn good-looking. Friends have sent the Sotheby’s catalog to me, thinking, as the biggest Mercury fan they know, surely, I must want to peruse every page. After all, I cried for days when he died in 1991, pregnant with my first child and trying to comprehend the loss of such an intrinsic part of my youth. What they don’t know is how difficult this is to process and how deeply I understand what Austin is going through.

In 1978, I was a music-loving kid who wanted to be a writer. I spent hours in my parents’ Detroit basement, listening to music, reading Rolling Stone magazine, dreaming of being backstage asking questions, partying just a little, then sequestering in my hotel room in Cleveland or LA to write up the story. Queen and Mercury were the stars of that fantasy. They were the first concert I attended at 14, lying to my parents about where I was, then sneaking off downtown. In the years that followed, I collected all their records. I saw them several more times, once even scoring backstage passes, and met them when they stayed at the hotel where I worked while in journalism school.

Though I submitted college newspaper clips to magazines, a job never materialized. At the same time, I met my future husband, who eased the let-down, telling me I could write for other purposes like PR or advertising. So I did. I created a lovely, yet different life than I imagined. I became a mother and settled into a beautiful suburban existence until my husband of 25 years received a surprise cancer diagnosis in 2008. By 2010, he was gone, and I was left with a house full of memories, both ephemeral and physical, trying this time to comprehend the loss of my whole life. And with none of Mary Austin’s bravery. 

I feel no disdain for her decision to part with Mercury’s belongings. After he died, Mary inherited his home, Garden Lodge, which he’d filled with collections of everything from tiny cloisonné boxes to 16th-century furniture, closets of clothing, walls lined with gold and platinum records, books of handwritten lyrics, jewelry by Cartier, art by Picasso and Chagall. I dreamt of stepping into Garden Lodge and being surrounded by all that Freddie-ness. Now, I think how suffocating it must have become. I realize Austin’s pain in living among these things, her further ache at deciding to let them go, and the challenges she faced doing so in the public arena, a place she has purposely avoided. Brave is exactly the word that comes to mind to describe this act. I listened to her BBC interview and felt compassion, where once I felt only envy.

I’ve downsized twice since losing my husband, once to move to a smaller home and again more recently, when life changes compelled me to take another look at what needed to go. Austin says she wishes to put her affairs in order and not leave this for her sons to deal with. Like Mary, I too wish to spare my children from reading my late husband’s love notes or journals. Along with more personal items, there are favorite sweaters, books, tools, golf clubs. Nothing like the Mercury collection, of course, yet it’s still exhausting, emotional work. 

As hard as it is to rid myself of things, keeping them makes me feel mired in and moored to a past I relate to less and less. I am now, at last, a music writer. And with a book being published, I feel I’m on the verge of a new life, one I’m finally ready to say I’ll live without my late partner. Perhaps this is just the passage of time, or perhaps it’s the result of purposeful work to move forward.

Writing my book has also allowed me to have a deeper understanding of Mary Austin’s situation. In it, I profile the widows of rock stars and what they’ve taught me about grief. Each woman, like Mary, has dealt with lifetimes worth of belongings. They are keepers of art and music, valuable guitar collections, and unreleased music. They deal with copyrights, contracts and royalties. They’re dedicated to preserving legacies. I alone decided which of my late husband’s things would remain with me, go to family or friends or be discarded. Yet these women deal with family, former band members, managers, lawyers, and overzealous fans who all think they have a say. One widow was forced to move all the belongings from the home she shared with her rock star boyfriend within one week of his death. Returning later to a storage unit, she opened the door to see among her things, her solitary bike inside. The sight of her bike alone after his had been taken brought her to her knees. Rarely are these women seen as doing right.

Even as I consider, as a fan, that I would keep Mercury’s remarkable collections, I know as a widow and as a chronicler of these women’s stories that I could never question Mary Austin’s need to free herself of these beautiful yet burdensome artifacts. I’m sure she’s agonized over what to do. I can hear Freddie say, Get rid of it all, darling, if it will make your life easier. But that doesn’t comfort your heart as you watch a collection of Japanese boxes, or even a slip of paper with his writing on it, taken away, whether it’s headed to a collector or to the recycle bin. Grief happens again and again.

After receiving a third email about the auction, I finally decide to click. I scroll through the photos, admiring the ornate and the common, and imagine owning one of Freddie’s T-shirts — an odd feeling, I’ll admit. It is expensive, stunning stuff, all these belongings of a man whose work and talent I still miss so very much. I wonder why we wish to hold onto things and then decide finally to let them go. Scrolling on, I feel more melancholy with each item. How do our belongings define us, especially after we’re gone, I wonder? When the person who inhabited these items is no longer, their meaning seems depleted. But to some, it becomes greater. Maybe it’s not about love lessening over years, but about space and time softening the need for physical connections to those we still love deeply. 

The post Auctioning Freddie Mercury’s things: As a fan, I’m heartbroken. As a widow, I understand completely appeared first on Salon.com.

But when it came time to write a death notice, Deborah Blum was clearheaded: In a heartfelt tribute to her smart, funny, popular child, who had recently come out as nonbinary, she was open and specific about the mental health struggles that led to Esther Iris’ death.

“Esther’s whole thing was that people should know and talk about mental health and it shouldn’t be a secret,” Deborah Blum told KFF Health News. “The least I could do was to be honest and tell people. I think being embarrassed just makes it worse.”

While it was once unheard-of to mention suicide as a cause of death in news obituaries and paid death notices, that has been changing, especially in the past 10 years, said Dan Reidenberg, a psychologist and managing director of The National Council for Suicide Prevention. High-profile suicides — such as those of comic actor Robin Williams in 2014, fashion designer Kate Spade in 2018, and dancer Stephen “tWitch” Boss in 2022 — have helped reduce the stigma surrounding suicide loss. So has advertising for depression and anxiety medications, which has helped normalize that mental illnesses are health conditions. The covid-19 pandemic also drew attention to the prevalence of mental health challenges.

“The stigma is changing,” Reidenberg said. “There is still some, but it’s less than it used to be, and that’s increasing people’s willingness to include it in an obituary.”

While there’s no right or wrong way to write death announcements, mental health and grief experts said the reluctance to acknowledge suicide has implications beyond the confines of a public notice. The stigma attached to the word affects everything from how people grieve to how people help prevent others from ending their own lives.

Research shows that talking about suicide can help reduce suicidal thoughts, but studies have also found that spikes in suicide rates can follow news reports about someone dying that way — a phenomenon known as “suicide contagion.” The latter is an argument people make for not acknowledging suicide in obituaries and death notices.

However, Reidenberg said, the subject can be addressed responsibly. That includes telling a balanced story, similar to what Deborah Blum did, acknowledging Esther Iris’ accomplishments as well as their struggles. It means leaving out details about the method or location of the death, and not glorifying the deceased in a way that might encourage vulnerable readers to think dying by suicide is a good way to get attention.

“We don’t ever want to normalize suicide, but we don’t want to normalize that people can’t have a conversation about suicide,” Reidenberg said.

Having that conversation is an important part of the grieving process, said Holly Prigerson, a professor of sociology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and an expert on prolonged grief disorder.

“Part of adjusting to the loss of someone is coming up with a story of what happened and why,” she said. “To the extent that you can’t be honest and acknowledge what happened if it’s a death due to suicide, that will complicate, if not impede, your ability to fully and accurately process your loss.”

People close to the deceased often know when a death was by suicide, said Reidenberg, particularly in the case of young people. “Being honest can lead to information and awareness, whereas if we keep it shrouded in this big mystery it doesn’t help,” he added.

A study about caregiver depression that Prigerson recently conducted identified avoidance as an impediment to healing from grief. “Not acknowledging how someone died, denying the cause of death, avoiding the reality of what happened is a significant barrier to being able to adjust to what happened and to move forward,” she said.

Researchers are increasingly seeing bereavement as a social process, Prigerson said, and as social beings, people look to others for comfort and solace. That’s another reason the stigma attached to suicide is harmful: It keeps people from opening up.

“The stigma is based on the perception that others will judge you as being an inadequate parent, or not having done enough,” Prigerson said. “This whole thing with obituaries is all about others — it’s about how people are going to read what happened and think less of you.”

Stigma, shame, and embarrassment are among the reasons grieving family members have traditionally avoided acknowledging suicide in obituaries and death notices. It’s also why, if they do, they may be more likely to address it indirectly, either by describing the death as “sudden and unexpected” or by soliciting donations for mental health programs.

Economics can also factor in — sometimes people are secretive because of life insurance plans that exclude payouts for suicides. Sometimes they’re trying to protect reputations, theirs as well as those of the deceased, particularly in religious communities where suicide is considered a sin.

Sometimes they’re operating under what Adam Bernstein, the obituary editor at The Washington Post, sees as “a mistaken belief” that an obituary is a form of eulogy that should speak to the highest memories of a person, and suicide doesn’t fit that agenda. People don’t include the word in paid death notices for the same reason. Bernstein, who is also president of The Society of Professional Obituary Writers, said that at the Post, obituaries mention suicide when the reporter can confirm it as a cause of death.

Avoiding the word suicide doesn’t necessarily mean someone is in denial. In the days after a loss, which is when most obituaries and death announcements are written, it’s often profoundly difficult to face the truth, especially in the case of suicide, according to Doreen Marshall, a psychologist and former vice president at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Even when people can admit the truth to themselves, they might have trouble expressing it to others, said Joanne Harpel, a suicide bereavement expert in New York who works with mourners through her business, Coping After Suicide. In the support groups she runs, she said, people vary in how open they are willing to be. For example, in the group for mothers who have lost a child to suicide, everyone acknowledges that reality — after all, that’s why they’re there — but they don’t all do so the same way.

“Some of them will refer to ‘when this happened’ or ‘before all this,'” Harpel said, cautioning against holding all mourners to the same standard. “They’re not pretending it was something else, but using the word ‘suicide’ is so confronting and so painful that even in the safest context it’s very, very hard for them to say it out loud.”

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The post Naming suicide in obits was once taboo. Changing that can help loved ones grieve appeared first on Salon.com.

“Someone You Love,” though, operates with clear and simple aims. First, it fulfills Silverman’s contractual obligation to produce a special for HBO, her fourth in 18 years. Second, it is earnest in the way it pokes at its targets while consciously refraining from provoking the audience — a change from the supposedly “equally opportunity offender” comedy she and her peers plied in the early 2000s.

But if you know what was happening in Silverman’s life while “Someone You Love” came together, the relative gentleness of the special takes on a new weight. In the weeks before Silverman’s special premiered on Max she lost both her stepmother Janice and her father Donald Silverman, who died within days of each other.

The special was in post-production when they died, enabling her to include a dedication to them in the end credits. Its creation, however, occurred while Silverman’s parents were ill and she was splitting her time between road gigs and spending time with them. Knowing this adds another level of tenderness to “Someone You Love” – it is funny, but it’s also a work that was created by an artist who is grieving.

Don’t take that the wrong way, Silverman still loves filthy humor and poop jokes. She opens with a bit that praises the loyalty of Jewish mothers by imitating one proudly bragging about her daughter’s standout performance in a hardcore porn flick.

From there she takes on antisemitism, a classic target that is unfortunately always relevant,along with the anti-choice movement and other facets of religious extremism from a place of not comprehending the inconsistency and obsessiveness driving them.

Along the way Silverman also looks inward, wondering aloud whether her jokes might have sold out her culture for laughs.

This ruminative turn is nothing new. Her short-lived Hulu series “I Love You, America” sought out people from the opposite side of the partisan divide from a place of understanding.

From there she launched “The Sarah Silverman Podcast,” providing a direct line between her and fans seeking her advice. Silverman does her best to counsel and comfort them without turning whatever they share into a punchline at their expense. And she reflected that sense of trust and vulnerability to the audience by sharing some of her final recordings of conversations she and other loved ones had with Donald before he passed away.

Watch Sarah Silverman episode of “Salon Talks” to hear more about her approach to this comedy right now, along with the new expectations the public tends to assign to a comedian’s work, and her recent experience of guest hosting “The Daily Show.”

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This is different from “A Speck of Dust,” because it is more of a kind of loose “hangout with Sarah” versus a stand-up special.  Was that by intention?

No. I have very little intention. It’s not that I never think about the big picture because I do. This is my fourth special in 30 years or 18 years since my first special. I never think to do a special until somebody asks me and I’m like, “Do I have the material?” This one was part of a deal I made before the pandemic, and then all of a sudden they were like, “It’s time,” so a lot of the writing happened on the road, which is how a lot of comics do it but not usually how I do it. It was really interesting and it felt more immediate and . . . I don’t know. Sorry, my brain just turns off. I have no short-term memory right now.

No, that’s OK.

It’s like menopause and grief. I’ll be talking and then I just have no idea what the question was. [This special] is more of a hangout. It’s more loose. I think because I do so few specials, there’s more of a palatable change because I’m older and different, and my existence is different, and the world around me is different, and the things I’ve learned and implement and the work I do has changed, and that’s the effect of that. That’s more for you/the audience to observe. But I’m just in it, so I don’t see as much.

I know these words aren’t adequate, but I’m so sorry, and my condolences for the loss of your parents. Tell me if I’m wrong with the timeline, but when you were putting this special together, you were in the throes of that, so watching it knowing that, it took on a different tone for me.

Well, as I was putting the set together, I was on the road for three months, and my stepmother had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but I had no idea my parents, both of them, let alone her, would be gone so soon. I thought it would be a couple of years or something. From diagnosis to her passing was four months, exactly almost. But the first three were not as dire as that final, so when I came home, it was right into being with them in their apartment with my sisters. 

Being on the road, I was able to kind of pretend it wasn’t happening, but it got realer and realer. Then I came home and I canceled shows obviously. It was just all hands on deck and we were consumed with sadness. It was just very all-encompassing, but there were weird silver linings, like being together. Just all of us being together and being so close and going through it together. I have three sisters, and two nieces and a nephew came, and it was heartbreaking and wildly sad, but kind of beautiful, and there was laughter and all this stuff. 

That couldn’t have been part of your question. Oh, so the special isn’t wildly touched by it other than knowing that my stepmom was sick and going through chemo, and we were all constantly in contact. It’s like, we have family Zoom every Sunday, and we have Silverman United WhatsApp. . . . We have WhatsApp chains with the whole family and then just the sisters and then just the sisters without the one we’re talking about. I mean, we’re just so up each other’s a**es and in a beautiful way. So, it’s not within the fiber of the special, but you watching it knowing what happened in the moments between, takes on a new [meaning]. 

In post, dedicating it to them once they had passed, and it all happened so fast, so I watched it back when it premiered and then when that came up, it was like, “Oh my God. So many things happened all at once.” After the funerals, which were nine days apart, we were coming back to the mortuary, like, “Do we get a punch card? Is there free coffee?” It just seemed like we were regulars. But there was relief because it was so intense, not euphoric by any means, but just a sense of relief. And then also just being with family and the shiva of it all. But then going back to normal life, it felt good to go into normalcy. But now, we were all on the sisters’ chain this morning, it’s just hitting us in all kinds of different ways. I mean grief takes care of itself. We can’t control it, right?

It comes in waves and we just never know when it happens. The reason I wanted to ask that is that for me, it struck a different level of intimacy. There’s always a level of partnership that I’ve noticed between the comic and the audience. 

I hope this isn’t a whiplash transition, but you talk a lot in your work about antisemitism. This one was very interesting to see this level of both going into these subjects where you’re joking about Hilter and say “‘My Struggle,’ is that not the most Jewish title you’ve ever heard?” . . . What was your approach to forming that part of your stand-up?

Well, I think just talking about the paradox of me on my podcast, talking without jokes or punchlines about antisemitism and being earnest, and then being on stage and making basically Jewish jokes, very base, and then talking about the hypocrisy of it and trying to find some kind of way to see it in the best light for me, was a fun, I don’t want to say journey, but I like blending heady stuff with aggressively dumb stuff because that’s me, and maybe everyone to a degree.

It just felt honest in a way, to call myself out on it. I’m a total hypocrite. I think hopefully everyone can see that in themselves to a degree. We’re different people at different times when surrounded by different elements.

With certain specials, there are expectations of things being said to make headlines and subsequent reactions. I’m particularly referring to John Mulaney or your friend Dave Chappelle. I’m wondering how you feel about that idea of call and response and controversy and whether that figured it all into the material of “Someone You Love.” 

I don’t court controversy. I don’t look for it in terms of publicity. But this didn’t happen with [“Someone You Love”] at all, and maybe you’re saying, “Hey, maybe you could have gotten headlines,” but that stuff has so little to do with me in terms of journalism or news outlets or gossip outlets or whatever the outlets are, whether they’re heady New York Times stuff or Page Six, whatever, it is about clicks because that’s how their revenue stream works now.

Anything that can be made into a headline will be made into a headline, and then you read it and there’s nothing really there. But people don’t read past the headlines. Often I don’t myself, admittedly. But boy, when I do, I understand it in a whole new way.

With Chris Rock, he had an entire set before he got to the issue of the slap. As a comedian, when you see this happening, regardless of your material, what is your impression of how you believe the culture is communicating with comedy or how they’re consuming the comedy?

There’s the participation of the audience in the moment and then there’s the participation of the audience online subsequently.

There’s the discourse, yes. Do you ever think of your work as contributing to a discourse? Do you think that that is changing our relationship with comedy? Do you feel like it’s changing our expectations for a comic and their work and their sets?

I have grown to believe that comedy dies in the second-guessing of your audience and what they want. As someone who is a comedian and feels an onus to comedy, I don’t try to predict what people are looking for and try to give it to them or predict how they might react and then change what I do according to that. I still think if I did that, it’s still art, but it’s not how I do it.

I’m affected by the world, and part of that world is my audience or other people’s audience, and I’m affected by the discourse of all the topics that are going on and the social politics of the world, and that changes how I think and how I communicate. So in that way, yes. But certainly not in that director way. I’m very bad at art and commerce. I mean, I could be worse. I’m not that bad. I own a house. But I’ve never been very good at figuring that stuff out. I just do my own thing and put it out and see what happens and talk to people like you to try to get the word out.

You were recently on “The Daily Show” as a host for a week, and you were the third most popular host in terms of ratings. Did you realize that?

I did not realize that. That’s very exciting. 

What do you think about that role? Do you consider yourself in the running for that and what would be the significance in your opinion of a woman being in that role?

There are so many people who would be great in filling those shoes, and I really had a blast doing it. The first day was crazy, but as the week went on, I was like, “Oh, I get this.” I really loved it. I felt like, “Oh, I could thrive doing this. I really understand this job.” It was such a lesson in immediacy and comedy. Which is funny because I’m a stand-up, but I’m a slow honer. Sure, on my podcast it’s fast and loose, but it seems loose and immediate, but I’m thinking about tiny little articles and things and stitching things together more meticulously than it looks.

With “The Daily Show,” the executive producer Jen Flanz sits there and you’re there with the writers and you’re working on stuff, and if you’re onto something but you’re trying to tweak it, she’ll go, “Use it or move on.” She’s watching the clock. It’s so thrilling because she just keeps you on track, and it’s really kind of that “the perfect is the enemy of good.” But you have to go with stuff and just do it or cut it or make big decisions fast and move on. That just makes me think of the song “Move On” from that Sondheim musical, “Sunday in the Park with George,” which is all about art and that stuff. The lyrics to that really makes me think of this.

But anyway, it was really exciting. I thought, “Ooh, I would love this.” But I really don’t think I could do that for an indefinite amount of time. I don’t have the stamina of most people. Actually, my mother is this way too. I can go, go, go, and then I need a lot of rest. I really love doing odd jobs. I love acting. I love my podcast. I love stand-up. I love all these different things I get to do. And a job like that, for me, I know Trevor [Noah] would go off for the weekends and do stand-up. I can’t do that. I would need to be in silence and rest for the other days. 

I mean, no one offered me the job. But thinking about it, I don’t think I could do it, even though I think I would love it. If I were younger maybe, or on a different trajectory, but I like doing other things more. If it was a finite amount of time, I think I’d love it though. Which was that, and it was great.

So it sounds like you did it for fun, mainly.

Yeah. Yeah. And that probably was the reason why it went well. What matters most is when you s**t the bed, but when you’re just like, “Ah, this is so fun. Oh, cool. What an experience,” it tends to go well because you don’t have these things fighting you in your head.

One of the things that I’m writing about in addition to writing about your special is the history of women in late night comedy. One of the [shows] that I reference is “I Love You, America.” Did your experience of doing “I Love You, America,” where you’re doing talk variety, not necessarily late night because it’s streaming, did that inform your expectation of going in for “The Daily Show”? 

Yeah. I mean, nothing was a crazy surprise. I know a lot about that process, but it was that process on a daily level. It’s the same and totally different in terms of there’s something special in not being able to tinker with the minutiae of things. And the Hulu show, we did. It was a weekly show and we had lead up time to be working on stuff, so there was a lot of time to tinker on every little thing. And there’s something really that I didn’t learn until doing this.

When I guest hosted “Jimmy Kimmel Live” a couple times and being around that, that’s also very immediate. It’s the same. But that probably more informed the speed of it. The Hulu show informed kind of the process, but faster. But it was its own thing and it’s such a well-oiled machine. And so jumping into it, I was able to be pretty prepared for what it would be like. My boyfriend also ran the show for several years with Jon Stewart, so he had lots of tips, and his ex-wife is Jen Flanz, who runs the show now, which is funny because he writes for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” now. But yeah, there was so much I learned about comedy really in that kind of high-octane version of it.

Unless a show is created for a woman, there haven’t been any women substantially in the running for the legacy shows, except for “The Daily Show” when there was a turnover between Jon and Trevor. And this is a seven-decades-old format. 

Joan [Rivers], Joan is the only one you can point to that even came close to one of those legacy chairs and because she had the nerve to do what was best for her career, she was blackballed for decades. I mean, wow, that’s the male ego at work. Because it made [Johnny] Carson angry. He wasn’t angry at [Jay] Leno, but he was angry at her, like she should turn down an opportunity at something he knew she was elite at. And then that Leno carried that on, was odd. And it was wasn’t until Jimmy Fallon took over and immediately had her on that he broke that. But the fact that we’re pointing still to Joan. I mean, Chelsea Handler, I would say, made room for herself in that and still doesn’t get, in my view, reference in that, oddly enough.

As a person in the world, I’m surprised. As someone who knows this industry, I’m not very surprised. But from your perspective, does it surprise you that women haven’t been more considered for these roles over the years?

If you look at the big powerhouse women talk show hosts from comedy, it’s Ellen and Rosie [O’Donnell], and they’re both in daytime. You could say relegated to daytime, but they may have been exactly their lane and they certainly got immense success from it. But it is really odd. 

But also as someone who grew up on late night TV and late night talk shows and also really came into existence in comedy through being guests on there, I’m really appreciative. But objectively, it’s beyond a dying form. I mean, is that OK to say?

But I mean, this article is really interesting that you’re writing because it comes kind of at the precipice of the death of late night, because I can’t promote this special on any late night shows because of the strike, but the truth is, what we see of late night shows are clips from monologues mostly online, and not really celebrity interviews unless something goes wildly awry. 

Everything’s going to streaming, and yet topical things haven’t reached streaming quite as much. But more than usual, I actually think people watch “The Tonight Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on Hulu or Peacock often or something

The last thing I would want is for, not that I don’t want women to have a chance in late night, but as it’s about to die, to put women to be the ones who are killing it. Whoever’s there, it’s going to end soon, I think. I mean, I hope not. Or maybe it finds a new way through. I’m really interested to redo it.

One of the things that I loved about “I Love You, America” was the idea of empathy. It came together at this time when the country was just riven in terms of partisanship. But you had this show where part of the idea of approaching topical comedy and different social issues and politics was actually reaching out and finding an attempt to find common ground. I’m wondering, A, has that changed? And B, did you carry any of that experience into making “Someone You Love”?

To a degree, yeah, for sure. When you talked about the loose parts of the special, it’s interesting because I did two nights, I shot one show and then the next night at another show. The second night was way looser, and a couple heckled. It was so in the moment and came kind of full circle and was totally something you don’t see in specials because it was heckling and I was so excited about it and I was like, “Well, just use the second night. I love the heckles and what happened and the back and forth.” It was really neat. And the editor’s like, “I don’t think you’re going to like it.” I go, “I know I like it. I was there. It was so in the moment, and you don’t see that in specials.” 

He sent me the clips of those moments, and it really didn’t play. There are a couple of moments that are in there that are cool like that, but there were really big moments were away from the material. But it’s so funny, and it’s why I think stuff like improv doesn’t translate to television or magic even really to it, is because somewhere in the audience’s mind, even though they don’t know the technicalities of it, they know that things could be edited and changed in post-production, even if they don’t understand. And so you don’t buy it as much as if it were live and you’re there.

And it’s almost like, you know that animation that’s too real and it creeps people out? It was like that. You just don’t buy that it’s in the moment, even though the truth was it a hundred percent was. I ended up not including any of it, except for those few moments that you see. And they were kind of talking about the psychology of yelling out in a show and what that really means, which I think, a hundred percent of the time the subtext is, “I exist.” Right? 

So I do think, yeah, to a degree I bring stuff from that show into, certainly “Someone You Love,” the bit that that is taken from is a kind of bastardized version of that sentiment. But also it informed a lot of how I approach my podcast and just me as a person. It’s just really just things I’ve learned in therapy and things I’ve learned in dynamic and relationship with others and trying to really implement it in my life, you know? I’m absolutely my best self on my podcast. People go, “Oh, you really have your s**t together.” And I’m like, “Yeah, for an hour a week, sure. Yes.”

“Someone You Love” is currently streaming on Max.

The post “There were weird silver linings”: How Sarah Silverman worked through grief to still make us laugh appeared first on Salon.com.

My father won’t be leaving this nursing home, run by nuns of the Carmelite order (“devoted to the care of the aged and infirm”); he’ll be here until he dies. He doesn’t understand this yet, and might never understand. It’s hard for any of us to grasp, really — his decline so stunningly rapid. Just a year ago, he was still walking and living independently in a riverside townhouse with my Mom. 

Driving back and forth from this townhouse, where my mother now lives alone, to the room my father now shares with a 96-year-old priest, I am often filled with rage. Usually, it’s directed at the suburban landscape I’m passing through — this supposedly idyllic place in which I spent a few lonely years, fleeing as soon as I could and not looking back. I hate it here, I think as I drive. I hate the shiny veneer covering everything, the smug safety of it all — the neatly landscaped yards with nary a weed poking up; the smooth sidewalks of the symmetrical housing blocks; even the cheerful kids playing soccer on endlessly lush fields, everything reeking of success and some standardized idea of achievement. 

I know my hatred is petty, and largely unfair. All sorts of real things happen in this place, of course; amazing people — bona fide artistic geniuses — and of course family members that I love hail from here. Most locals I’ve known are kind and hard-working and experience the same struggles that people do everywhere else. When I lived here as a teen, I wanted nothing more than to assimilate, to achieve what was expected of me, a fact that embarrasses me now. Is it the persistent illusion of perfection that so infuriates me these days? Or does my loathing stem from the realization that unlike me, some people do live happy, fulfilled lives here? Perhaps my rage is a proxy for my Dad’s, incapable as he is of fighting sufficiently against the dying of the light. Self-reflection does little to diminish the intensity of my feelings. I pass an elderly couple playing frisbee with their grandkids on a lawn so uniform and green it might be Astroturf, stewing in bitterness, and think, I’m like Charles Wallace.

To explain: back in North Carolina, I’m reading Madeleine L’Engle‘s “A Wrinkle in Time,“ a book I loved when I was young, with my 10-year-old son. My seething and scoffing is reminiscent of Charles Wallace Murry’s once his mind is overtaken by the dark forces of an entity known as “IT.” I’m grasping for meaning everywhere these days, trying to make sense of so many things spinning beyond my control, but I keep noticing parallels between the book and my current situation. 

Driving through the ‘burbs, past the cookie-cutter regularity of some neighborhoods, I can’t help thinking of the evil planet Camazotz, which I found terrifying as a child even before we’d moved to the Midwest when I was in eighth grade, before I’d ever heard of neighborhood subdivisions with names like Mablebrook II: its eerie semblance of normalcy revealed to be a horrifying forced assimilation. The town the characters come upon in Camazotz looks just like one on Earth, but with an uncanny sameness, “laid out in harsh angular patterns . . . all [houses] exactly alike.” The children skip rope and bounce balls in rhythm, “Over and over again . . . All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.”

A Wrinkle in Time (Disney)

I’m in Camazotz, I think as I drive to see my Dad. I identify most strongly with the book’s Meg Murry, the ornery teen who not only shares my name and the anguished isolation I felt as an adolescent, but also my emotional reactivity and stubbornness. “Where is my father?” she demands over and over, determined to find Mr. Murry even if it requires travel to distant and dangerous worlds. When she finally locates him, a prisoner on the dark planet, her father looks different: “The expression of his eye was turned inward,” his hair grown long and “shot with gray.” She likens him to a shipwrecked sailor. In his arms at last, “the moment that meant that now and forever everything would be all right,” she soon realizes with shock and sadness that her father can’t fix their situation, that he is “a human being, and a very fallible one.” 

How can I not hear echoes of this in my current predicament — the shock of my own father’s physical diminishment (30 pounds in three months), seeing how he struggles to sit up, to hoist his body from bed to wheelchair. I’ve seen the blankness in his eyes during episodes of agitation as he tried to place me in his mind. I’ve tucked him into hospital beds, held his hand and sung lullabies in effort to ease his fear at the thought of another night alone in an unfamiliar place he confused with a prison. 

It makes sense that upon returning to this place of past and present sorrows, my memories are primarily of the loneliness I experienced here — something like the “clammy coldness” Meg feels when she tessers through space to arrive at a bleak planet devoid of individuality and devoid of love. My mother, like long-suffering Mrs. Murry in the book, has “tried and tried to find out” — in her case not where her husband was sent on a secret intergalactic mission, but what the next months might hold, what sort of care he is receiving, what the medications he’s taking are doing to him. Instead of over liverwurst sandwiches and warm milk, my mother tells me over a glass of Johnnie Walker that it’s like he’s dying, bit by bit — that he’s starting to forget her. I keep thinking that if we all lived in the same town — if we had always lived in the same town, and never moved; if our entire lives had gone differently, if our society wasn’t the way it is, and we’d all made different life choices, then perhaps my father could be cared for in a familiar house, at least, and we wouldn’t be in this position. 

I’m bargaining, I realize — just like Mr. Murry and Calvin O’Keefe do, when Meg decides to return to Camazotz alone to rescue the child they left behind. Only then do I see: the rage I’ve been feeling is a stage of grief.

It doesn’t matter that my father is still alive — or that on many days he’s as lucid and funny as ever, the same clutch Trivial Pursuit teammate who can recall terms that elude the rest of us; he is slowly but steadily leaving, growing more distant every day. 

Anger provides structure. I read this in a recent CNN article on the stages of grief. It forms a scaffold to give shape to “the nothingness of loss.” In directing my anger towards a family playing frisbee, I’m giving myself an outlet, something to focus on — in a way, it’s healthy, undeserving though they may be. Just as Meg is told in “Wrinkle” that her faults will be her strengths — her anger and refusal to assimilate ultimately enabling her to escape the all-consuming IT — perhaps my at least recognizing this is a step toward deliverance, though I don’t expect my stormy moods to dissipate any time soon.

“When I find myself in periods of mourning, I like to remind myself I’m going somewhere,” writes J.P. Brammer in an advice column for The CUT on how to handle being romantically ghosted — an experience in which the abruptness and lack of closure can necessitate a very real grieving process. “I’m not going to hurt forever. I am undergoing a transformation.”

Meg’s acceptance of her fate — that she must journey alone back to Camazotz to save her brother — can be seen through the lens of a mourner’s trajectory: though the process can be supported, even shared, it can only be endured at one’s own pace. 

Reading the book now, when Meg’s ability to love is shown as the only way to resist IT’s darkness, I interpret this as acceptance, clarity of vision. Meg sees things as they really are, and in this acceptance — this final phase of grief — she frees herself and her brother from the fog in which they’ve been enveloped.

A Wrinkle in Time (Disney)

“Space Travel has made children of us all,” Ray Bradbury writes in an epigraph for “The Martian Chronicles,” another treasured text from my childhood which, like L’Engle’s work, instilled wonder in me via its introduction to the mysteries of the universe. In one story, the crew of an early expedition to Mars are perplexed to find what appears to be an idyllic Midwestern town upon their arrival at the red planet. Their initial wariness at this unlikelihood soon turns to joy when they discover the town is inhabited by loved ones who’d died on Earth. “Is this heaven?” someone asks, and a grandmother says no, “but it’s a world, and we get a second chance.” One by one, the crewmembers are overcome with emotion as they are reunited with long-lost family members. “Mom, Dad!” the gray-bearded captain cries, spotting his parents on a porch; he runs up the steps “like a child to meet them.” 

Later that night, though, he can’t help wondering, “How and why and what for?” The situation defies all logic, as much as he and the others might want it to be real. By the time his doubts solidify into certainty, it’s too late. The story ends with a mass funeral, all the humans dead, the beings they thought were their loved ones “shifting now from familiar [things] into something else.”

As a child, I was chilled by the terrifying twist in the story, awed at the possibility of psychic powers and alternate dimensions. As an adult, I see a parable about the inevitability of death — and also the horrors of dementia, a disease that forces us to witness the transformation of loved ones into “something else.” 

On subsequent visits to Illinois, I’ll continue to feel waves of rage, guilt and sadness. Such is grief, a messy continuum, no way out but to go through it, something which, like Meg, I must experience on my own. I’ll try to identify these vacillating emotions as they come and to acknowledge them, as I encourage my kids to do. I learned from L’Engle that one way to keep from succumbing to darkness is to let myself be vulnerable, to feel everything. When despair comes, I’ll remind myself that I’m not stuck, I’m going somewhere. 

In her 1963 acceptance speech for the Newberry Medal for “A Wrinkle in Time,” Madeleine L’Engle mentions a theory of the universe in which matter “is continuously being created, with the universe expanding but not dissipating. As island galaxies rush away from each other into eternity,” she says, “new clouds of gas are condensing into new galaxies. As old stars die, new stars are being born.” Her point was that literature should have this expansive quality, opening the eyes of children to wonders beyond their comprehension.

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Science fiction did this for me as a child — gave the ability to conceive of truths more profound and beautiful “than we can understand, with our puny little brains” as Mr. Murry says . I was comforted by books in which vast mysteries confounded even the bravest and most brilliant adults — because being confounded didn’t keep them from trying, from seeking answers and in doing so experiencing growth. I was comforted then by mystery—the idea that the very stars in the sky might be living beings, filling the universe with love and goodness.

It comforts me still. 

The post Grief is a distant planet: How “A Wrinkle in Time” is helping me deal with my father’s decline appeared first on Salon.com.

Netflix’s teen dramedy “Never Have I Ever” began with one goal for teen nerd Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan): get laid. Most people wouldn’t go up to the guy they’ve had the hots for since grade school and ask them to take their virginity, but most people aren’t Devi Vishwakumar. The often shirtless upperclassman Paxton Hall-Yoshida (Darren Barnet) is willing to humor Devi’s teenage dream, and over the course of four seasons, they’ve bounced between friendship and dating. Meanwhile, Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison) is a classic case of enemies to lovers. Devi has feuded with Ben for just as long as she’d been lusting over Paxton, and their longstanding rivalry pushed both students to work harder to best the other. Ben is the first to notice when Devi is having a rough day, and he’ll lower his sword to make sure she’s OK before getting in a playful dig. These peers have also had their own on-off relationship. But as hard as Devi tries, neither boy can replace a therapist’s love.

While fans are busy duking it out over whether Ben or Paxton is the right choice for Devi after the series finale, the reality is glaringly obvious: It’s her therapist. And no, I don’t mean whatever dark corner of fanfiction romantically pairs the two together (I’m pretty sure the California Board of Psychology would have a field day over an underaged doctor-patient dalliance). However, of Devi’s many relationships in the show’s four-season run, Dr. Ryan (Niecy Nash) sparks growth and self-love that no other character can match. 

Everyone can benefit from therapy, and even Devi’s mom — who says therapy is for white people — enlists the help of Dr. Ryan, who helps Devi deal with her father Mohan’s (Sendhil Ramamurthy) sudden death, which occurs in front of her at an orchestra concert just before the events of the first season. We learn that one of the ways that Devi reacted was by temporarily losing her ability to walk, which Dr. Ryan deems a grief-based psychosomatic weakness. But instead of confronting her loss, Devi distracts herself from her feelings by bottling them up and focusing on getting a boyfriend, losing her V card and checking off every notch on the coming-of-age rom-com checklist. Dr. Ryan doesn’t fall for the distraction, but audiences do.

Niecy Nash as Dr. Ryan in “Never Have I Ever” (Lara Solanki/Netflix)Dr. Ryan makes it abundantly clear in her very first scene that Devi’s Paxton-centric daydream is a prime example of avoidance. Their sessions often consist of the doc sitting on an armchair in her brightly colored office while Devi paces and talks a mile-a-minute about everything but her dad. Their first session we see opens with a bewildered Dr. Ryan refusing to tell the underage Devi that she’s bangable because it’s wrong “ethically, legally and most of all, it’s creepy.” 

From the jump, we can tell that Dr. Ryan keeps up with Devi’s banter and Gen Z colloquialisms, all while being Devi’s softspoken yet sassy voice of reason while she attempts to get her patient to pivot to why she’s really there. 

Between sentiments like “Knock it off, wannabe pill popper,” and “I think you give many effs,” Dr. Ryan keeps Devi’s attention with a friend-like rapport without diving into unprofessional territory. When Devi tries to sidetrack Dr. Ryan, she pivots the conversation. Toward the end of the first season, Devi asks Dr. Ryan, “You’re bringing it back to my dad, aren’t you?” who responds, “I am. I’d be a bad therapist if I didn’t.” Sure, Devi doesn’t open up about her dad for a while, and she takes a hot minute to listen to Dr. Ryan’s advice. But Devi gets there eventually.

As someone who’s gone through over a dozen therapists and psychiatrists (psych ward class of 2006 represent), I know firsthand that finding the right mental health professional isn’t always easy. A healthy rapport and understanding are vital to the process. I’ve had psychiatrists who made me so anxious that I’d dig my nails into my arms like a cat and those who laughed with me through my trauma. You can guess which one was more effective. PSA: It’s no fun when you have to see a therapist about your therapist. However, you have options (something that Devi almost explored during a fight with Dr. Ryan), and finding the right fit is half the battle. 

I spoke to therapist Tori-Lyn Mills, LCPC – a Thriveworks clinical professional counselor with over 20 years of experience in grief, loss, and trauma – who compared Devi’s therapy to being like couples therapy but solo. “The therapist is supporting Devi’s relationship with herself,” Mills said. “In the grand scheme of things, she’s always going to be with herself, not these relationships.” Mills also pointed out that though Devi gives Dr. Ryan a hard time, the good doc refocuses Devi internally rather than externally, ultimately encouraging Devi to have a better relationship with herself. 

Dr. Dana Wang, Psychiatrist and co-founder of RIVIA Mind, said, “This healthy relationship [between Dr. Ryan and Devi] taught [Devi] how to be honest with herself and others by showing her emotions. That, in turn, translated into her other relationships becoming more intimate.” She noted that “Dr. Ryan helped Devi see the value in herself, which was the most therapeutic part of their relationship.”

In interviews, Ramakrishnan is asked what team she roots for. Countless times, Ramakrishnan answers, “Team Devi.” Everyone in Devi’s life — from her family, friends, and boyfriends — often have their own selfish reasons for wanting Devi to make certain choices. But ultimately, Dr. Ryan is the only objective person in Devi’s life that is genuinely Team Devi. She’s also the one person that gets Devi to be Team Devi. As a bonus, in coaching Devi to love herself, Dr. Ryan encourages a healthier relationship between Devi and everyone in the teen’s life. 

Sendhil Ramamurthy as Mohan in “Never Have I Ever” (Courtesy Of Netflix)

Without Devi’s dad Mohan acting as a peacekeeper between his daughter and her mom Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan), they hurt each other more often than not during the first season. Devi calling her mom a b***h certainly isn’t the best, but nothing could possibly cut deeper than Devi yelling, “I lost the only parent that actually cares about me. I wish you were the one that died that night” at her mom. What’s worse? Nalini agrees with her. 

Nalini isn’t without her harsh moments, either. On the night of Mohan’s death, Devi overheard her mom telling him, “Whoever this child is, I’m through with her. . . . She’s no daughter of mine.” She told Mohan that he was too easy on Devi, while Mohan insisted that he just has a different approach. One of Nalini’s greatest hits also includes putting down Paxton and Devi in the same breath when she says, “Great decision-making, Devi. Why don’t you just let this idiot knock you up?”

I, too, had a tumultuous relationship with my mom as a teenager. Like Devi and Nalini, I was a hothead, and my mom didn’t have the patience to handle it — or the desire to get raw and have a deep conversation without our emotional weapons ready to fire. At one point, I screamed something to the effect of, “You should have gotten an abortion if I’m such a burden to you.” Luckily for Devi, Dr. Ryan helps both women work through their lack of communication, leading to some of the show’s most gut-wrenching and hard-hitting scenes. 

Few dry eyes can be found when Devi and Nalini spread Mohan’s ashes to the tune of U2’s “Beautiful Day” at the end of the first season or when Nalini tells Devi, “You’re never too much, and you’re always enough.” Instead of grieving silently by treating their emotions like the enemy, they begin honoring Mohan’s memory and what he would want for his two (im)perfect girls. Ben may have rallied the troops to get Devi to go to the beach to spread her dad’s ashes, but Dr. Ryan’s push for the mother and daughter to mourn together seals the deal.

By Season 3, Devi and Nalini have made tremendous strides in their mother-daughter relationship. When Devi decides not to go to the Colorado-based Shrubland school, she tells her mom, “I need one more year with you. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. OK? Look at Dad.” And instead of insisting that Devi get the best education possible, she accepts her daughter’s decision with a hug. Nalini even catches herself calling Devi stupid after she lied about college acceptances and quickly corrects herself in the final season. Without Dr. Ryan, Devi and Nalini would likely never break through their sniping and miscommunication to reach this point of respect and acceptance. 

Dr. Wang pointed out, “In South Asian cultures where no one talks about mental health, there is a lot of shame in experiencing negative feelings, and it’s not easy finding ways to express them in culturally acceptable ways.” She added that Devi “became physically paralyzed because it’s more permissible to become physically weak than emotionally vulnerable.” 

Similarly, Mills noted, “Our emotions don’t belong in our body to stay. So it’s important to be in tune with your feelings and to make friends with them.” Dr. Ryan helps Devi and Nalini do just that, and season by season, they begin sharing their grief with honest and thoughtful communication rather than blowups.

“Never Have I Ever” narrator John McEnroe likes to call Devi a hothead throughout the series, but there’s a strong argument that Devi’s intense in-the-moment reactions go much deeper. Whether she’s smashing a chemistry beaker when Ben beats her grade on a test, spreading a detrimental rumor about her friend Aneesa or publicly announcing that Ben took her virginity in a moment of jealous rage, there’s often an underlying feeling of inferiority that accompanies these impulsive outbursts. No one’s forgetting Devi’s Season 4 shouting match with Margot any time soon. “I hope you have a nice life riding Ben Gross’ circumcised d**k,” is a pretty memorable public takedown.

At one point, Ben cuts Devi to the core when he savagely quips that she has an undiagnosed mood disorder. Mills addressed this crack, saying, “It’s always really tough if someone who’s not a professional — especially a friend or family — someone that’s close to you says that you have an undiagnosed issue [because it] can seem like an insult or dig rather than a support.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Wang had a similar sentiment, adding, “No one wants to be given a label, and it’s part of the stigmatization of mental health disorders.  . . . Dr. Ryan taught Devi not to let others define her.” 

Ben’s mood disorder insult hit me hard because I, too, had an undiagnosed mood disorder until I was 25. Of course, “probable mood disorder” and later “mood disorder NOS” littered the notes of my middle and high school records. Still, no psychiatrist pulled the trigger on my Bipolar II diagnosis until I was well into adulthood (which is common practice for diagnoses like Bipolar).  

Throughout my handful of halfhearted suicide attempts, the scars that litter my body from shoulder to ankle, and the nights I spent sobbing over minor inconveniences, I just wanted to stop feeling so much all of the time.

Ben’s comment wounds a still-grieving Devi, who’s grown accustomed to her classmates calling her “Crazy Devi.” When she breaks down in Dr. Ryan’s office to ask if she’s crazy, Dr. Ryan says, “Devi, you feel a lot, which means sometimes you’re gonna hurt a lot. But it also means that you’re gonna live a life that is emotionally rich and really beautiful.” 

Darren Barnet as Paxton Hall-Yoshida, Jaren Lewison as Ben Gross and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Devi in “Never Have I Ever” (Lara Solanki/Netflix)On some level, it doesn’t really matter if Devi has a mood disorder or just needs Dr. Ryan’s help expressing her emotions. Like me, Devi feels her feelings in a never-ending litany of fireworks. They come fast and they come hard, and we can’t always help how they make their presence known. Still, I would take my emotionally rich life over apathy, even on my worst days, and I think Devi would, too. 

As Devi prepares to graduate high school in Season 4, her last therapy session in the show seems to mark the end of her journey with Dr. Ryan — who’s a child psychologist, after all. During the show’s four seasons, Dr. Ryan taught Devi that it’s not weak to let your emotions out and it’s OK to let in the people you love. Her compassionate yet firm advice helped shape a self-assured young woman who knows that there’s more to life than boys. 

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Devi’s over-the-table goodbye hug with Dr. Ryan in the show’s penultimate episode speaks volumes. The doc tells Devi the four words that have desperately loomed over every trophy triumph and failure, her Princeton dream and each orchestra recital: “I’m proud of you.” Her dad isn’t there to tell Devi this anymore, but Dr. Ryan has it covered. The therapist’s assurance that Devi is a survivor helps her dive into her trauma one last time to honor her dad in a college essay worthy of a Princeton acceptance letter. And with that, we’ve come full circle.

So, Ben or Paxton? The answer is simple: It doesn’t matter. Devi may have moved on to college, but she’s certainly not finished making mistakes. Hopefully, she’ll keep her sessions with Dr. Ryan on Zoom or find a local therapist to continue her therapy journey — because that work is never finished. But either way, Dr. Ryan gave Devi the tools she needs to navigate any relationship while holding herself accountable for her actions. Whether her college relationship lasts a lifetime or ends in three weeks, Devi Vishwakumar is gonna be just fine. And she has Dr. Ryan to thank for that.

If you are in need of help, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Hours of operation are 24/7 and it’s confidential.

The post Who cares about Ben and Paxton? Devi’s best “Never Have I Ever” relationship is with her therapist appeared first on Salon.com.

Director Robert Schwartzman knows a thing or two about families. His mother is Talia Shire; his brother is Jason Schwartzman; his cousins are Nic Cage and Sofia Coppola, and his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola. Schwartzman emphasizes the awkward moments as well as the warm memories in Renn’s family. The filmmaker deftly balances the humor and heartache as Renn bonds with his sister and fights with Rick as they prepare for the service. Renn also finds time to meet Zoe at a karaoke bar. 

“The Good Half” is all about embracing optimism during times of despair. Schwartzman spoke with Salon about his film, grief, and working with Nick Jonas in advance of the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

How did you come to direct this project?  You’ve written most of your previous films. What made this project irresistible for you?

Having spent so much time about making music, I feel the creative process comes with the spark of an idea and chasing that. That’s what I’ve done so far. It was different to get a script, fall in love with it and imagine: what would I do with this? The process can be total chaos, but you feel like you execute it on some level you hope to get to. With this script, I saw the charm. The writer had lived the life of the main character. It was embellished for the screen. I loved the heart and comedy. I am obsessed with John Hughes‘ 80s movies, so the humor I like is creating situations that are uncomfortable and make you laugh based on the way things play out in the storyline. 

Did you identify with Renn?

I found myself close to the character because in my youth. I lost my father to cancer. I was younger than Renn is, but I understand loss and losing a parent, so in my own way it was trying to understand what it was hard for me to understand as a kid. Even though I didn’t write the script, part of my life is a story of loss and grief and trying to make sense of it. 

The story is about coping with loss, guilt and grief, specifically Renn coping with his mother’s death. Renn is in denial and acts out as his emotions get the better of him. What do you think of how Renn processes his emotions, and how do you process grief? 

That’s at the heart of what this is all about for me. Grief is a mysterious thing to have to experience. It’s not a one size fits all thing. Neither is love. Everyone has their own way to process things or grieve. When I talk to my siblings or mother about it, my brothers and I tell stories about this trip we took, and you laugh through tears that’s how you can make sense of it. It’s comforting. I think this is an honest way to deal with grief; you find ways to distract yourself. Renn’s connection with Zoe is them healing together. They are able to talk about it. The first step is communicating emotions, and that’s where acceptance comes in, which is the last stage of grief. I wanted to take viewers through the stages of grief. We have the main character in denial, feeling anger and then acceptance.

What observations do you have about family dynamics — especially given your family?  

It is hard to make sense of our relationships with the people closest to us. I drew on my experiences of loss. It’s harder for me to be emotional with people closest to me than people I don’t know very well. For those who know me so well, it takes on a new type of vulnerability to talk to them about stuff. I was excited to build this world around this family and have each person bring a different way of dealing with grief and finding peace in it. 

What can you say about working with Nick Jonas on the role? He has a flair for deadpan sarcasm and cynicism, a great hangdog expression, and you get him to sing in one scene. 

I have known Nick a long time and I thought the guy I know him to be is an introvert. He’s known for being a musical performer, but Nick is a performer-performer. He grew up doing “Les Miz” as a child on stage. He came from that world before he became a successful band musician/personality. Nick is comfortable to perform, so he’s up for the challenge. He wants to step up and say, “I can do this.”

Inside, actors are afraid and I’m sure he was and is, but for what we needed for the character, he stepped up. I felt Nick has in him a real mystery, and I feel very curious about him. I think the character needed to be played as someone viewers wonder about how he is doing. His layers as a person leant well to casting. I’ve seen him take on acting roles. I think he will be a competitive force for other actors in his age range. 

Nick performs karaoke in one scene. Was it planned for him to sing?

Renn says in the film, “I don’t do karaoke.” When he gets to the bar he says, “I regret coming here.” Nick did not know what song we were doing when we did it. I surprised him because I didn’t want him to know it very well. He flubs the song lyrics. We needed it to be in the moment, which is what karaoke is. 

What is your karaoke song?

I really love “Dream Lover” the Bobby Darin song. I like oldies but goodies. They are short, sweet, and not about falling on your knees singing your heart out. I’m a sucker for ’50s and ’60s music. Del Shannon’s “Runaway” is my favorite song ever. I love fun hair metal music and I know most people sing that. I think I’m the guy who when he does karaoke, most people go to the bathroom or get another drink. It’s not that fun to watch me do karaoke.

Do you think musicians make good actors because of their performance skills?

I find Nick to be more like the character in this film than who he is on stage. It is closer to the truth of who he is and that’s why I am so invested in him. 

You have often performed and composed music. How does that help you with directing?

Acting is so rhythmic, and comedy is timing. Nick is a really good drummer. On stage, you have to hit a mark at this point in the song; he is doing that. That’s what is called on when you are on set. He remembers songs, chord changes, and moments in a show; your memory has to be sharp as a musician. As an actor, you had to come to set with the foundation. Nick was very committed. As a musician, it was very complementary tool set to pull from — memory, marks and professionalism — he pulled on that to deliver for this film.

For me, as a director, everything is so rhythmic. It is about building rhythm of the day when you have no time. Establishing a rhythm with collaborators — your crew, your DP, your actors. Communication is rhythmic. And it’s the edit. Having a life in music and directing, the editorial process is similar to making albums. It is watching again and again and being able to manipulate things and find new meanings and having happy accidents is similar to making music. I’m a studio rat so when I am in the edit, I am at home. I eat up post-production. Having spent so much time in music, I feel very happy to have that background to understand that rhythm well. 

You create elegiac moments in the flashbacks, but there are also awkward moments, and even farcical ones. Can you talk about how you established the film’s serio-comic tone and developed the film’s style? 

I understand how the casket sequence has more humor, and the rhythm of that scene and how Nick comes off in that scene versus Renn alone in his bedroom. I don’t go into the film thinking this scene is going to be the jokey one. It’s just things I love about movie watching. I love the playfulness of Nick’s performance grilling David about his casket budget. But I also like to be alone with a character and be in their head for a moment. This is Renn’s struggle emotionally, and you are feeling this pain and seeing his shift to push it away. Those slices are true to what grieving can be.

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The women in the film, Renn’s mother, Zoe, and Leigh, absorb most of Renn’s guilt, often absolving him. What are your thoughts about the female characters in “The Good Half?”

Renn tries to make good with the characters around him and find peace in these relationships. I like that Renn is able to own up to the things he feels are not right. He apologizes to his sister for not being there. The break-in sequence is the family coming together. They are working together and craving this connection. Zoe is sensitive to other people’s needs. She is a therapist; what she does for a living is listen. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her own emotional hurdles. She is open about her divorce, which is a different version of grief. 

Are you an optimist? What is your “good half”?

I am an optimist, and my wife would agree 100%. I am someone who tries to look at things from the perspective that it will be OK, even when times are bad. Things don’t always play out the way we hope for, but at the end of the day, when things are not what we want in the moment, they can lead us unexpectedly to things that are very positive. Staying open to the possibilities of what life throws at us can sometimes bring us some peace.

“The Good Half” screens at the Tribeca Film Festival June 8, 10, and 12. 

The post Nick Jonas “has in him a real mystery”: Director on why he’s compelling in grief in “The Good Half” appeared first on Salon.com.

Mendoza, who has previously directed the infectious low-budget musical, “Fruit Fly,” and the dark comedy, “Bitter Melon,” connects with the material here by creating flights of fancy while also grounding the story with scenes depicting grief and mental illness. It’s a tricky balancing act that shifts from comedy to sadness, sometimes within the same scene. Mendoza manages it well coaxing a wily performance from Raci and infusing the story with some clever visual touches. 

On the eve of the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Mendoza spoke with Salon about “The Secret Art of Human Flight.”

Ben takes a big leap in “The Secret Art of Human Flight.” This film is a big leap for you having made a series of indie films like “Colma: The Musical” and “Bitter Melon.” Can you talk about work on this level?

I learned to see the pattern in my career. Every time I make a film, people come to me and say, “Great DIY job, you indie punk kid. Now I’ll show you how to make a real movie!” And when I try to work larger, we hit snags and problems, so I have to work as the scrappy DIY guy I am. Even though this film was 10 times more money than I usually work with, I still had to be scrappy and wear a lot of hats. So did my DP. This is the probably the scrappiest I had to be since “Colma: The Musical.” This felt no different to me. It just happened to have Paul Raci in it. 

It was interesting because I always thought of myself as someone who was going to stay on the outskirts. I was going into darker territory with “Bitter Melon,” and going into experimental territory with my current film project [in development.] When I got this script, I thought it was an ’80s film that threatened to whisk you away with images of flight, like “Always” and “Radio Flyer,” which were marketed as “emotional movies about flying.” I’d never been handed a script before, nor have I worked with Hollywood people before. I was looking for outs, because I am always busy, and I am insecure. Grant talked me into it, and it gave me a chance to exorcise some things I was going through during the pandemic. This film deals with loss, and I was dealing with loss, so I took the plunge.

What I appreciated about the film was how it asks Ben to confront his fears. After his wife’s death, he is treated with kindness and compassion, but Ben doesn’t want folks to treat him like a wounded hummingbird. What themes clicked with you emotionally? You talked about loss during the pandemic, but it isn’t sentimentalized. 

I think that over-sentimentalization goes hand-in-hand with something I don’t like about dead wife movies. This is a dead wife movie, and I said, “Either we lean into making a dead wife movie in 2023, or we cut the dead wife out altogether.” I was really happy to be given the chance to flesh Sara out as a character. Sara is a version of me and my husband rolled in one. When you have been married for 17 years, you get a little more pragmatic. For me, Ben having to deal with things head-on, we had to skip past the sentiment, and show that there were some cracks and fissures in their relationship. I grew up with messages like, “In order to move past something you have to let it go.” We absorb that, but they never meant anything until I had stuff to let go of. I wanted to put my lens on that and have Grant echo that. 

“The Secret Art of Human Flight” is a very layered film both in terms of content and style. There are surreal moments and scenes of magic realism. You incorporate personal videos, a psychedelic sequence, and other episodes. How did you approach telling this story visually? 

I’ve always been a fan of mixed media. It inspired me to have Reina Hardesty in the film. She was talking about her experiencing as an Asian American with me. That unlocked this link to my previous work. So, I wondered, what would it take to make “The Secret Art of Human Flight” into something mixed media, without being “Natural Born Killers” or “Sans Soleil.” When I had the opportunity to write the flashbacks, I talked with my DP about how could we differentiate them and make them like the films that made our hearts soar? How can we make this feel like big moments in Hollywood films? So that lead us to shoot in 4:3. That makes it feel bigger. We shot in a small house in Pittsfield, MA. I wanted to shoot wide angle as much as possible. I wanted things to be unsettling. Let’s make every shot look weird. My DP, Marcus, said, “I feel you want this to be like a horror film,” and I responded, “If you want things to be a rollercoaster, it has to be a little bit scary.” So, we built this aesthetic together. “The Tree of Life” was a big inspiration for me; I spiritually don’t connect that that film, but the visuals really live with me. 

There are several scenes that address issues of grief and mental illness. Can you talk about incorporating these topics into what is, at times, a buddy comedy?

Even though half of it is a buddy movie, I was trying to make the other half like a home invasion film. I think Mealworm is scary; he is not the genie from “Aladdin.” He could be there to kill him, which is said by Tom (Nican Robinson), the cop. You witness this big struggle inside Ben’s head. The idea that the other side of isolation is connecting with people, and once Ben starts connecting, there is a moment he blows up and talks about how he doesn’t care. It’s borderline suicidal. It’s a heavy scene, but it does have to be there. But people don’t run away from him We all struggled through the pandemic, but we didn’t struggle though it alone. People talk about how isolated they were during the pandemic. What was interesting was watching people I know blaming everyone for their depression. I never saw that before. His sister, Gloria (Lucy DeVito) forces Ben to open up about his feelings. The scene was supposed to be played for laughs, but I thought, I can’t in good faith do this as a joke. It has to be heavier. It’s a movie about grieving, so it deserves to have a few heavy moments. 

Both Wendy and Mealworm counsel Ben differently. What approach would you take with Ben?

My knee-jerk reaction to how I would deal with Ben is that I’m definitely a Wendy. But I wonder how much of me is Mealworm, too? When I first got the script and I was reading what Mealworm is saying about leaving western luxuries aside and becoming the barefoot goddess as she connects with the earth, I don’t know that this is wise advice. Maybe that’s the point, but it feels like faux mysticism and orientalism. I brought that up with the team and that became a line in the film! I don’t want to come across as a guru or someone who has all answers. I want someone to come along with me on this ride called life and share experiences. That’s what I do with people. I say, “I can’t fix your problems, but I’m your sponge.” That’s what I appreciate most about Wendy. I didn’t want her to be an oracular character, or a fixer. When she talks about her dead husband, she should be off in her own world, not looking at Ben. Her sharing her experience is a lot more impactful. She is this grounding force. There are certain things about Mealworm that do speak to me. Mysticism and orientalism aside, I appreciate what he says about letting go. But I am more of a facilitator than a guru.

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You are a composer as well as a director, and often create songs for your films. You wrote two songs for “The Secret Art of Human Flight.” Can you discuss that form of storytelling in this film?

Interestingly, that song is Wendy’s theme, evolved. I was composing on set and just coming up with little tunes. I had a keyboard in my backpack at all times and use it to show how I wanted a rhythm to be on any scene. There is a scene of Paul playing a guitar on the floor in front of candles. He was knocking out some chords and seeing what sounded pretty. That is what got captured in the movie, and those chords became Wendy’s theme. Imagine if the film is a musical — what would Mealworm’s speech sound like as a musical number? 

Wendy says she copes with grief by drinking a potion she creates. Ben learns to fly. What do you do to get out of a rut? 

There are several things I do to get out of ruts. I always try to take myself out of my element —whether that is taking psychedelics or trying something new, like joining the Bay Area flash mob and choreographing for them. Or moving to Tokyo. Or just traveling for a while and not knowing when I am going to come back home. Things that are uncomfortable. Things I might have been afraid of in the past. Any rut I fall into is based on a block, and not sure I know what it is or where it lies, but maybe I can do something to shake it free. 

“The Secret Art of Human Flight” screens June 8, 9, and 13 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The post “This is a dead wife movie” that isn’t maudlin says “The Secret Art of Human Flight” filmmaker appeared first on Salon.com.

I have the credentials to make such a claim because I am the creator and curator of WhoWeLost.org, an online pandemic remembrance story project, and the editor of a new anthology that is the only COVID memorial of its kind. Since I speak to the COVID-bereaved every day, my thoughts are intertwined with their passions and concerns. I know they worry that their losses are already being minimized or entirely forgotten. I know that many are estranged from their families due to the politicization of the virus, vaccine disinformation and denial of science. And I’m positive that the anxiety and guilt many have about how their loved ones disappeared and then died frightened and alone is an unrelenting theme that haunts their days and nights.

Earlier in the COVID sphere, when the death counts were mounting, and our nightmares were full of refrigerated trucks full of bodies, several journalists reported on the sole U.S. memorial to the victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, a 2018 monument erected in Barre, Vermont. I researched and read these stories, discovering that all of them contained interviews predicting that this pandemic would be different, that we’d learn from our history, do better this time, and honor the dead.

Now, however, opinion pieces and news items about the alleged end of the COVID-19 pandemic focus on the notion that if we don’t learn from our mistakes in public health policy and governance, we are destined to make them again whenever another variant or new pathogen emerges. Pay attention, we’re admonished, or you’ll be sorry later. This is correct, of course, but cognitive psychology teaches us that our capacity to forget is influenced by monotony and information overload — and certainly not just as it relates to the pandemic.

The knowledge that our pasts influence our present and future is so basic to our understanding of the human condition that it’s startling how often we ignore it, even though we cannot listen to a country song, read a memoir or even watch an episode of “Ted Lasso” without being enveloped by the past/present paradigm. A few weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine smirked and referred to the work I’ve been doing since 2020 as “Oh, those COVID stories?” as if her life (and she’s a psychologist!) was utterly separate from the narratives of others. Yes, her dismissiveness hurt my ego but I was reminded, again, of how societal empathy has diminished during the pandemic and been replaced with disinterest.

How are we to reconcile this, to separate the fatigue and vitriol from the essential need to remember all those we’ve lost, and continue to lose? Maybe I’ve turned into an idealist, but I feel it’s imperative that we look within ourselves, at our own histories—with purpose and honesty — if we are to recognize that all of us are, in various ways, connected to pandemic grief. This is what public health officials and entities like the CDC are neglecting: We cannot move forward without encouraging and facilitating remembrance. It’s our only emotional antidote.

Summer/Shiva

In December 2020, I was already months into the WhoWeLost Project when I discovered my personal pandemic anthem. Driving back from masked food shopping, I absentmindedly flicked my fingers across the car radio buttons and landed on a snippet of Dan Fogelberg singing “Same Old Lang Syne.”  Although I had not just “met my old lover in the grocery store,” I found myself moved, and began to weep uncontrollably. I was so surprised by my reaction that I cried even harder and wound up pulling off to a strip mall parking lot to extend my catharsis.

Long ago, I was an adolescent Fogelberg fan girl, obsessed with his 1977 “Nether Lands” album, in love with the soulful gaze and artfully draped hair featured in every photograph of him. But by the time the holiday song “Same Old Lang Syne” was released in 1981, I had long moved on and thought his new work trite. Yet there I was, parked outside a dormant pizzeria, scratching at my mask rash, undone by the sound of his voice.

When I arrived home and pondered what I’d just experienced, I understood that my reaction to a song I never even liked was too potent to be ignored. After a deep Google dive, I came upon a 2017 album, released a decade after Fogelberg’s death due to prostate cancer, and began listening. “A Tribute to Dan Fogelberg” features tracks recorded by artists as diverse as Garth Brooks, Boz Scaggs and Train, but it’s the Donna Summer cover of “Nether Lands” that broke my heart open and still does.

Summer’s rendering is lush and melodramatic, bordering on a Broadway power ballad. When I play it (always only when driving), it calls up my childhood, fully formed, a solid boulder before me on the roadway. I am simultaneously an older woman gathering stories of pandemic loss, and a moody teenage poet, sprawled on a gold shag carpet, record player blaring. My father has not yet returned from the office, from the retinas and corneas and tiny screws keeping temple pieces attached. Downstairs, my mother is cooking dinner, with an ever-present glass of vermouth on the Formica countertop.

But always, as Donna Summer keeps singing, and I drive, losing myself entirely, in my mind’s eye I wind up beside my father, crumpled in a heap on a hot tar road on a summer morning in August 2009.

An optometrist, my father had gone for a morning walk and was struck by a car whose driver had no peripheral vision due to undiagnosed brain tumors. He died alone on the pavement and the image has been lodged in both my waking and dream life ever since. My father had remarried after my mother’s death a decade earlier, and his old and new families did not get along. My brother and I were banned from planning the funeral and afterward, when one of our family members politely asked that my dad’s veteran burial flag be given to his grandsons, a fight ensued that exploded with shoving, punches and blood. Awful discord and lawsuits followed. My brother and I were excluded from shiva and collective mourning. There were no proper goodbyes.

I know now I’ve been silently grieving for years, in a dark corner of my brain that began to be reawakened as soon as the news of disappearing families and final iPad farewells hit. All the uncertainty, the social media bullying and dangerous disinformation, resonated with me because the trauma inherent in what it means to lose someone to COVID was already part of my existence.

Of the many decisions I made when I designed the WhoWeLost website, one feature is mentioned by grievers the most: They appreciate that no comments are allowed. No one can post an opinion about the validity of a memory, or insert doubt about comorbidities. If you need to leave off a surname, or just go by initials, that’s fine. You don’t need to be part of any social media platform or download an app. I created a safe zone, a place my brother and I never had. Giving this to others has brought me great peace.

Lives/Eyes

When Donna Summer sings “Nether Lands,” so much of the song’s power comes from juxtaposition — she recorded over the original master track with its rich orchestral arrangements, but her voice is utterly unlike Fogelberg’s. Distant from her disco hits, her operatic performance gives no hint that she would soon also pass away, five years before the tribute album was released. She’d asked to record “Nether Lands” because she said the song had helped her through hard times years before and she knew it “by heart.”

As do I — the song is part of my musical DNA; its lyrics returned to me without hesitation. We all have our own music that works this kind of magic, returning to us a specific time and place. Many of the people who write stories on the WhoWeLost website, and several stories in the anthology, cite specific songs as memory cues too. But they also conjure recipes, holidays, vacations, old love letters and drive-in movie theatres, among thousands of other personal touchstones. They share the jokes they would have recounted at Dad’s wake, if it had been allowed to take place.

I’m regularly asked how I cope with being the intermediary of such immense loss. Some have been more blunt, calling me a “grief sponge.” In truth, I am sad a lot, especially when there’s an uptick in the stories the site receives, which is currently the case since this spring represents the third anniversary of the first COVID surge, a triggering and difficult time for those who lost someone at the beginning of it all.

I don’t think you need to have a botched shiva following a surreal, tragic death to understand or empathize with what it feels like to lose someone to COVID. But I hope you do reach back and remember your grandpa and his dog, napping on the couch together, their sleepy smiles mirroring each other. I hope you recall a favorite teacher’s kindnesses but also your childhood fears of that bully who mocked your little brother. Remember that anxiety about an impending diagnosis. Think about the shame your cousins felt when your alcoholic uncle ruined Christmas dinner. In short, remember both the difficult and the joyful and internalize that losing someone to COVID often means these memories are impossible to access without their origins being stolen or twisted.

Last week, I followed my own advice and decided to see if the old online guest register from my father’s funeral was still on the facility’s website. I was shocked to find it all intact, though I don’t recall if I’d ever looked at the comments before. A lot of his patients had left notes and there was one that took my breath away: “He was always telling us stories and asking about our families. He cared about our lives, not just our eyes.” 

I walked around the house that afternoon, repeating the near-rhyme to myself: lives/eyes/lives/eyes. And all at once, everything made sense.

The post The Donna Summer song that helps get me through this silent grief appeared first on Salon.com.

I remember Kyle blowing raspberries on Ben’s stomach that morning, then bringing him on his hip into the bathroom where I stood looking into the mirror at what I thought to be the happiest family alive. I brushed back Ben’s blond hair, which was ruffled from a lazy night’s sleep. He pulled away in an independent boyish manner while I ran my hand down his chubby leg. Had I said, “I love you”? I will never be able to uncoil that memory from my brain. I thought we had so much time ahead of us. 

Kyle found Ben in the backseat of his car after realizing in horror, when attempting to pick him up from daycare, that he had not actually dropped him off that morning. As the police drove me to the hospital, I knew. Ben was gone. In the tiny room at the back of the hospital, my known world fell apart when they told me, “Ben didn’t make it.” As I entered Kyle’s room, I saw a vision of a soul torn asunder. I crawled onto his lap, prying his hands off his head, where I saw veins protruding. “I love you. I love you. I love you,” I relayed, in disbelief of the instantaneous words falling out of my mouth. My shoulder grew wet with his tears. My reaction was instinct. This was the man I loved on a level that went deeper than my words. Kyle had stood by me through moments I wasn’t sure I’d survive, and now the tables had turned. As much as I felt the need to save him, I also felt a repulsion for the reality that his actions had caused. Our son was dead. Everything I thought I knew about love or forgiveness was about to radically change.

In 2001, the two of us were an innocent pair. We were 21, living together in Raleigh, North Carolina, shedding our adolescence during our last days of college. I had met Kyle three years earlier through a friend of a friend when he’d carried my boxes into the college apartment. As I watched his chiseled face, strong arms and gentle demeanor, it was love at first sight. Then the Twin Towers crumbled and there was an immediate need to fall into one another, into the metaphysical beauty of human connection, to remind ourselves the world still existed. A few months later we found ourselves standing together in the county clerk’s office to be married. That night, as he touched me, I felt a faltering. A slight withholding of all of myself, as if I knew my own world would soon be overrun, testing the very fiber of our love. I watched the moonlight filter in through our window, waiting for the inevitable. 

Within a year the cracks began to form. Subtle at first, then with a fury unbeholden to reason. The early episodes of my manic depression exploded, intense and uncontrollable, leading to multiple hospitalizations in psychiatric wards as doctors struggled to find a diagnosis. On the worst days of agitation, in mixed states, I threw plates at the wall, yelling obscenities at Kyle as he stood helpless. He did not know on the first night we were together that he would be responsible for keeping me alive, fighting for “us,” and testing the boundaries of earthly love. One difficult night, as Kyle drove me to Duke University Hospital, manic and suicidal, I tried to jump out of his car, which was steamrolling down the interstate. He grabbed at my jeans trying to keep me inside while I battled, hit, kicked, and screamed at him to release me. He pulled over, taking out his cell phone to call 911, yelling, “I need help. I’m with my wife, and she’s sick. She’s manic depressive.” As I heard those words, I sank deeper into the seat, finally giving up. Only my sobs released into the night sky.

After a suicide attempt, more doctors shuffled through my hospital stays until they finally landed on lithium to quell my unquiet mind. On those many nights, I lay sobbing in Kyle’s arms as he held me. I uttered, “Please help me. Please don’t leave. Love all of me.” He rubbed his hands through my hair and said, “I do. Love all of you. Always and forever.” This was a phrase that would be tested beyond anything either of us could imagine in the years to come. 

After Ben’s death, I existed in survival mode, putting on my coat of armor to protect our family. The distance between me and Kyle gradually grew into an emotional separation that would last for years to come. I became bent on survival, while Kyle existed in a state of mourning, a mode of emotional nothingness. I could not even call it living. He compartmentalized quickly, rarely talking about Ben, moving on as fast as he could to a normal life with work and our daughters. I could not find true love or forgiveness during this time. The exuberant love of young adulthood had faded and I could not find what was left on the other end. My soul shut down; I needed to feel nothing. The constant zaps of pain and emotion in my body had to be numbed. 

On a separate path from Kyle, I fell into oblivion as soon as possible after work, first with benzodiazepines and mood stabilizers as strong as tranquilizers, then over the years moving on to alcohol with the sole purpose of blacking out in a stupor on the weekends, coupled with endless days at work in Big Law. The moments I missed with my children — walks on the beach at nighttime, not watching the sunrise because I was hungover — I can never get back. My state of addiction always came with anger, even at those I loved, yet I could not understand it was really anger toward my life and what it was not. Eventually, something had to change. I would either find love and learn to lean on forgiveness, leave, or remain in a constant state of numbness.

As I enter the final publishing phase of my memoir, which was actually written shortly after Ben’s passing, I’ve noticed myself pulling out of the depths of my addictions. Working on my story has helped me take a step back and see the purpose of my journey more clearly, guiding me to take a leap of faith to walk away from Big Law and become an author and mental health advocate. With all of my battle wounds, today I find myself contemplating the meaning of love again. I have come to understand that my soul is connected to Ben (who will always be with me) and also to Kyle. Since our early days of innocent and light-hearted love, my struggles with manic depression, and even after our tragedy, we have been soul partners. Our energy is bound together throughout time to support and love each other during and beyond the worst life can offer, teaching each other lessons we need to evolve and grow.

As Kyle and I sat on the patio one evening, tears formed as I told him that sometimes I wonder why God made me as I am, in ways that may cause him pain, and I was oftentimes sorry for being me. He grabbed my shoulders and said, “Lindsey, I love all of you, just as you are and always have. There is no regret. There is just life.” I believe soul partners encompass love in its various iterations, which are ever-changing. True love need not be wild and tempestuous, or light and effervescent. Sometimes it is quiet and gentle, but it is always unconditional. Our love is God’s grace to forgive and a commitment to see it through day in and day out, in the best and worst of times. Quite possibly, our commitment is to save each other over and over again, as many times as it takes, teaching each other the lessons that can only be found through unconditional love and radical forgiveness. We have shown each other that together we can survive the impossible.

 If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis  Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

The post The power of radical forgiveness appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet when the fatal spring peak eased last May, there was little reprieve. The public’s interest in front-line workers vanished, as attention shifted to the protests that erupted across the city, fueled by the police killing of George Floyd and others. As EMTs, we returned to our baseline state of invisibility. It shocked and saddened me to be so swiftly forgotten. “Never forget” is the slogan of 9/11, perhaps because of our historical failure at the art of remembrance.

When winter arrived, it brought with it another surge in Covid infections, along with the loss of a close friend: an FDNY firefighter turned ER doctor who lived in Las Vegas and died of World Trade Center-related cancer. He was a funny, kind, loving, mustached man who always wore a fire department t-shirt, made a heroic spiritual U-turn at the end of his life by getting sober on his deathbed, and helped me more than anyone when I was on the ambulance during the pandemic. He would spend hours on the phone with me debriefing about what I’d seen.

I’d become a first responder four years ago to honor his late brother, a firefighter killed on that horrific blue Tuesday morning in September 2001. The tragedies of 9/11 and Covid dovetailed for me in 2020, and I found myself pitched into a sea of grief. Even now, months later, I struggle to understand that my friend is gone. I don’t sleep well. I don’t eat well. I cry often. My therapist assured me this is a normal stage of grief, made more acute by isolation. She referred me to an article about people languishing.

One day a passage returned to me from a Jim Shepard story called “Boys Town,” about a struggling war veteran, which goes like this: “You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”

When the possibility of taking a trip to Martha’s Vineyard with four of my closest friends arrived along with the vaccines, I seized the opportunity. I packed my bags, grabbed my best friend, and together we sped across New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, then ferried to the vineyard. We arrived on shore, sunglasses in hand, bursting with hope that our loneliness would abate. Isolation and suffering would give way to friendship, togetherness, and healing.

The four of us spent five days enjoying salty, lilac perfumed air, orange-pink sunsets, and delicious foraged watercress and sea bass ceviche. Nights, we stayed up late talking and telling stories, just as I’d dreamed. It was the closest I’d come to pre-pandemic life I’d experienced since the previous spring. And yet rather than the laughter I’d imagined would permeate the air, I was reduced to tears every day.

When I hugged one of my friends for the first time in a year, a deep sadness overtook me. I wept at how comforting it was to take in the miracle of our aliveness. I wept over all the events we’d missed in each other’s lives over the past year — the birthdays and brunches, funerals and holidays — the time we lost and would never get back. I was startled by the depth of my sorrow, the convulsion of tears released with each hug. 

And while I was comforted by my friends’ companionship, after spending a few hours with them I felt like I’d just marched in the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. I often retreated to my bedroom to read or nap, longing for solitude, the very thing I’d come to the island to escape. Unaccustomed to being out of my apartment, I jumped at the sound of an icemaker, mistaking it for an intruder who’d come to the house to murder us, obviously. At night I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about the gray horrors of 2020, how the pandemic kept me from seeing my dying friend during the last months of his life, the catastrophic Covid deaths that were ransacking India at the time while we were seemingly tiptoeing out of the tragedy, ruminating on the unfairness of it all.

Why, despite being so grateful to be with friends once again, was I so easily overwhelmed, so plagued with feelings of sadness and loneliness, especially when this trip was the only thing that I’d looked forward to in months?

After a year of isolation and death, it’s fair to say we’re all a bit weird now. On the island it was impossible not to notice how odd we’d all become post-2020. One of my friends lost her home and now had a Band-Aid slapped across her forehead from running into a lacerating cupboard. One sobbed when she talked about losing her aunt to cancer. Another friend cried alone in her room while journaling in the morning.

Driving up a steep road flanked by the sea, one of my friends agreed the trauma we all feel is real and collective, but she added that some people had it worse than others during the pandemic. “Anyone who works in health care,” she said, looking at me sideways.

At first, I bristled at her remark. I didn’t consider myself especially traumatized, despite having worked on the front line as an EMT, particularly when I viewed my experience against that of full-time first responders who worked mandated overtime with no hazard pay, or friends who lost jobs, or family members, or their lives.

True, I’d been on the ambulance when the sirens flared and thousands of New Yorkers perished while my friend was dying of cancer. Yes, I’d gotten sick with what my doctor presumed was Covid, though I tested negative for the virus. No, I didn’t tell my friends who weren’t first responders about what I’d seen and felt during those godawful months. They were anxious enough as it was, stuck at home mainlining news and mortality data, and I didn’t think telling them things were much worse on the street than what they were seeing in the news would be especially helpful.

And so while it saddened me to admit it, my friend was perhaps right to stick me in a separate emotional sock drawer than the one she inhabited. Last year, in the chaos of the disaster, I didn’t have time to feel. This trip provided me with the opportunity to start to absorb the losses and reflect on how agonizing it had been to be confronted with so much death, how disheartening that half the country thought Covid was a joke, and how exhausting that while things were slowly getting better here, it still wasn’t over.

I know this is supposed to be the “summer of joy,” and I do feel a new sense of freedom and relief with get-togethers made possible by the vaccines. But as an EMT I can’t help but feel insulted that New York City has chosen to honor its front-line workers with a parade rather than by paying EMTs and paramedics a fair wage for the grueling and critical rescue work they’ve been doing thanklessly for years, with 2020 offering a master class in ambulance-driven heroism. And I can’t say I feel especially cheerful to be an EMT now or in agreement with the notion that Covid is somehow magically done with us. The last time I was on the ambulance and transported a psychiatric patient to the hospital, the adult and pediatric ERs were packed bed-to-bed with sick and dying patients, every nurse I encountered looked exhausted beyond endurance — they’re quitting in droves — and the fluorescent lights that illuminated the hospital floor seemed to highlight a world of endless misery with no end in sight for those on the front-line. 

On a mental health questionnaire circulating among healthcare workers, one of the questions asked: When you think of Covid-19, how often do you feel disappointed in people? Never? Rarely? Often? Always?

Always, I answered.

The last day of the trip I dressed in all black in preparation to return to New York, ringing with gratitude at having seen my friends, but also reeling from newly registered sorrows. On the ferry ride home, I stared at the deep blue water and forced myself to acknowledge that this summer was not like the last. This year, 2021, was in fact different. Vaccines were here and they were working. Treatments were improving. People who died in the chaos of last spring now had a chance.

The trip with my friends was wonderful and I have not recovered — not even close. But it will get better, I told myself as I unpacked. In the meantime, I know the loneliness will still be there. But this time, I also know how to get out of the loop: I can reach out to friends and pull them close before things start to get too weird.

The post It’s finally time to reunite with friends. So why do I feel so lonely? appeared first on Salon.com.

My cousins slice through the dampness hanging in the air and rush toward the pool. The oldest, his eyes towards the sky, asks my aunt if there will be rain. She tells him maybe, and that if so, she’ll have to bring them inside.

The youngest, a preschooler at a local Catholic school, closes her eyes and clasps her hands in prayer. Just over the joyful hollers of her brother, I hear her words slip out into the thick air: Please, Grandma, don’t let it rain today. Please Grandma. I want to play outside. Don’t let it rain. She holds the tender moment for a second, then joins her brother in joyous celebration of cool water against hot skin.

I ask my aunt if her daughter prays to her grandmother often and she nods. When I ask my cousins what they know about her, they list off dozens of details about her life.

She was a Spanish teacher. She used to take her students on yearly trips to Mexico for language immersion. She was from Ames, Iowa. She loved to drink Pepsi and eat maple bar donuts. She screamed the loudest at my uncle’s high school wrestling matches and skipped church to watch the Bears play on Sundays. She loved fiercely and deliberately and would have given anything to see them both in the world.

Our grandmother has been gone for 14 years, but to see her talked about by children born years after her funeral, it doesn’t seem like it’s been 14 weeks. 

Coming out as bisexual was, in many ways, easier for my family to swallow than saying that I had given up on their faith. Obama-voting Christians, they at least knew a few lesbians. A life without religion, even in the Christmas-and-Easter-only traditions my family kept most of my childhood, felt unimaginable. 

While the lack of religion was freeing in many ways, I also came to understand the holes in people that faith could fill. When the world burned or you failed in grand and fantastic ways, I imagined there being a comfort in knowing that if you were to die you would go to a better place, and that no matter how you failed, even your God was waiting to forgive you.

As an adult, I started to gather the things around me that felt holy, felt true, and lashed them together into something that felt honest and durable, reaching out toward what others found in their religion.

* * *

I carve through the roundabouts and accelerate again quickly, hoping to catch the store’s hours posted online. I’m in pajamas, having given up on the day, before I took a look at the calendar and jumped in the car.

I’m on the phone with Mom. It is a lazy Sunday in a sleepy, tourist town on Puget Sound. I soar through Commercial Street without hitting a light. Mom tells me about her bike ride earlier, out near Spokane. She tells me how clear the sky was and how far she went. For her, God hovers closest to earth on the weekends where her legs burn in lactic acid and her breath gets short.

I put the phone on hold and pull the car into the drive-through line. The cashier asks what I want and I say two maple bars and an old-fashioned, for my partner. When I merge back onto the street heading home, I take Mom off hold and take the first bite of the maple bar. 

“How is it?”

I still do not believe in a God, have not prayed or gone to a church for years, but understand that even in a life such as mine, there are moments when I touch that inner power that brings some to tears and tongues in the pews. In that moment, eating a donut on what would’ve been her 79th birthday, I know that I am as close to the woman who died 18 years ago as I will ever be.

“It is good,” I tell Mom, “the best I’ve ever had.”

* * *

There are scientific facts that touch the inner power in me that others find in their faith. One summer, I buy a shirt from which a flower erupts through a skull and tie-die it in the backyard and feel like I’ve touched the place where holiness lives in the human body. 

There is a beauty and comfort for me in knowing that I will one day return to the earth I came from. There is a great beauty in the hope that my body will feed the planet that has given me so much. I know this will not undo the damage I have done as a human being, with my lithium batteries and plastic salad bins, but it is something, I imagine, like writing a $25 check to someone who knows you will never pay back what you owe: Not much, but all I can do.

In college, over a Thanksgiving break, I visit my grandfather’s house with the rest of my family and my partner. He has lived in the same house in Central Idaho since 1977 and is three hours from the hospital that he used to go to for cancer treatments. Nobody even brings up the idea of moving closer to one of his children, knowing that he would say, in his awkward, too-polite Midwestern way, to f**k straight off.

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After the obligatory conversation around the kitchen table that my mother grew up with, catching up on how school and work is going, and what we want to have for Thursday’s dinner, I stand up to grab a glass of water. Passing by his fridge, I notice a note sticking out from under a family picture.

I recognize his handwriting, but see that it is a recipe for iced tea, which he does not drink. Two details click into my mind simultaneously: My grandmother drank iced tea more than she drank even Pepsi and my grandfather was her only caretaker the last few months of her life.

I imagine the story immediately. Her dictating the directions to him as he scribbled them down, referring to them to make her iced tea until it become routine. I wonder if the note had been forgotten behind there or if he has chosen, all these years, to keep it on the fridge.

My grandmother has been gone for years, but my grandfather still says “we” and “us,” not “me” and “I” when he tells stories. It is possible that he is addressing his dog, who he takes everywhere with him, but having known the man for twenty-some-odd years, I doubt it.

It is possible that my grandfather will never leave Salmon, Idaho, because he doesn’t want to have to pack up all the belongings he’s acquired over the decades, look for a new house, pick a new place to move when his children live in three distinct and separate areas. But knowing that my grandmother, to whom he was married for nearly 40 years, is buried up on a beautiful hill that overlooks the city and the river it is named after, I doubt it.

* * *

My grandmother lives in me too. I drink only Pepsi when I’m drinking soda, eat only maple bars when donuts are being handed out, and root only for the Bears if there is a game on screen. Her favorite number, and its Spanish translation, scatters itself across years of old usernames and passwords. 

Holding my crying newborn in my arms, I instinctively sing songs from her favorite band, Peter, Paul, and Mary. “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” songs I remember best echoing through the house in Salmon 20 years ago. The melodies move through me like a muscle, as if involuntary, as if not coming from me at all.

* * *

The night my grandmother died, I sat in the spare bedroom of the house in Salmon. Having been taken suddenly, the morning after my eighth birthday, on the six-hour drive over two mountain passes in the winter, I knew in that half-formed way that children often do that my grandmother would not make it through the night.

Seeing her frail and skinny on the couch, I broke down in tears. She had been awake all day, the only time she’d done so in months, and pulled me close to her. I kissed her and told her goodbye.

Sitting on the edge of the bedroom, watching a portable DVD player, I cried. My sister, three years younger, cried in the confused, unsure way younger children often do. We watched “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” one of my favorite movies at the time.

At the end of the movie, when the Ark of the Covenant is opened, all the souls contained within escape and whip through the gathering, killing the Nazis. I imagined my grandmother’s soul as it left her body and wondered if it would come through the room, giving my sister and I a last kiss goodbye.

When I was ushered out the back door, while adults kept themselves between us and the bed where my grandma had laid, I pulled the hat over my eyes, like Indiana Jones does in the movie, and cried.

I thought at the time, my grandmother hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye, so strong was the pull from heaven for her soul. But, sitting in a plastic recliner on a hot day in Mississippi 14 years later, watching a child that was named after her pray to her for a clear day, wishing for a Pepsi to beat the heat, I wonder if she has ever truly left.

The post The holy maple bar: Notes on an afterlife, without religion appeared first on Salon.com.

“Spare,” Harry’s memoir, had just come out, and the parallels between real-life Harry’s and fictional Edward’s experiences struck me. At age 12, both boys lost their mothers in a crash, although Edward felt the exponentially larger wallop of losing his entire family in the plane crash of which he was the sole survivor. (Napolitano, an executive producer of the series, has said that her novel was inspired by a real Dutch boy who alone survived a plane crash in 2010.) 

There’s more. Both 12-year-old boys had one older brother. Both boys received ghoulish media attention following their losses. And both boys indulged in magical thinking to help mitigate their grief: Edward sees and chats with his dead older brother, Jordan; Harry convinced himself that his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, was only pretending to be dead (“Her life’s been miserable, she’s been hounded, harassed, lied about, lied to. So she’s staged an accident as a diversion and run away . . . Of course!”).

If Harry’s experience is any gauge, rarified though its particulars are, “Dear Edward” gets grief, and especially children’s grief, right.

If “Spare” can be said to have a thesis statement other than that the British press is an army of unconscionable goons, it’s that the inattention to 12-year-old Harry’s mental health back in 1997, when his mother died, set him on a course of panic attacks and anxiety that were finally alleviated when he turned to therapy as an adult. As I rewatched “Dear Edward,” I took note of how the grown-ups in the kid’s life measured up to those in young Harry’s. In a sturdy series comprising a half-dozen stories centered on the plane-crash casualties’ loved ones, the mismanagement of Edward’s grief may be the only false note.

Colin O’Brien in “Dear Edward” (Apple TV+)

Before their plane shattered in a Colorado field, Edward (Colin O’Brien), Jordan (Maxwell Jenkins), and their parents were headed to Los Angeles, where Edward’s mother had accepted a screenwriting job; the whole family was relocating from Manhattan. When Edward is returned to the East Coast after the crash, he moves to Nyack, New York, to live with his mother’s sister, Lacey (the faultless Taylor Schilling), and her husband, John (Carter Hudson, in a low-key but deceptively exacting performance).

When Edward first pulls up to the house in the series’s second episode, a phalanx of lookie-loos and press people stick cameras and microphones in his face and call him “Miracle Boy.” Of course, for Harry the attention was on another scale entirely: “Willy and I walked up and down the crowds outside Kensington Palace, smiling, shaking hands . . . Hundreds and hundreds of hands were thrust continually into our faces, the fingers often wet” with tears. For both Harry and Edward, this sort of attention was unwanted and unhelpful: it reinforced that their loss was real.

Over dinner, Lacey tells Edward that the airline will provide a psychologist to help him with what he’s going through. Taking a cue from the spectral Jordan, who is seated beside him, Edward tells Lacey he’ll think about it, the idea being that he won’t, and his aunt and uncle seem to accept this. Later in the episode, when Lacey and John sit down with a doctor to discuss Edward’s worrisome weight loss, it’s treated as strictly a medical problem. 

The absence of mental health support for Edward seems odd in a series in which the adults featured in its half-dozen stories meet at a grief group. “Grief is a thing best shared,” Harry writes in “Spare” — it could be the tagline for “Dear Edward.” Even my cursory bit of online sleuthing produces a wealth of bereavement group options for kids; did no one think to introduce Edward to the young Prince Harry equivalent of Nyack? (I also found myself wondering, Where are Edward’s grandparents and cousins to help him cope?) This isn’t late-1990s Britain; the social acceptance of therapy has only improved since young Harry first needed some. 

To be sure, “Dear Edward” isn’t asking viewers to believe that all the grown-ups in Edward’s life are paragons of responsible adulthood. Lacey and John aren’t certain they’re doing the right thing by hiding the mail Edward receives from people in thrall to Miracle Boy. And Lacey is a snarly mess — because of her failed infertility treatments, because she’s lost her sister. “I’m f**ked up,” she admits to Edward in the second episode, and she’s steadfast in her emotional availability to him — a step up from what the royals had to offer young Harry. But it’s not enough: Edward is barely hanging on.

In “Spare,” some tuned-in adults appeared when I least expected them. At Harry’s school, there were letter-writing days, and following Diana’s death, “the matrons asked me to write a ‘final’ letter to Mummy. I have a vague memory of wanting to protest that she was still alive . . . I probably dashed off something pro forma, saying I missed her, school was fine, so on and so forth . . . I remember, immediately thereafter, regretting that I hadn’t taken the writing more seriously.” Why didn’t some adult suggest that Edward write his family a letter? There’s no reason to believe he would have taken the suggestion — once again he might have said, “I’ll think about it.” But maybe he would have.

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It could be that “Dear Edward” neglects dear Edward’s mental health out of narrative necessity: who wants to watch a series about a bereaved kid with a crack team of specialists and an ultra-capable extended family who help him effortlessly reintegrate into society? Still, the degree to which Edward was shortchanged defies plausibility. Maybe that’s a quibble about a multifaceted drama that rewards repeated viewings. Among the bravura cast’s standouts is the formidable Connie Britton as a well-heeled new widow who finds comfort in breaking things. If only someone had thought to hand Edward some fine china and pointed him at a wall.

“Dear Edward” releases new episodes Fridays on Apple TV+.

The post “Dear Edward” gets children’s grief right – just ask Prince Harry appeared first on Salon.com.

Years ago she fell and broke her wrist in many places. She called me at an airport. I was coming home from somewhere; where? She chirped about her terrible luck, making it into a funny story: rushing out of a hot tub to get away from a lecherous friend, slipping. It is not a funny story when I type it here. Typing makes it sound terrible. I am expert at telling terrible stories. She never wants anyone to feel sorry for her.

The thing about the scarves is I can wrap myself in them, round and round my neck. I can lower my face into them and smell. They smell like her.

“This smells like Cai’s house,” my son says.

“What does that smell like?” I want to hear someone else describe it. He knows she is dying in three weeks. He knows she has planned it. The only other person who has died is my dad after long, sad years of assisted living that scared my son. Also the cat. My son cried when the cat died, but only after half a day passed and he noticed the cat was gone. He has known Cai all his life. She doesn’t play backyard sports with him — even when she could — so she is not his favorite of my friends but he loves her. He likes to joke about all the books she’s published. He likes to say “Aren’t you jealous?” He likes to say, “She’s so much better than you.”

“Good,” he says of the smell.

I steal books off her shelves. She has mountains of them. I call it borrowing. “Can I borrow this?” But I am a slow and picky reader. I dip in and out. I will not be done in three weeks. Things that will outlive her: the spinach in my freezer. The half bag of fertilizer in my shed. My unfinished book draft. The bulk bag of prescription food for the (not dead) cat’s allergies. My other unfinished book draft.

Her scarves are fancy, fancier than mine. My clothing is utilitarian. Hers are about pleasure. She always had exquisite taste in clothing and jewelry and housewares. But she wasn’t a snob. She isn’t a snob. She’ll be dead in three weeks but till then, verbs are present tense. She’s a stickler for grammar.

I am selfish in my grief: Who will deliver cupcakes to my door when I’m depressed? Who will correct my every lay to lie? Who will take me to birthday pedicures?

“You better haunt me,” I say.

She wants to be cremated and sent in an urn to the fancy Boston cemetery where her parents are buried.

“What about us?” I say. By us, I mean her husband, son and me, 3,000 miles from Boston. By us I mean me. “Who’s in Boston anyway?” I say.

“Bostonians,” her husband says.

We three laugh, though Cai’s is a seal straining to bark. Her voice was the first thing to go before hands and throat and dragging feet.

I know everything there is to know: Two doctors have approved the drug she’ll spend $750 to ship from the single pharmacy that dispenses it. The drug will go into her feeding tube. She has to depress the plunger that will send the drug into her feeding tube to stay within the law. The drug will first put her to sleep and then kill her. But anticipating death is like anticipating Minotaur or anticipating ribosomes or anticipating nebula. I lack the neural pathways.

We need to cry together, she types into her phone beside me. Deep breath, she texted on the same phone from the neurologist’s office nearly two years ago — the specialist neurologist, the neurologist of last resort — minutes after the diagnosis and the moment before she told me. Even then, she wanted to tamp down the drama. All I want is drama. My friend is dying, I tell anyone who listens. My dear friend is dying. My best friend is dying. I want to wring it out. I want to rain it down. If I could self-immolate in it, I would for the spectacle. We cried together once in a room full of other people crying too.

Spectacle doesn’t work between the two of us alone. She says, “I don’t want to think about it too much because then I won’t do it and I want to do it.” She wakes up in mucus, unable to breathe. Her bones hurt. Her fingers that she uses for writing, for speaking, for everything, are barely working. My job is to say yes to everything that makes no sense, that I can’t see my way to. My job is to be not me, not anything about me.

I name the stupid people who didn’t appreciate her enough – who don’t appreciate her enough – and enumerate the ways I will tell them to fuck off to in her obituary. In her eulogy. I say this like it’s funny. Which maybe it is. Maybe all this is funny, like her stories are funny, no one feeling sorry for anybody.  

I have three scarves, a stack of books, and November’s orange toenails, already chipped, slivers of bare nail pushing up from the cuticles. Soon I will sit at this same desk in this same body in this same life, type She laid on the couch, crushed, and wait.

Cai Emmons died peacefully in her home surrounded by friends and family on January 2, 2023, using Oregon’s Death with Dignity law and with the help of EOLCOR (End of Life Choices Oregon). Here’s her farewell message to friends and readers. Miriam has since stolen a gel pen, a half pad of Post-it Notes, and an insulated grocery bag from Cai’s home.

The post When your friend is dying, it’s OK to steal her scarves appeared first on Salon.com.

My mom’s younger sister Cathy was petite and sophisticated with long brown hair set in a spiral perm. Her home in Atlanta was clean and bright, carefully decorated, with cats hiding under beds and couches. Out back, her yard was shaded by a line of oak trees. As a young girl, I hoped that I would grow up to look and be just like her.

At Christmas time, we went shopping together at the Gwinnett Place Mall. It was the mid-Nineties, and shopping malls were at their height with multi-level waterfall fountains and stained-glass ceilings. The sun’s rays projected a kaleidoscope of color onto the tile floors as we walked from store to store.

My aunt was not a spendthrift, but she encouraged me to be. In early elementary school, I was given a dollar-a-week allowance, and anytime I picked up a tube of glittered lip gloss from Limited Too or a Beanie Baby from the Hallmark store, my aunt would caress my small shoulders with her hands and say, “Oh, Anna, just get it. You know you want to.”

Getting ready for dinner one evening, my aunt and I stood together in front of her full-length bedroom mirror. She handed me a pair of fuchsia clip-on earrings, large plastic stones glued onto cheap metal clasps. I attached them to the lobes of my ears. They were heavy and itchy, but I smiled at the reflection of my aunt smiling at me.

“Tell your mother they’re real,” she said to me with a lightness. “Tell her we decided to get your ears pierced this afternoon.”

I would do just that at the restaurant as I consumed, three, four, five pieces of oil-drenched bread. I was so innocent, my ears not yet scarred, eating so much bread without worry or care. Later that evening, I overheard my aunt tell my mother, “She’s like my own daughter — the daughter that I don’t have.”

Several years later, when my aunt was pregnant with my cousin, I felt jealous. I knew what a new baby meant, that it was not just a doll to outfit, to gaze at sweetly and then return to the shelf. Of course, I was relieved to hear she was expecting a boy. I would not be replaced, not completely.

My cousin was a toddler when Aunt Cathy was diagnosed with stomach cancer. I knew she wanted more children. I learned this through eavesdropping. We were at Stone Mountain Village, bundled in coats and scarves to buy hot coffee and chocolates from a store with aged beans, stale candies. Outside, it was dark. Twinkling lights decorated the row of storefronts. Aunt Cathy sat on a cushioned bench. The light of the shop highlighted the tears on her cheeks. 

“I guess Anna will be like my daughter,” my aunt whispered to my mother. Though the tumor was in her stomach, her treatment would involve the removal of her ovaries. Upon hearing this, I felt excited — like I’d won a prize. I was, perhaps, the only one who felt emboldened by my aunt’s stolen fertility. 

Shortly after she had her ovaries removed, Aunt Cathy was given tickets to visit Benny Hinn at one of his healing conventions. These tickets were a birthday gift from church members, the Southern Baptist’s alternative medicine.

“It’s worth a shot,” the ladies at church told my aunt. They spoke of people who had been healed from chronic diabetes, from the debilitating pain of car accidents. 

“I’m not getting my hopes up,” my aunt said, after she wrote to Benny Hinn’s organization, giving notice of her future attendance: 30-something mom of a young toddler, stomach cancer, several rounds of chemo and radiation, ovaries just removed. She never received a reply. Those healed in the service were heavily made up, dripping emotion, performative plants.

“I should have known better,” she said angrily to my mom over the phone. All she had left were her doctor’s appointments and her diminishing medical options. Hope began to seem just as ridiculous as Benny Hinn.

She was on her final round of chemo during one of our last visits to the mall. She threw up repeatedly into a plastic Ingles bag during our short car ride. She now wore a short brown bob, chin-length, a shade lighter than her hair before cancer. She joked about purchasing a crazy-looking wig in a fun color: platinum blonde, bright blue. But she chose a style just a touch more conservative than her hair before.

After cleaning herself up, we walked from store to store. She was quiet, distracted. I tried to draw her back to my world, picking up a floral minidress, holding it against my chest. She smiled, as if under duress, and said nothing at all.

The Gwinnett Place Mall is a dead mall today, as are so many malls. The mall was used as a set for the third season of “Stranger Things.” Monstrous aliens were filmed in violent pursuit of the dorky adolescent cast, just steps away from where my pretty aunt, decades before, stroked my hair and told me — gangly, big glasses, brunette-banged me – that nothing I wanted was silly, none of my desires were too much.

Just before Aunt Cathy’s death, we visited her at home. There were several strange men in her bedroom: a doctor, a church elder. I waited for my aunt to express delight at my presence, to give me a clue about the Christmas present she had picked out for me. We barely made eye contact. She swallowed a handful of pills. Minutes later, she rushed out of bed and threw up violently in a bucket. I could see the sharp edges of her hipbones through her floral satin pajama pants. I heard my mom whisper that my aunt was down to 70 pounds. In the dark that night, I stepped on the bathroom scale and saw that she and I were the same size.

Aunt Cathy passed away on New Year’s Day. I was nine years old. My mom mused on the cancer’s cause for years: Maybe the tumor was because of paint fumes in the poorly ventilated studios where she worked as an art student. Or maybe it was because of the hot dogs she ate so often in elementary school, all those nitrates in the preserved meat. What was it that led to those tumors in her belly? What did she consume that led to her early, tragic death?

Her death made me realize that youth was not some sort of guarantee against mortal pain. The world, fate, seemed capricious, without reward for good behavior or careful living. I could not express my grief in words. Instead, I pressed my own stomach’s flesh down repeatedly, punching it like dough, slapping it with an anger I didn’t know how to channel.

The day after her death, the television was turned on for background noise. All the talking heads on “Today” spoke of their New Year’s resolutions, the penance they promised to pay for the indulgences of past weeks.

I listened to them talk. These newscasters seemed so happy with white teeth and big smiles. I felt like I was being offered the solution to my problem, which was grief; maybe the world would improve if I took more care about what I put in my mouth.

“Let’s play a game!” I said to my cousin. “Let’s see how many laps we can run around the house. We’re going to get healthy!” And we ran and ran until we were dizzy and distracted.

“Let’s eat lots of carrots for lunch,” I suggested, and we dug a bag of dry carrots out of the crisper. We peeled them over the sink and took big bites. Each crunch felt like a movement closer to life than death.

After my Aunt Cathy’s death, my grandmother stopped decorating for Christmas. The first year, she downgraded to a small, artificial tree, barely as tall as a toddler, the kind that could be purchased in the same grocery store aisle as decorative brooms that smell of cinnamon. Soon, she wouldn’t even make an attempt — wouldn’t even place a pine wreath on the door.

We rarely left the house when visiting my grandmother after Aunt Cathy’s death. The mornings started slow. My mother and grandmother sat on creaky wooden chairs with pink cushions tied to the spindles. They drank their coffee and ate microwaved Sara Lee danish. Time would pass. They spoke of those in the periphery of their lives.

I began to avoid the conversations at the kitchen table. They were always the same. I spent the Christmas after Aunt Cathy’s death in a dark bedroom. I adjusted the antennas of a small television set and watched figure skaters perform in noncompetitive holiday specials. I did sit-ups on the floor as the athletes glided gracefully across the screen. Aunt Cathy’s stomach had betrayed her, and since then, I had become fixated on my own. I completed the sit-ups in sets, keeping track of the numbers in my mind, aiming each day to make it into the thousands.

I finished the holiday break with a rug burn on the skin of my spine. In January, I sat at my desk in school massaging the damaged skin on my back with quiet pride. 

This year, I’m 34 — the same age my Aunt Cathy was when she died. I still miss her presence at our holiday dinner table. And each New Year’s, I am reminded of what I learned through her passing: That grit cannot erase grief. That no amount of resolve can solve the problem of being human.

Today, I have the multiple children she prayed for but did not receive. Recently, my two children helped me unpack the holiday heirlooms I inherited from Aunt Cathy — a set of small Victorian dolls that she kept in a glass curio cabinet. They are porcelain figures the size of an adult hand. Nearly all of them are holiday themed. 

Together, we wiped the dust from each delicate girl with a rag, placing them on the mantle above our fireplace. One girl’s arms were extended holding ornaments, ready to trim a tree. Another wore figure skates, hands hidden in fur muffs. Another’s limbs were carrying a load of holly wreaths. Each wore pin curls, period-appropriate dresses, large hats. I glanced at my sons and back to the fragile girls. All had expressions of such joy with cheeks so rosy, so plump.

The post You can’t resolve your way through New Year’s grief appeared first on Salon.com.

Thanksgiving in my family, like many others, brings with it the shadow of death even as it also celebrates ongoing family love. It is almost always bittersweet. When the anniversary of the death of a loved one falls on a holiday, it has an added intensity because it returns to haunt us with the feeling of absence again and again on a day when families gather for a joyful meal together. Time’s passage helps, but only partially.  

Eventually, I found a way to bring my father’s voice back into my life so that I could see him again at the dinner table and hear his mock plea to my mother, “Give the baby some food!” Although I was no longer a kid, he’d turn to me as the youngest of his three daughters, with that gleam in his eyes, and say, “Lee-ah—la! You’ll always be my baby.” But getting back to that time “before” is certainly a process.   

For years after my father’s departure for the hospital, I’d find myself reliving the last stretch as soon as we began preparations for the annual Thanksgiving feast. Something in the November air almost instantly brought back the feeling of dread. I would remember the changes in my father that we resisted acknowledging for fear of losing him. We assumed gall stones — easy enough to address. When he entered the hospital on Thanksgiving weekend, the diagnosis came as a shock. Stomach cancer: untreatable, inoperable, terminal.  “Ominous,” according to my cousin-doctor when I emailed with questions and false hopes. My mother expressed her greatest fear on the way to the hospital. “If he’s going to the hospital on Thanksgiving weekend, what if he doesn’t come home again?” A prophetic fear, as it turned out.

The days in the hospital stretched on as if each one lasted a month, with more and more tests leading to a surgery that we were told would make it an “easier, less painful death,” but would not save him.  We told him as much, for fear that surgery might be a mistake, but he chose the surgery. He whispered, “I’m not ready to say goodbye,” shrugging his shoulders sheepishly. 

Even with pictures as a reminder of better times with Dad, my mind always took me to the room where he died. I would relive hospital scenes: the moment he fell when he was attempting to get out of bed himself. The nurse came and asked him if he was hurt. He replied, “My body is not hurt. It’s my dignity.” 

He was not without humor through this nightmare. My mother asked, “Aaron, if you go, when will we talk?” And my father replied. “Every Thursday, when Phil Donohue is on, Mollie. Don’t worry!” And he was wise. To me, he said, “When I die, don’t make a fuss! After all…,” and then he ran through a litany of names of loved ones who had died much sooner than he would at 86: his mother, sister, brother, cousins, close friends. “Just read to me,” he said. And I proceeded to read him the op-eds from the New York Times, as he requested, and to talk about world politics, the wrongs of war, foolish politicians, his favorite subjects. 

On the day they wheeled him into the operating room, he gave his best smile despite the pain and winked. “Say see you soon — not goodbye!” After the palliative surgery, my mother ran after the surgeon who was rushing down the hallway to his next task. Her voice trembled when she asked him whether my father would now be better enough to come home to play their daily Scrabble games. Ever since retiring, they thrived on Scrabble despite their mutual accusations of cheating. The doctor slapped a piece of paper on the wall as if it would explain everything, and we stared at his illegible scribbling above his incomprehensible medical diagram. He shook his head, and in the voice he clearly used with trembling wives, said, “Sorry, highly unlikely.”

After nine sleepless days and nights in the hospital, I took a flight home to Massachusetts to take care of business. The doctor had reassured me that he would live for at least a few weeks. But the next morning, my sister called to say things had taken a turn, and she was told it was time “to pull the plug.” She added that she could keep him on until my return.  I told her we had expressed our love for each other, and to let him go. Nonetheless, my father stayed alive, if not conscious, and I made it back later that same day, for one more embrace before he died that night.

I wondered if I would ever get past the weight of loss, replaying each year the final moments, the look on his face when he rolled over and uttered simply, “I’m dying,” the sight of my mother beside him in the hospital bed, losing him after 65 years together, my sister and I in each other’s arms on the adjacent bed, listening for the last breath, waiting.  

It took me a decade to hit upon a Thanksgiving strategy. I began to read a banker’s box full of letters my father had written to my sister when she lived in Japan. He had covered the tissue-thin airmail stationary corner to corner with his typing, leaving only a little room for the address. The letters were stashed in a box marked “Dad.” 

“These are for you,” my sister Marilyn said, “for when you miss Dad.” When I pull out that box before Thanksgiving, his voice returns, resurrected in each well-crafted sentence. Scenes from my childhood reappear, and his embellished stories, full of his unique wit, come back as though he will soon show up for Thanksgiving after all.  In some ways, he does.

When I read the letters, I can see my father again, jolly, plump, reciting a passage from a recent thick book he has read, sitting at the head of the Thanksgiving table. He studied books of jokes from the library before these visits and then attempted to recite them. I can hear his infectious laughter before he’d ever reach the end of these jokes, and I can laugh again, remembering his laughter. It is audible now through memory. I can revisit his stories about his family, told and retold with increasing hyperbole, set in the little tenement where he grew up on the Lower East Side in poverty. He and his twin sister slept in the bottom two dresser drawers in the hallway of the studio apartment inhabited by a family of seven. 

A self-educated man, a victim of the Depression, unable to go to college, my father will forever represent for me what it is to be a true intellectual. He was an autodidact who read more than most college professors. His education was at the 42nd Street library in New York, where he would escape to read and research the subjects of his choice for hours, cutting out of his job at the Post Office to do so.

When I was little, my father worked the night shift and took care of me during the day while my mother went to work. I have no idea how he had the energy to entertain me, but he did. I remember the little blackboard in our apartment hallway. My father would write Shakespeare soliloquies or poems by Frost and others in bright white chalk and in his childlike print. My job was to memorize and recite the quotes back to him “with expression” at the end of the week. I can see his face as he handed me my Hershey bar reward after explaining the words to me and helping me recite more dramatically and with a better appreciation for the sheer beauty of language.

Perhaps the greatest blessing of the letters is the way in which they recreated scenes from my childhood, long forgotten if not for his language. There are reminders of our outings to as many free cultural events as he could find on weekends in Brooklyn or New York. He would take out enough copies of Shakespeare’s plays for all of us. My sisters, my mother, my father and I would wait on that long line outside the amphitheater in Central Park for a Shakespeare in the Park performance, reading the play out loud from our library copies, each taking a part. I was eight years old when I got to be Portia. By the time we got seats, I understood a little of Shakespeare’s brilliance — or at least the basic plots. On our weekend visits to the Grand Army Plaza library, he would set me up in the children’s section and head to the adult’s. Books took on a life of their own, all associated with my father’s love of language

I saved only one of the many postcards my father sent to me at sleepaway camp in the Catskills. That one yellowing card sits framed on my desk and brings back the day I received it. I was eight and quite homesick until the card arrived. I climbed up to the top of the bunkbed to read it in silence during the rest period.  And there he was in his words, smiling at my reactions to his little narratives. He had turned the little card to type on every section of it, poems and tiny stories for me, upside down, sideways, in all directions. “Leah-Leah-Leah-Lee, Leah-Leah-Lally,” he wrote. Then he told the story of how my second grade teacher bought a fish at the market, and when she cut it open at home, out jumped my best friend, Barbara! He wrote that he had bought me a horse and buggy and it was parked in front of our four-story walk-up apartment for me to ride when I got home.   

Missing him now as much as I did then, I do wish he could appear before me again just like he did at the end of my sleepaway camp stay. We all wish we could still run into the outspread arms of the father we lost.  My consolation, however, is real. The last supper can transform through the memories that words evoke. The stories of our lives together can save us from despair after a great loss. This Thanksgiving, I will share my father’s jokes and tales with my children and grandchildren and make a toast to the memories that sustain us.  

The post Thanksgiving, my father’s last supper appeared first on Salon.com.

Three years after my father’s death, my mother was focusing on what she believed was a white stain on the brown rug in his home office, where he died. She thought it had something to do with whatever he’d done to hasten his demise. Gentle attempts I made to tell her that wasn’t the case proved fruitless. So on a visit, I went into the office with her.

“Look, Mom,” I said, leaning down, rubbing my hand on the threadbare area, which she’d mistaken for a stain. “It’s just worn out.” I looked up at her. “From the wheels on his office chair.” I rolled the chair back and forth. “See?”

She wasn’t buying it. “Well, that’s what you think,” she said, as if to indulge me. “I think something else.”

That’s how it was with us when it came to my father. He was our Rorschach test. My mother saw a self-sacrificing savior. I saw a self-serving aggressor. She saw a suicide. I saw a heart attack.

The stain may have been caused by bleach, my mother thought. Or maybe it was ground-up pills. She didn’t offer many details of her theory, and I didn’t push. “You know how smart he was, how much he read,” she said. “He could have figured something out.”

My father died the night before Labor Day in 2019. I went back to my childhood home with a suitcase full of every black dress I owned and whatever else I thought I might need for the next week, month, year, or forever. In the end, it was five weeks, the longest my mother and I had been together since I left for college 25 years earlier.

“I live here now,” I said on the phone to friends during those weeks. It was a joke, and maybe also a prayer. My father and I had been adversaries, rivaling for my mother’s affection. We had grabbed her back and forth from each other over the years. Now, finally, she was mine again. It was hard to let go.

But I had a job from which I had taken family medical leave, a husband and a nine-year-old son. My home was in New Jersey and my mother lived in Massachusetts, a four-hour drive away. Over the past 45 years, she had been diagnosed first with major depression and then with bipolar disorder. Lately, she had developed mild cognitive impairment, most likely caused by over 60 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), begun seven years earlier, to treat her depression when no medication would work.

This was part of my mother’s theory, that my father killed himself to get away from the relentlessness of her depression. “He hated driving me to all those ECT treatments,” she told me. But that wasn’t true. Taking care of my mother was the cornerstone of my father’s identity. It made him both the hero and the victim at the same time. As a child, he had just been the victim.

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No one ever told me my father had been sexually abused as a little boy by an older male cousin, but as a teenager I heard him hurl the information at my mother when they were arguing over who had it worse. I think it angered her, his being so vulnerable. That was her role. Their relationship was like an Escher drawing with his need to care for her twisting around her need to be cared for, in an endless loop that defied logic. No way in. No way out.

In the weeks my mother and I spent together, I was alarmed to realize she no longer knew how to use a credit card at the grocery store, open the front door to the house with a key or turn on the TV. She hadn’t driven in years. So I found 24-hour care, and used the money my father left behind to pay for it. I filled a notebook with everything I could think of: names and phone numbers for her friends and family members and doctors and favorite stores and what she liked to eat for dinner. I left a note on her bed saying our time together had been magical. Then I got into a cab to take me to the train station, with the promise that I’d be back in a week for a visit. My mother stood on the front stairs beside the woman who would move into my room and take my job as her caretaker. They both waved.

For the first time in many years, I regretted leaving. Usually, all I felt was relief.

The bad visits home after I left for college had all collapsed into each other, like folds in an accordion. All I could see clearly were the ones at either end. On my first return home, I didn’t spend as much time with my mother as she thought I would. The day I was set to leave, she sat on the couch, catatonic, unwilling to speak to me or even look in my direction. “You broke your mother’s heart,” my father said. He may as well have said: I won.

This is one reason I knew my father didn’t kill himself. To do so would have been to give her back to me. And he never would have done that.

The last time I saw them together, about a month before my father died, we went out to eat with my husband and son. My father was impatient and cutting. His face was an enraged mask. He pulled my mother along when she walked more slowly than he did, was exasperated when she took too long to order, then was disparaging of what she did order. Meanwhile, my mother was like a turtle near a predator, head pulled into her shell. She used to defend herself. “Is there a nicer way you might say that?” she would ask. But not anymore. After dinner, back at their house, I beckoned my mother down the hall to my childhood bedroom, increasing my father’s fury. The only thing he seemed to hate more than being with her was being without her. I closed my door and whispered, “If you want to leave, I will help you.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “Of course not,” she said. “Daddy takes care of me.”

Seeing them bring out the worst in each other was more than I could bear. I loved my father, who could be as kind as he was harsh. He held my hand when I was in labor. He carried my antique steamer trunk up four flights of stairs when I moved to New York City on my 23rd birthday. He supplemented my income so I could work in publishing, at a job that paid $7,000 less than what one year of my private liberal arts education had cost.

I imagined the abuse he suffered as a child made it terrifying for my father to engage in a true partnership with my mother. He always had to be in control, for fear of what happened when he wasn’t. But like so much else between them, it went unexamined. I wanted relationships with my parents independent of one another. But they were unwilling to spend any time apart. So in the end, I called once a week, visited less and less. I know they counted the number of days per year they saw me. It was their bitterness math.

Of course, it was not overt. Better they had said, “It’s nearly June and we’ve only seen you two days since January.” “Never ask for what you want,” was the first rule of our family. If you have to ask, the thinking went, the person from whom you wanted something never really loved you anyway.

My mother most wanted my father’s time. She described her life with him like this, “Out early. Home late. And meetings.” They met in college, both twins who were set up by friends. My father was tall and smart and Jewish, and my mother couldn’t believe her good fortune when he gave her his fraternity pin after they’d been together for a year. “What could he possibly see in me?” she asked her sister. It was a question she never stopped asking.

For her, his death is just another abandonment. But a heart attack is random. A suicide is personal. A suicide centers my mother in his death in a way she never felt centered in his life. Every suicide is also a murder, they say. A suicide says: You didn’t only do this to yourself. You did it to me, too.

My father didn’t kill himself. There was no evidence of self-harm, no note. He had a mild cardiac condition. He died of a cardiac arrest. It was written on the death certificate. It was the truth. But it wasn’t my mother’s truth, so it came up again and again when we talked, and we talked every night. Without my father there to undermine her, she was better than she has been in decades, having scaled down from 24-hour care to no care at all. No more ECT, either. She drove, volunteered, made art, did her own shopping and cooking.

“If only he had waited a little longer,” my mother said. “So he could see me now.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

The post My father, the Rorschach test: My mother and I couldn’t see the same man, in life or in death appeared first on Salon.com.

In her exhilarating, fiercely frank “All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire,” Woolf steers the reader through the complicated  waters of caretaking and  grieving through mixed emotions. Prior to Hal’s illness, the marriage had already become “toxic.” After his death, Woolf felt a pressure to perform sadness while she longed for sexual liberation. And there was no road map for such an ambiguous bereavement.

Like Jennette McCurdy’s stunning “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” “All of This” is a barrier-breaking exploration of death, one in which the end of life does not magically transform a messy personal history. And it’s a validating affirmation that there’s no one right way to feel or act in the aftermath of loss.

Salon talked to Woolf recently via Zoom about what we get wrong about grieving, “the monotony of death,” and why we need to be both the “harbors and ships” in our own lives. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This book was a real departure for you as a writer in a lot of ways.

In my head, I never felt like I was hiding anything so much as I was using metaphor. So much of my blogging was finding ways to talk about what was going on in a way that maybe people didn’t know. It felt like I was subtweeting. All the stuff that I wrote about in my book, I actually wrote about in real time on my blog, but metaphorically. Then it was turning everything that I had written for the last many years inside out, and showing it from the underbelly instead of from the surface. 

There are going to be things that people read that surprise them. But I also feel like I was working my way into eventually writing about all of this. It felt very natural to sit down and to know where I wanted to go next as a writer was just to go deeper and deeper and get into the parts of marriage and sexuality people weren’t really talking about.

Once I got started, it became like this thing where I was like, “Well, what else aren’t people willing to talk about? What do women feel shame about?” That’s what I want to write about. It became, why aren’t we talking about this? Why are we talking about this? Once I went there and it felt actually really good to get in there, it was like I couldn’t stop.

You start the book with your husband giving you permission to tell this story. That is a unique jumping off point. I want to ask how you arrived at that being a place to start.

He gave me permission to tell a story — and not necessarily this one. That was what f**cked me up, because he had never, in the 13-plus years we were married and I was writing about my life from the moment we met, ever gave me permission to write about anything pertaining to him. Every time I mentioned him in anything, I would send it to him first for his approval. I feel very strongly about consent and making sure everyone feels comfortable. And I understand that I’m a liability to be married to, to be associated with, because I write about my life. I always, always have. It was out of respect for him that he got the final say in what I was writing about when I mentioned him at all.

When he got sick, knowing that the only way I’ve ever needed to make a living was writing about in my life, he was like, “This is what you have to do. You’re going to write about the story when I die. You’re going to write about all this.” But he didn’t know what that meant because in the past, there would be the one good time, and I would write about that. Sometimes I’m waiting for him to come to me in a dream and get mad at me, or the opposite. I’m waiting for some message, and there’s been none.

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The first version of this book, the first proposal that I talked to my agent about, was not this book. It was a book about the death. It was a book about the feelings that I was having, but not the full spectrum. When I started working on the proposal, it felt false. It felt like another grief memoir about a widow. It felt more performative than honest. I was like, I can’t write this. If I’m going to write this book, I’ve got to write this book. So I was given permission to write a book.

I feel very autonomous in my choices to write what I wrote about. I know that a lot of people will disagree with me. I don’t know if he would have. I’m sure there are certain things that he wished I didn’t write about. But I only included in that book what I felt was important to include. There’s plenty of stories that I didn’t include, but I did feel like I needed to include certain things because I don’t feel like they’re specific to my experience. My marriage was very much a normal, dysfunctional marriage. I don’t think that it was in any way anomalous.

I think women curate the experience of motherhood and marriage as being what you’re supposed to want, what you’re supposed to have. To show a crack in that armor feels like a betrayal of the sisterhood. But then if you do say, “Well, I’m getting a divorce,” people comes out of the woodwork like, “Girl, I need to talk to you.” That’s when you get the true story.

We’re having this really profound moment where we are crossing over from one version of sisterhood to another. I think Trump’s presidency had a lot to do with it. I think #MeToo had a lot to do with it. There’s now this other side where it’s like, wait a minute, sh_t’s f_cked up. Why are we pretending like it’s not? Why are we protecting the people who are f**cking us over? What? Huh?

We’ve been doing this forever. And why, for what? I hope we’re just getting started, being really honest about our experiences and recognizing how universal they are. It shouldn’t be brave to just tell the truth, but it is. It’s brave and it’s scary and people are worried about it. It’s a liability to be honest and it’s so much easier and so much safer to protect this heteronormative, patriarchal status quo. That’s why everything is such a mess.

It’s time, and it doesn’t have to be a hashtag or a movement. We can talk openly and honestly about our experiences without shaming each other for them. I hope that we’re on our way to doing that. The truth is we’re all human and we’re messy. I wasn’t a perfect wife at all, but I was miserable and that mattered. I was desperate to get out of my marriage and I was relieved when it was over. And yes, it was not the ending that I would’ve chosen. But it was an ending, so I was relieved.

What’s the line that you wrote? “Death does not forgive our sins.” Often there is this expectation that it does. That when someone has died, they’re off the hook for the ways in which they hurt you, the ways in which they let you down. The ways in which you just weren’t in a good relationship. It doesn’t mean that they were a bad person. It doesn’t mean that you were bad. It’s all of that. And we don’t talk about that.

Totally. We don’t talk. It literally comes down to the fact that we’re so bad at death culturally. We think that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Even someone who we’ve had a toxic relationship with, as soon as they die, the worst thing has happened to them. It’s like they’ve been absolved because they’ve been pulled into this void of worst possible scenario. How can you be mad at a dead person? I think it has to do with our fear of death and relationship with death, the reason why we can’t speak ill of the dead.

I also really appreciate it that you talk about how just tedious dying can be. How open-ended and boring and strange. 

The monotony of dying. I have this picture, and it’s the last picture I have. I’m so glad I took it because it’s such a powerful photo. Whenever I look at it, I’m like, “I can’t believe that happened.” My youngest were six when he was dying, and then my other two were 13 and 10. My son, he has his phone, so he is on Instagram, just scrolling through, doing what teenagers do. And [my husband] was at this point non-responsive, just lying in his bed, dying, which takes a minute. My twins were putting stuffed animals on him, like on his head, on his shoulder, just placing them all over him. Almost like a game. Like, “Oh, I’m putting it on his head, and he is not moving.”

This is all they know, this is their experience, and they’re doing what they need to do. Just watching my kids continue to be kids and do kids things, even though their dad was now in this state, it was so profound to me and moving. This is part of life. This is what happens. One day I’ll be lying in this bed and hopefully my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be doing the same thing, drawing mustaches on my face or whatever. I want them to. I want that.

You describe his friends bursting into tears when they see him. I get it. But also there’s so much around this process because we don’t know how to prepare people for it, as patients, as healthcare providers. So then what happens is it comes down on the spouse, and it’s supposed to be a privilege. It’s supposed to be the greatest honor of your life to go through this often really painful, scary, boring experience.

I was a mommy blogger for years. That’s what I did since I was pregnant with my son. I’ve written about pregnancy and birth and all the experience of raising children. It was such this circular moment for me to be again caretaking. Visiting my twins in the NICU and visiting him in the hospital, sleeping in the hospital, going back and forth between, was so similar.

The amount of books and resources and support you get as a new mother now, with the internet… but there are no death bloggers. There’s no resources specifically if you’re a young person dealing with a death. I didn’t know any, I had nobody who had ever been in my position like a peer.

I saw Jennnette McCurdy’s one-woman show “I’m Glad My Mom Died” here in LA a few months ago. I was so excited because I was like, yeah, let’s normalize this. Let’s normalize the relief part of it.

I have yet to have a relationship with anyone where there wasn’t conflict, where there wasn’t pain. The relief and the freedom side of it that you talk about is so resonant for so many people.

I have friends who’ve lost  parents, who have gone through similar experiences. And then feeling guilty for being relieved… God, the fact that people feel guilty for feeling such normal human emotions just breaks my heart. It’s so justified, all of those feelings.

You can’t feel relieved that someone has died unless there’s great love there. When somebody’s in your life that you love, even when you cannot stand them, you’re still beholden to them. You can’t let them go. There’s a part of you that’s always going to hold onto them or be there for them or have these feelings.

When they’re gone, that gets to go away too. I honestly don’t think there can be a relief without love. I think it’s actually a response to loving someone so much that you didn’t leave them, that you didn’t cut them off, that you didn’t stop thinking about them, stop feeling for them. All of these things, which when somebody dies, you get to release. It’s almost like you’re in a purgatory with somebody emotionally, physically. In death, the purgatory goes away. It makes total sense that anyone would feel relieved with the death of someone they loved and had a complicated relationship because they’re no longer in that purgatorial space with them.

I had grieved my marriage years before it ended, years before. There was a point when he was like, “Let’s go to therapy, let’s try to save this.”  It was like those tire things where once you pass them, if you go backwards, your tires are going to pop. I had already left the parking lot. There was no going back. The idea of going to therapy felt violent, because I was so done. It was so in my body that I was like, how dare you even assume that I would want to in any way rehabilitate this?

You talk about both of you being released and both of you being free. That is what it can feel like when there’s a death, especially when you did have time to plan, prepare, to think.

And four months of caretaking feels like four years. I do not know how people do that for long periods of time. I’ve spoken to a lot of women in the last four years who have been caretaking their chronically ill partners, and holy sh_t, I do not know how one can stay sane and do that. His prognosis was from the day one was not good. I knew that there was just limited for me. I couldn’t have done that if I was like, this is my new life. I wasn’t going to, there’s no way.

And you have a healthcare system that says, “So, good luck to you! Now, you’re going to do wound care. You’re going to administer medication. You going to change catheters.”

All of that was also shocking to me. I had no idea. I was like, “We’ll have hospice.” No, no, no, no, no. Hospice is a home healthcare worker coming to your house once a week to take vitals. That was it. I was like, “Wait a minute. So who’s going to do everything else?” Oh, it’s me, right. I’m doing it. At least I had my mother came up to help me with my kids. So many people don’t have that family help, friends coming in to help pick up kids. I was essentially with him around the clock. And I had four children.

To someone who is having this kind of experience right now, what do you want that person reading your story to know about what it’s really like on the inside of it? And what’s on the other side of it?

I want people to feel seen for having every kind of feeling. For wanting their dying spouse to die faster. For wanting to get on the other side of this. For not wanting to be there. For having all the different feelings that happen when you’re taking care of someone who’s dying. I want people to be able to feel like it’s okay to have the full extent of feelings. And to know that on the other side of it, is okay to feel relief and freedom in all these things. To feel like you can finally exhale. I know that guilt is attached to so much when you’re taking care of somebody because your body works, because you get to live, because you get to have this afterlife. I think a lot of people keep themselves from really running wild and free through the field after someone dies, because they feel like they can’t. They feel like they’ll be judged. They feel like they have to be performative in their grief and pretend like this isn’t something that they also feel relief about. And I just want people to feel like they can live.

You can hold more than one truth at the same time.

You not only you can, but you have to. You have to. As a single parent, I write about sex and dating, and that’s obviously a large part of my book too. I was like, “Whoa, I’m single again. I’ve got a body, I’m going to use it while I can.” But mothers, we’re expected to be the harbors and not the ships.

My journey in these last four years is, I can be both. I have to be both actually to feel like I’m thriving in my life and not just surviving it. At home, I am this. I am the harbor. I keep my dating life separate from my domestic life. This is who I am. But I also have to leave. I have to go explore. I have to feel things. I want women, specifically mothers, to feel empowered to be ships because everywhere is telling us to be the harbor and to be selfless receptacles of everyone’s pain and everyone’s needs. We don’t even know what we want any more because we’re so used to taking care of everyone else.

When someone’s dying, you realize it even more. The only time I ever felt like I was a good wife was when he was dying. I was like, this is what I do. This is what I’m good at. But this isn’t all that I am. I just want every person who is going through any sort of transition to feel like they can be the ship too.

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