Grief

On November 2nd, the doctors told my father he had days to live. At once, my siblings and I, spread far and wide, converged upon our childhood home like pilgrims to a spiritual birthplace, and we watched our father die.

There were many of us there: my mother, my two sisters, my sister-in-law, my brother, my two brothers-in-law, my three nieces, my mother’s mother, two dogs, two cats, countless family friends, community members, neighbors, relatives, old frat brothers, former coworkers, apple trees, lingering tomato plants, blades of grass, clouds, rain, sunshine, a gibbous moon, light, darkness, and myself.

For five days, we laughed and cried. We ate and drank. We watched sports and ran errands. Our dad was with us, laughing and eating too, and carrying on as best he could. Over five days, he would laugh a little less and eat a little less, and carrying on became harder and harder. On the fifth day of our vigil, he could carry on no longer, and passed away in the mid-afternoon, surrounded by his immediate family holding hands and saying goodbye.

For some reason, leading up to his passing, I kept telling myself it was selfish to grieve. This wasn’t my death. This was his. I get to continue on. I get to taste chocolate and see leaves turn yellow and fall to the ground. I get to laugh and cry and hold hands and see smiles and wipe tears. I get to run and feel the air fill my lungs and feel my heart beat faster when I’m excited and slower when I’m at peace. I get to see the mystery of tomorrow answered when it becomes today.

He won’t get to do that anymore. And so, my first grief was for him.

And though I thought that to grieve is selfish, I accepted grieving for him, because he was not done living, and a soul who perishes with unfinished living is a tragic thing indeed.

But the dead need not concern themselves with life. That is the business of the bereaved.

And so, my second grief was for us: his family and friends, who now get to continue living without his presence, for without him, the world is a little dimmer, and a little less wise. And for us, a little lonelier.

And though I thought that to grieve is selfish, I accepted grieving for us, because we must continue to live without our father and husband and friend and teacher, and being deprived of him is a tragic thing indeed.

And yet, I also experienced a third grief: a grief for me. An unacceptable grief. My selfish grief. My grief of shame.

Allow me to share:

Days before he died, I scratched out in a notebook:

I’m afraid.
I’m a coward.
I can’t handle this.
I am weak.

You see, I wanted so deeply to be there for my father and my family when he passed. I wanted so very deeply for him to be surrounded by his loved ones. I wanted so very deeply to be there for my sisters and my brother and my mother. But I was terrified that my cowardice would take over, and that I would, at that most essential moment, flee. I was almost sure I would flee my family when they would need me the most.

And so I was grieving my cowardice.

I can’t even watch people die on television. How can I expect myself to watch my father die in real life? What wretched weakness will betrayed itself in that pivotal moment when I should stand strong for him and for us?

Strength. What does strength mean in that moment? Does strength mean standing there, staring death in the face, and telling your brother, “It’s okay”? Does strength mean sustaining the composure needed to be able to wipe away others’ tears?

Here’s how it happened:

The moment came on the afternoon of November 7th, and despite expecting it for five days, it was unexpected. My mom said “now,” from his room, and the siblings and I looked up confused. Then she yelled, “NOW!” and we understood. We all rushed to my father’s side, and heard his final breaths. We held onto each other as we wished him goodbye. I couldn’t see his face. It almost seemed like a dress rehearsal. It wasn’t real. We had been waiting for this for five days; why would it happen now of all moments?

I saw myself there, as if I wasn’t there at all, but rather watching myself from outside of me, and I was confused that I had not fled, considering I was so certain I would. Was I doing my duty? Was I there for my family? It seemed that, yes, I was, but something was too easy. I wasn’t upset enough. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there at all, but here, watching myself be there from outside of myself.

But then, a moment after he passed, I walked over to my brother to hug him, and I turned and looked at my father’s face — the face my brother had been watching as life left it.

He was dead.

I snapped back into myself, and the dam burst.

All the emotion I had been holding, the three griefs, the fear, the cowardice, they all came rushing back, and my strength, whatever strength I thought I had, vanished. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle any of it, and I did exactly what I thought I would do:

I fled.

I ran into my parents’ bedroom, and I wailed hysterically, sobbing uncontrollably on the floor. I had never known I was capable of such a powerful emotion. It was the strongest feeling I had ever felt. The moment is a raw fog. People came in to comfort me, to make sure I was okay. Eventually I held myself up by the bedpost and regained my composure.

And then… it was over. I was fine.

Later that evening, my family commented on my hysteria, even jokingly. For some reason, I was embarrassed.

But then, when I left the following day, my mom hugged me, and she said, “Thank you for your grief.”

And then I understood: I was never meant to be strong for my family. I was meant to be weak. My role in this was never going to include wiping the tears of my sisters. My role was to sob uncontrollably on the floor, for it was through my violent release of grief that my family was better able to access their own, to experience what they needed to experience. Maybe it was that I should be weak so that my family could be strong and comfort me. Maybe through my grief could we access the profound magnitude of the moment. Maybe my grief helped bring us closer together. I’m not sure what it was or how it needed to be, but now in hindsight, it couldn’t have been any other way.

It has been several weeks now. I am doing well. I often think about how wonderful it has been to cry — how beautiful it is that we get to experience such a vast, dynamic emotional world. Sometimes I think it’s easy to fall into a numb ennui about our existence — our lives are streamlined from birth to death, designed by formulae, our interests and passions commodified for our convenience, our inner lives analyzed and written into self-help books. It’s really easy to live life somewhere in the mundane middle on the scale of emotional experiences. That I have had this grief means that I have had the fortune of joy. That I sob means that I have valued something or someone. It means that my life can engage with the sublime. It means that I can finally understand what it’s like to experience the loss of a loved one, so that I may be there for others who will. Because we all will, as it seems it should be in this world.

Grief has taught me a lot this year:

Don’t grow too attached to the future.
Respect the past; its sum is your present.
Weakness can be essential. Do not mistake it for cowardice.
It’s okay to be sad. Maybe even preferred.
Fear is yearning for strength.
Grief is love.

Sure, you can disagree with these platitudes, but these lessons aren’t yours, they’re mine; they’re the ones I need to learn. I need to learn that I must be free to live passionately, to live true to my heart, lest I be too careful, lest I make the mistake of never really living at all, lest I clutch foolishly to a plan that was never mine. I should be so lucky as to grieve so again someday.

The Comedy of Tragedy

This week I saw a video of a crippled man ramming an elevator shaft door with his motorized cart before busting the door open and plummeting to his death.  It was hilarious.

Or at least that’s what the internet tried telling me.  Something about, “Ha ha… what a moron!” and “Darwin Award Winner 2012!” and “That’s what you get when you can’t control your temper, buddy!”

Maybe I need to lighten up, but I don’t laugh at Darwin Awards anymore.  I used to, but in the midst of releasing a mighty guffaw of superiority, a humbling thought approached me:

We don’t know.  We don’t know just what drives an individual to do something fatally stupid.  We can’t know.  We can know the superficial reasoning, but we can’t know the internal pathos behind a person’s acts beyond what we can deduce from the outside.

We know the crippled man barely missed getting on the elevator, and that’s why he started ramming the door.  Sure, it was somewhat inconsiderate of the woman who closed the door on him.  Sure, it was stupid of the man to ram the door.  Sure it was irrational.  But maybe he was having a really shitty day.  Maybe he was sick of having useless legs.  Maybe the missed elevator was a mere straw that broke the back of an otherwise troubled man.  Sometimes people just snap.

Maybe.  We don’t know.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stuck in traffic and have fantasized about slamming as hard as I can on the gas pedal in the middle of gridlock.  It’s a stupid, senseless thought, but it is powerful.  It would be a desperate attempt to cry out to the world about the sheer amount of time we spend in a motorized box going nowhere, and the psychological trauma that we, as a society, might afflict upon ourselves by wasting the one resource we can never get back (time) alongside the millions of other ants traveling to and from mindless jobs and errands.  That’s how I would see it – my hypothetical gas-pedal tantrum.  The news would see it as some bastard losing his shit, and people would laugh at how dumb and crazy I am as I get carted off to prison for recklessness.  The only two things that stop me are empathy and the understanding that traffic is a finite problem.  It has to end.  I have faith that my trivial troubles won’t last forever.  Perhaps we could call that “sanity.”

But what if I didn’t have that assurance?  Would I hit the gas then?  Would I ram an elevator?  I don’t know, I haven’t been there.

Or maybe the elevator man was having an okay day.  Maybe he was just laughably dumb, and made one stupid decision too many.  Chalk one up for Darwin, right?

But you know what’s great about being alive?  We are guaranteed the privilege of retrospection, and therefore we are given the opportunity for reconciliation.  Dead people don’t get that opportunity.  I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my past that I’m fortunate enough to look back on and realize they’re stupid.   The only difference between me and the guy at the bottom of an elevator shaft is that my stupidity has yet to cross paths with the ruthless finger of Misfortune.  Let’s not pretend that you’ve never done anything stupid, you anonymous internet masses hiding behind your derisive laughter.  The only reason you’re able to laugh in the first place is because once, somewhere, you got lucky.

And remember, people don’t die in a vacuum.  They die amongst friends and family.  The least we could do is be respectful of that.

Perhaps I need to lighten up.  Maybe laughing at the tragic misfortune of others is how we cope against the dark reality of how fragile our lives are.  Perhaps we should celebrate laughter from all catalysts, because if we took everything seriously, then daily life would be nothing more than pale misery.  Perhaps laughing at tragedy is the poetic expression of an ironic existence – one in which we have been created to place weight on such lightness and lightness on such weight.

And yet, I can’t help but feel, with all my loves and trials, joys and sorrows, from the story of my own birth to the hope of my life’s trajectory in the present day, that if everything I’ve gone through was trivialized by some ridiculous fate like falling down an elevator shaft, I would be pissed.

Or maybe I would laugh heartily from above, who knows?

A Grand Absurdity of Existence

Within the last five minutes of my uncle’s life, I spoke with him on the phone.

I suppose it’s more accurate to say I spoke at him.  I was with my mother at the time, and my father, who was at his brother’s side, called us when it seemed as though he might finally die.  It was to give us one final chance to say our last words to him, whether he heard them or not.  I had been prepared for his death for a long time, but on the phone, I was dumbstruck.  I could only squeak out, “Bye, Uncle Bob,” and I said this over and over.  I could say nothing else.  I’m not sure I could’ve counted to ten if asked.

My mother, who, bless her heart, is a apparently more eloquent, managed to say, “Say ‘hi’ to Dad for me when you get there.  You say ‘hi’ to my father for me.”

And that was that.  As far as I know, other than those at his side when he died (his siblings, his wife, his children, and probably a doctor or nurse), my mother and I were the last two people to speak to Bob.  On the phone, of all things.

Consider the journey a man makes:  When he is born, he is surrounded by a cast of characters – a mother, a father, a doctor… moments later: brothers, sisters, and grandparents.  Those are the most important people in his life.  As he grows up, the circle of important people expands to include friends and teachers.  But with time, teachers come and go, as do friends, and in spite of whatever lasting influence they might have, they leave the narrative of his life.

The cast of characters shifts.  With age comes tragedy, but with tragedy is joy.  Grandparents leave, but children arrive.  Teachers leave, professors arrive.  Coworkers come and go, lovers come and go.  Nieces and nephews replace aunts and uncles.  Colleagues replace colleagues.   Except for a few friends and my family, everyone who is important to me today I didn’t even know a mere three years ago.  God willing, those friends and family will be with me for a long time to come.  But everyone else?  Who knows.

My uncle was born and lived a life, and that life included parents and grandparents, teachers, friends, siblings, and colleagues.  I didn’t join his life until he was more than halfway done with it, and when I did, I was one nephew out of many.  I saw him most summers and occasionally other times of year, but on the whole, in the great novel of his life, I am a footnote.

And yet, the sands of faces were sifted through the filters of time, and somehow my mother and I were left privileged at his book’s end.  Truth be told, my mother was a very important part of his life, but myself?  It’s as if I popped out of the eternal cosmos at the last second to wish him a good passing.  How did I get there?  How did I, of all people, deserve to be there on the phone with my uncle at his final moment?  Out of the hundreds of people that were more important to him throughout his life than I, how did the right find me and not someone else?  Chance?  Coincidence?

I am thankful for this, but the fortune of being among the few called upon to end his final page is a privilege I accept with confusion and humility.

I know who is important to me in my life, and I can pinpoint the main characters of my life’s story looking back.  But, looking forward, I have absolutely no idea who will be talking to me on the phone as I breathe my final breaths.  As far as I know, they haven’t even been born yet.

It kind of makes this… whatever this is… absurd.  On of the many Grand Absurdities of Existence, I suppose.

The Best of All Possible Funerals

Let me tell you about my uncle.

His name is Bob.  He grew up in San Francisco.  He lived in Seattle.  Over a year ago, he was diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer that left him paralyzed on one side of his body and was expected to kill him within a month.  He fought it for thirteen months, never giving up.  He died about a month ago.

Let me tell you about Bob’s family.  His wife, my aunt, spent the year supporting him in every way she could, showering him with the love he deserved and ensuring that his quality of life was the best it could be.  His children, my cousins, seemingly without hesitation, halted their adult lives in New York to give everything they could to their father.  I have never before seen such devotion, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I never see that level of devotion ever again.  Angels could’ve hardly done better.

Let me tell you about Bob’s siblings, nieces, nephews, and friends.  Repeatedly, during the course of the year, they would fly to Seattle to visit and help (or at least try not to get in the way).  Every trip to Seattle seemed to ensure that the previous trip to Seattle wouldn’t be the last one.  After a while, there was never a last time to see Bob.  There would always be a next time – “I’ll see you later.”

Let me tell you about Bob’s brother.  He is my father.  This past year, he flew to Seattle more than he probably ever had previously in his entire life.  This past winter, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, my father said these words to me: “Why do we never have time to visit people until they’re dying?”  At Bob’s funeral, he gave a eulogy that expanded this sentiment: “We never have time to visit our loved ones until we know there’s not much time left.  Well, I have news for you: there’s not much time left.”

Let me tell you about Bob’s funeral.  It was a snowy January weekend in La Conner, Washington – a small, sleepy town north of Seattle across a river from the Swinomish Indian Reservation where the services took place.

I’ve never had so much fun at a funeral.  It was a blast.

There was native american drumming and singing preceded by drifting speeches with no point or direction.  There was Japanese taiko drumming, a slide show, an interactive eulogy with costumes, the singing of Beethoven, and a delicious buffet with dessert and an open mic.

But best of all, there was laughter and togetherness.  In a cozy motel in sleepy La Conner, we joined together to watch the NFL playoffs.  Together, we sang songs at a restaurant (much to the chagrin of the staff, I’m sure). We sat around a fireplace after the celebration of life, merrily and sorrowfully drinking; every newcomer to our gathering would require another toast: “To Bob!”

No family is perfect, but those which are strong can come together in times of great sorrow and laugh together, drink together, and be merry together.  I am proud of my family, but moreover, I am proud of my uncle for being such a great man leading such an admirable life – a life that could bring us together at its closure to remind us what it means to be here on an otherwise lonely planet.

Thank you, Bob.