The first time I saw grief up close was my own. It was a death, a birth, a tempest that blurred all the squares on a calendar. My first husband left and I found myself in bed, crying from an unfamiliar, terrible place. It was like life itself had been the one to noisily drive away in a jeep, but here I was still breathing, automatically, as if by some administrative oversight. I breathed and cried, making dumb noises that, like an alarm clock sounding for the job you’d lost, waking you only to remind you of that loss, didn’t change a thing.
My parents found me there. There’s this picture of them that hangs in their dining room. They’re hugging, arms wrapped around each other like they’d drown if they let go. My mom is wearing a long skirt, my pop, jeans, and there’s a commitment in their embrace that, growing up, made me feel safe whenever I saw it. From my bed, I saw them just like this picture again. Their love for each other was real and I needed real.
A friend recently told me how banks teach tellers to recognize real money. “They actually don’t spend any time handling the counterfeit stuff,” he explained. “They spend all their time memorizing the look and feel and smell and markers of the real thing. So when something comes their way that isn’t, they know it.” In the early days after my son Luca’s death, I needed to be with people who said true things. Hopeful things. Not just nice words that make you feel like you better buck up because it’s been a month now. Surely not hinting that since I can no longer find the sunshine, perhaps I could be the sunshine (someone actually sent me this sentiment. It went over great. I had no idea it was as simple as that—being the sunshine, putting it on like a yellow shirt—and once I realized this, I felt instantly better, of course. Lol. Just kidding, it made me feel worse). What I mean is, I needed hope rooted in faith. I mean the evidence of things hoped for, assurance of things not seen. I mean going to bed in the dark with the steely certainty that the sun would rise, that light would be streaming across my pillow in the morning. That, though weeping lasts through the night, joy comes in the morning. That joy comes again at all. I didn’t need the singularity of my grief being ignored in an effort of hope. On the contrary, my grief was the reason I needed hope. If I saw what I yearned for—wholeness—then why would I need hope at all? I needed the kind of special souls who manage to hold the duality of hope and grief at once in their conversations. I needed someone to be honest enough about the darkness to turn on a flashlight, rather than simply walking blindly in the dark, pretending I’m not bumping into everything, pretending it’s not hard, maybe even impossible for me to see in this darkness. That’s the kind of truth telling I needed. Anything else felt like my oxygen had been cut off.
I can remember being at lunch with a friend who told me I’d never not be broken, that I’d never recover, never be okay. She said this over seafood, over plates and drinks in a crowded restaurant. I got up abruptly and left. I cried in the bathroom, took deep breaths, kept thinking I needed to look less sad because I had to go back to the table soon. I had to go finish a whole meal even though I was no longer hungry. I splashed cold water on my face and thought as hard as I could about how those words were wrong, how grief isn’t a life sentence or a black hole we step into while life freezes around us. Grief is a door, a passage, a very real shrouding of the heart, but we don’t stop moving. We can’t. We are beholden to the laws of the universe: everything that lives, grows and moves. Grief is under this code. Grief further facilitates this code. The people who have gained co-destinies with their loved one who has died proves this. Those who have “bounced forward,” to borrow a term from Cheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s book “Option B”—who have grown in empathy and love and compassion and found their purpose redefined or maybe even defined for the first time by grief—proves this too.
There’s a line in the Psalms—“Deep calls to deep…”—reminding me of grief calling out to be met by—what? Something deeper, other, truer than loss simply because we are the unlucky ones. Maybe the depth of my grief is met by the option to move forward in a paradoxical way, to grow in grief, which feels antithetical, like a betrayal to those of us who could never believe in this growth at the dawn of our own loss. Could it be that grief allows us to meet the world with a new and demanding taste for authenticity that leaves no room for entertaining the dead weight of virtue signaling, keeping up appearances, and any kind of pretense at all?
The word “sin” as it appears in the Bible comes from the Greek word “Hamartia,” which means “to miss the mark.” There are the obvious implications of this that we learned in Sunday school, of course—but I wonder if grief harshly walks us to a space within ourselves where we have no choice but to become honest, authentic, and in so doing, are able to see more clearly what is real and worth our attention and what is not.
Could it be that our grief is holy and sacred? That God in His mercy allows it to help us more easily hit the mark, so to speak, by becoming transparent and vulnerable? Perhaps the depth of our pain being met by the depth of God’s own grace—for there is that text in the book of Psalms, a promise to us, dear ones, that God is close to the brokenhearted—is a hint that the Eucharist isn’t just something we do, acknowledging that life springs from death, first in Christ—but it’s something our very lives embody. We see it in every spring that follows winter; death is followed by life—and this, in perpetuity. Perhaps the life looks different than we’d imagined. Perhaps it is a perspective we never even knew we needed—but, someday, when we look back, we will be able to say: I thought I was only gaining the horrible burden of grief, but, yet, I cannot trace this invaluable mind and heart shift, this co-destiny, this bouncing forward to anything other than the point I thought my heart had irreparably broken. Would we choose it? No, usually not. But is grief a fire that reveals to us the gold that is worth holding onto? I think it can be.
There is a line in a Nessa Rapoport poem that portrays how, in the throes of grief, the heart develops an appetite for only what matters: “This is the teaching of suffering,” she writes,
“If you allow it, as if in a great stroke the world you occupy divides itself. Here is what matters; the rest -- no (Suffering).”
Recently, I posted some tenets of the philosophy of stoicism on social media. They were almost all ideas that are hard to disagree with, like, “Ask yourself, “Is this essential?”” and “Put people first” and “Another path is always open”—you know, easy pills to swallow. But I got a lot of pushback from “Think of death everyday.” So many people were like, “Huh? Sounds morbid—why in the world would I want to depress myself like that!” But the root of this idea is centered in reality and life-giving boundaries. When we understand that death is part of our journey here—that nobody lives on earth forever and our time here is limited—then it allows us to have a healthy sense of urgency to get our life in order. To spend our precious days in meaningful ways. There is a prayer in the Psalms that similarly says:
“So teach us to consider our mortality, so that we might live wisely.” (Psalm 90:12)
The musical Hamilton portrays the title character as having an ever present sense of his own oncoming death. And it is in large part because of this consideration of his mortality that he was so prolific, writing 51 of the 85 essays that became the Federalist Papers which are still consulted by constitutional scholars as well as the Supreme Court today. There’s a line his wife Eliza sings, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” that proves this point even further. The fact that he understood his days were numbered propelled him to be intentional with his time and make sure he spent it doing the work he so deeply believed in.
I feel like grief does this to us—plunges us, whether we want it or not, into a consideration of mortality in general. It’s a hard lesson on how transient our lives are, how brief and profound it is when and how we intersect with each other. And yet, even when we are not actively grieving, we can still cultivate this essential understanding of our own mortality, therefore living the days we have here with purpose, intention, and appropriate attention on what matters (the rest—no, as Rapoport reminds us).
In the month of March I sang for two funerals. I have to say, it’s an honor to attend a funeral, let alone sing a song like ‘How Great Thou Art’ at one. And when you have a chance to go to a funeral, you should go. Yes, to support others, absolutely, but also because it is a gift to ourselves to understand that life is precious and fleeting and to pretend like it is neither of those things is denying ourselves the opportunity to live well. We are constantly making choices, forced to prioritize and order our lives and we need wisdom to do this. Two sure-fire ways to gain this wisdom are grief and an understanding of our own mortality (Happy Spring! And You’re Welcome for the Happiest Newsletter Ever!).
I will close with this. I spent some of my first marriage performing with Broadway shows, touring the world. Sometimes we’d have week long layovers that allowed us to go home. My husband at the time had his own busy schedule, working three nights in a row and sleeping during the day, meaning that, during these precious layoffs, we generally only had three days with each other. And in those three days, he’d still spend a full afternoon and evening at one of his buddy’s places, gaming with friends. This was a point of contention between us because I couldn’t understand how, when our time was so fleeting together, he’d prioritize a big chunk of it with other people—people he saw every week because they lived in his town. His choice revealed a priority that didn’t strengthen our marriage and, needless to say, our marriage didn’t last (this was not the bomb that blew up our marriage, but again, it was a choice he made that didn’t prioritize or strengthen our marriage). My point is when we understand that life or marriage or our own bodies or our loved ones or our careers or our relationships or whatever it is we find so deeply meaningful are not guaranteed to us, then we live better. We take care of our lives better. When we understand that what we have and experience on earth is fragile and vulnerable and therefore incredibly precious, then we can prioritize our decisions and days to reflect this reality. Marcus Aurelius said, “Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.” Let grief, let the reality of our own mortality be a compass that reveals which way is up. Let us recognize what matters, hold onto it, and live our days and nights in a way this is worthy of this gift of life.
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The TJ Show: Podcast — TJ shared a fairly unpopular observation about me being a mom in our latest episode. Listen to "Mom Sounds” on most podcasting platforms including Apple and Spotify.
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Deep Calls To Deep and What To Do About Time
These words hit home!! I lost my dad unexpectedly on December 3rd 2021. To say it was a shock is an understatement. Thank you for your words Jess!!! Xoxo
Gah, your words. They hit me. Every time. In a good way. In a thinking way. In an understanding way. My grief is very different from yours but I get your words and see how they apply to me. I cannot wait for your book that’s for sure. ❤️❤️❤️