inside of ourselves

"you never know how inside of themselves people are." i read that long ago in a barbara kingsolver novel and it's stuck with me ever since. in any given situation, you don't really know where people are coming from. maybe they've had a completely shit week. maybe it's been awesome. maybe it's been both - up and down, like any other week. maybe they've just learned they have a terminal illness. maybe their father just died. maybe their mother with alzheimer's just failed to recognize them for the first time. maybe they just lost their job. maybe they just got a new one. maybe they just learned they're pregnant. or perhaps they miscarried. maybe they're tired or have a toothache. maybe they feel lonely or sad or joyful. you just don't know. maybe the path ahead of them seems clear. or perhaps it's obscured and murky. maybe they're relieved the sun is finally shining after too many days of rain. maybe their awesome boss just quit. maybe they feel like they're in limbo. perhaps they're caught up in needless office politics. what if they have a need to be right? to be comforted? to be understood? what if they feel bewildered and alone and cast adrift? what if they are newly in love and their stomach is full of butterflies? you just don't know. you can never really know. and quite possibly they'll never really be able to tell you. but maybe what they most need from you is that you see them - really see them. no matter how inside of themselves they are.

ways of saying goodbye

i went to a funeral recently. it was someone who i had served on a board with, not a close friend, but someone i liked and enjoyed spending time with. not all that long ago, she got a cancer diagnosis and it was aggressive and swift, clearly leaving her husband of 57 years and family reeling. she was the type to be organized and plan everything, so the funeral, which she planned herself, was truly beautiful - the songs she had chosen poignant, the way her family carried her casket out to the gravesite and and how it was lowered down in the grave while patsy cline's version of just a closer walk with thee, was played on a tinny old tape player from the 80s. patsy's dulcit tones on that old player were somehow perfect and i even got tears in my eyes as we stood there on a sunny, beautiful autumn day in a picture postcard-worthy little churchyard in denmark. 

it hit me as i stood there at the funeral, tears in my eyes, that i hadn't had the same opportunity with my dad. he died so suddenly and my work life was in such turmoil at that point, that i felt i had to keep my commitment to a big event that was going to go on with or without me. and at the time, i felt strongly that it was what my dad would have wanted me to do. i still feel that. but it means that i missed his memorial service and the funereal shedding of tears that would surely have accompanied it. last may, we buried his ashes in his plot at the cemetery, but i was a beautiful, sunny day and so much time had gone by, there was less sorrow in the moment. my sister and i had had a fantastic road trip with his two best friends and his ashes a day or so before the ceremony, and so putting what remained in the ground was on some level closure without tears. plus, i had a little jar of his ashes tucked into my suitcase, so i knew it wasn't final final. maybe when i eventually sprinkle those on my garden, i will shed the tears i undoubtedly need to shed.

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karl ove knausgaard on never running out of things to write about.

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swedish death cleaning
"it's like marie kondo but with an added sense of the transience and futility of this mortal existence."


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i'm not the only one who has noticed that we can't talk anymore.

to grieve or not to grieve, that is the question

so many thoughts swirling in my head of late, especially as i listen to podcasts, which i do constantly. i don't always know if the podcasts provoke the thoughts or reflect them. a growing suspicion that i suck at grieving has been crossing my mind of late. and then a couple of podcasts i listened to on the way home today covered the topic of grief - this week's death, sex & money and malcolm gladwell's revisionist history touched upon it as well.  i don't know if they helped me work through my own struggles or not.

it comes down to that i don't think i've properly grieved for my father. i shed tears on the plane on the way there, as he lay dying in a hospital, nearly three years ago, but i don't think i've really, truly cried about his death. and i am not sure that i know how. there are times when i miss him acutely. most often when i'm in the garden, which is also where i talk to him. he's come to my sister on two occasions, reassuring her, but i've not even heard a whisper from him. i'm not envious exactly, more puzzled. is it because i lack the ability to open that portal to him? am i less open to it? or am i at another stage of my grief than she is? have i even started it properly? can i even recognize it? these are the thoughts that have me convinced that i suck at grief.

but it's also mom's decline. alzheimer's is so cruel and strange. she's still here, but it feels like we already need to grieve her. i don't even know this strange fabulist she has become...telling lies, or perhaps fractured fairy tales, to explain the world around her in a way that makes sense to her, as her brain fills with holes and erases the old ways of making sense. i worry that my good memories of her are being similarly erased, but i'm not sure that what i feel at this stage is grief. i find it hard to even summon pity, which sounds horrible, i know and then i feel guilty for that. but it remains that it's how i feel at the moment. 

and then i can't help but wonder if i ever properly grieved for sophia. when it happened, i was so sick and we had sabin to focus on, so did i properly grieve her passing and the passing of the specialness of being a mother of twins? i don't know. it seems like maybe it got pushed under somehow and never really dealt with, though i have always been able to speak of it, so it's not like that. but is glibly being able to mention it the same as dealing with it? i suspect not.

but how are you supposed to know how to grieve? i think our culture today places so much pressure on us to get back into the saddle immediately that we maybe don't give ourselves time. maybe grief takes years. maybe it doesn't look a certain way. maybe i don't wailingly grieve my father because i think he lived a long, amazing, worthy life and died the way he would have wished, so i can have nothing but respect for him and and be grateful for the time we had and how he shaped who i am. maybe i don't wail because it was his time and i feel that in my heart and while i am sad for me and for us and for mom that he's not here, i'm not sad for him per se. or maybe i just suck at grief.

with mom, it's more complicated, due to the disease and that she's still here, strangely more physically fit than ever, even as her personality changes so radically that she seems like someone i don't know. maybe grief doesn't come because the time isn't right. maybe i will learn to grieve when it's needed, or find my own way to do so. maybe our grief is singular, individual, so unique that i don't even recognize it because it's so much a part of me.

oddly, i think i've grieved harder for lost jobs than for lost loved ones. what does that say about me or about the times in which we live? what we do is so important to identity that we feel it as a loss of self when we leave a job, whether it's by choice or not. and so a period of mourning follows.

and then i wonder if grief is really about missing who we once were? do we lose that? or do we contain it within us, so there's no sense grieving it...

as you can see, i have more questions than answers. and rather a lack of grief. or at least the ability to grieve in a definable way...

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daily affirmations from lenny.

"fucking up is how you go pro." - words to live by, i tell you.

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i want to be e. jean when i grow up.