“Do you feel like you’ve just stepped into a new and magical life?”
A writer friend asked me this recently as I was showing her around the converted church I share with my boyfriend Kent. It is, in fact, the most spectacularly beautiful and special place I’ve ever lived, and I’m proud of it, although I’ve only lived here since March, after my son Ronan died. The windows frame trees and light perfectly in all seasons; creatures run around the grounds that Kent built and landscaped, the furniture is sturdy and dark, the art is interesting and evocative and well-placed. Because it once housed an active parish, the living room still has a sacred, sanctuary feeling, with its high ceilings and choir loft (now an office). The north deck looks out to the mountains, the front garden is secluded and tree-heavy. We like to sit in both places and read.
It is in the church’s large and beautiful main room where we held my son’s memorial gathering for my friends and family, a week after Ronan died of Tay-Sachs disease, and this is also where I fell in love, where I’m still in love. I’m obviously house proud, as we like to say, but I’m also proud of Kent, who met me at a time in my life when my child was dying of a terminal illness and I was going through what turned out to be an acrimonious divorce; a man whose hands made this beautiful home and held my son in the moments before he died, and then after. My life at that time was very difficult, full of dread and sadness and the day-to-day worry and care of a sick baby who had no hope of recovery. Now it’s been almost five months since Ronan died, and life is no longer characterized by the feeling of being on call for the worst to happen, and then watching it happen.
The problem is, I’m still on call. Or at least I think I am, if my strange behavior is any indication. There are well-documented grief stages, most of which are too prescriptive and orderly to be true, but this is more like an addiction. An addiction to dread, or an otherworldy commitment to vigilance; an insistent grip on anxiety as the ultimate familiar feeling, an emotional safety zone. I’m like an alcoholic who doesn’t drink anything but worst case scenarios, or anything else I can possibly do to cause self-torment (erroneous emotional algebra is a special gift of mine, where something = something else, and the equation is always wrong) as a way of giving my brain something to do apart from ruminate on those final images of my son’s wasted body lying in his crib, gone. But these images still come to me in dreams, with their violence and finality.
In the aftermath of Ronan’s death, in this moment of pause, in this odd void that is also big and rich and beautiful, I am restless and needy and strange to myself. My identity feels totally whack – am I mother? Am I a worthy partner? Can I possibly write a novel? (And also, about this third point, who could POSSIBLY care?) And it’s not just these epic questions that spring up, but the other, deeper, tenacious, terrible, and highly effective voices that have made up the central narrative of my life for so long, a narrative which fueled me, kept me pushing, achieving, striving, as if one part of the self existed solely to contradict the self that insisted ugly, horrible, unworthy, disgusting, shit.
I feel, in a word, kind of ruined. Or revisited by some nasty, pre-teen, hypersensitive, overly self-conscious, catty mean girl bitch version of myself. She’s deeply unpleasant, this one, and truthfully, I never liked her when she was around the first time, wreaking her uniquely pre-pubescent havoc: slamming doors, berating herself, refusing to eat, and asking herself (and sometimes others, although not as often) annoying questions like, “Do you love me? Am I cute enough? Am I smart enough?” Nobody likes this girl; she’s the pariah of the lunchroom, the playground, the prom, and the person (me) to which she has become, it seems, reattached, although I thought she had been disposed of and her body buried where only I could find it.
Of course, much of my angst could be solved if I could just settle down and relax, but this I seem unable, at the moment, to do, or at least not for extended periods of time. So I drag my ruined, whining, untrusting self around the house, around the world, mad at myself and everyone in it, as insecure and strangely shifting as a sand dune in a wind storm. I am unpleasant to be around; I even annoy myself. There are, however, some deep precedents for this kind of behavior.
What do ruined people do? Weird shit. This seems to be the consensus of psychoanalysts as far back as Freud and Jung; the traumatized self creates, out of necessity, a system of self-care that is keen to avoid repeat trauma. This makes change difficult; it makes people who’ve had part of their psyches destroyed by unmanageable emotions push people and emotions away, create obstacles, generate unnecessary drama. As a side bonus, one also gets the fun rollercoaster ride of a panic attack, the stress moving into and controlling the body when the mind has had enough. The psyche has become the filter, both for the bad AND for the good. Self-protection becomes self-sabotage. I’m reading a super brainy book about this very phenomenon, and it still takes me a while to track these patterns in myself. I also have another brainy book about the brain itself that can tell me why tracking these patterns is a difficult endeavor in the first place, and which lobe of this most mysterious organ it involves.
It’s embarrassing to have these old wounds and stories start prattling away, unleashing their nasty smells and unrolling their scroll-like lists of my deficiencies in the aftermath of a profound situation, turning me into a loony bird of insecurity and self-loathing and fantastical story-spinning. I am that pre-teen devilish nightmare all over again, freaking out over a zit on my chin, wandering sightless for three days through the hallways of junior high, moving slowly from locker to locker, smiling at everyone because I couldn’t recognize any faces, all because I had an eye infection but would not dare to be seen with my thick prescription glasses but also couldn’t bear to miss a single day of school.
In reality (not the self-created one), I’ve just weathered one of the worst possible scenarios an adult woman can face, and I’m still here. I survived the sorrow and am still reaching out for life. Very much in love. Determined to move forward and create happiness that Ronan never got to experience in his short life. I still like police dramas and Chantilly cake and action films; I’m still vain; I still do abdominal exercises; I still talk to my friends, although I often think to myself that if I don’t talk about Ronan, then it means I’m not honoring him, even if my friends and I have other things to talk about. I am the best and worst version of myself, and it’s completely confusing. “Don’t join the circus!” my therapist warns me, but I’m already there, staring into all the funhouse mirrors, trying to tame the lions, and outfitting the piano monkeys with red hats and cymbals.
What else do ruined people do? Cry. A lot. I didn’t cry in the weeks following Ronan’s death; I didn’t cry at his memorial. In April at the group remembrance for other children who had died of Tay-Sachs I remained dry-eyed. I didn’t cry at all for a very long time. Then I cried all the time. Some fine thread tweezed through the ecstatic numbness of those first few months: a letter that read like a painting, an unexpected kindness, a book I finally managed to read while finding death in every line, fingering the red-gold tangle of Ronan’s rotting hair in its plastic bag like an unhinged lover. Birds fought for nest space on the roof of the church in the just-budding trees, and I hated them. I was everywhere and nowhere. I was obsessed with a Notorious B.I.G. song that made me weep, and I listened to it several times a day. I wore the world on my finger like a thimble, tapping doors, testing the strength of the church windows rattling like a sign I didn’t believe in but looked for, still. I made Kent pull the dead mice from their kitchen traps. I found the fact that grass continued to grow in the desert a singular unfairness. I wrote bad poetry in the cave-like dark of the television room (the former altar) in the middle of the night. Each day was a weapon: the couple unstrapping their sleek helmets in the supermarket parking lot; the toddler brushing a stray curl from his forehead. A cloud in motion. Light. My head was a balloon, a bomb, a gun, and at night my body expanded like a raft but had nowhere to go. I understood that love is fragile, but I had nowhere to house this information.
*
For the past two weekends in a row, I have pulled Ronan’s box of clothes from the top shelf in the basement and cried into it, fingering his puffy brown coat, the pajamas with the rockets and aliens spiriting across the legs, the hand knit sweater from a friend that he wore as a newborn, the sun hat with the built in SPF and safari-style side flaps. My artist friend came over weeks before Ronan died and made a cast of his hand; it’s so detailed you can almost see his fingerprints, his short lifeline. I hold the stiff plaster in the shape of my son’s hand as if it’s his living hand and think “how?” I sit on lawn chairs and alternate between reading a book and sobbing. My brain continues to try and find work in the form of AM I:
Hideous
Untalented
Unworthy
Ugly
Unlovable
Too weird for words
Less important than a weed
Less important than anything or anyone else, ever
-that’s tiresome and anxiety-inducing. Why? Because when I put my face into that box of Ronan’s baby clothes, I wish that I had died and he had lived. Where do you go with that? It’s the primal parenting impulse turned on its head, completely around. You fail by dying, of course, of caving into the grief, plus you’re dead; but you also fail in continuing to live, because you were not able to save your child by making the trade you’d so easily make: me for him, him for me. Even Steven.
That grief five months out makes less sense to me than it initially did is upsetting and disorienting. The grief seemed logical when I experienced somatic withdrawal in the weeks leading up to Ronan’s final decline, when I lost my hearing and speech (strangely or perhaps conveniently, this tended to happen during faculty meetings at the school where I teach), an instantaneous morph into panic. It made sense when I could tell Ronan was about to breathe his last and I felt my heart beating on the ceiling; if I’d opened my mouth it would have flown right in. It made sense during the course of most of Ronan’s life, when every day brought some new regression, some new horror or seizure, some nasty new medication to deliver or loud medical device to maneuver, some stranger’s insensitive question to politely (or rudely) answer, and also the abject heartbreak of holding my boy close, trying to memorize his smell, his sounds, the feel of his skin and hair. I miss him every morning. When will that stop? Will I miss the missing when it stops, if it does? Will I continue to back myself into these illogical corners? And also, what about grief could possibly make any sense? And if it defies logic, then how do you use logic to defy it? Can someone please slap some sense into grief, and also, into me?
I don’t have time for you, grief, but here you are with your vagabond, thief-stained hands. You don’t appear to belong in my new life, a life of creativity and travel, of good food and good love. My nervous system appears to be wired to a constant state of vibrating, nonstop vigilance. What gives? Grief, get your hands off me, please. They are too various, calloused, unknown, known, groping, lecherous, and mean. I don’t like your touch, and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to grow to like it. You’re a molester; you are, as they say in almost every Law and Order episode, “the perp.” Do me a favor and fuck off.
The practice of grief-induced vigilance panic is not so easily dismissed. I was telling Kent the other day that I feel like part of me has been crushed, my identity obliterated, meaning withdrawn, and yet here I am, reading manuscripts and writing fiction again and making dinner plans and enjoying a glass of lemonade. I feel like I’m being massaged in directions I don’t understand by hands I don’t trust. And I’m made restless by my vigilance addiction, trying to find something to worry about, like some kind of weird Pavlovian woman who has become addicted to the “what’s next and how bad will it be?” Ring a bell and I’m ready with a list of everything that could go wrong, and how I’ve failed, all the while knowing that worry is useless and that part of the failure is this self-pitying insistence on making up stories about how I’ve failed. I’m turning myself in benign, indulgent emotional tornados. Oh, C.S. Lewis, if I make up a new Narnia (you can choose the trees and the animals), could we meet briefly in that afterlife where you could write a follow-up to A Grief Observed? I even have a title for you: A Grief Understood, Unwound, Unraveled, Obliterated, Fucked Over Completely. Somebody, anybody, do some magic, make it better.
In Palm Springs, restless, I took a trip to the local bookstore to see if I could find a book that would keep my attention. Reading has always been a religion for me, but I hadn’t made it cover to cover with any kind of attention with any book in almost a year. I was beginning to feel like I was cheating on my brain; in a desire to reassert my faithfulness, I wandered the bookshelves. I saw two of my friends’ recently released hardcover books, and sent two quick texts to tell them how beautiful the covers were and congratulations.
Like all writers, I looked for my book in its appropriate place, not really expecting to find it. Then, suddenly, there was Ronan’s face. The book was turned out to the viewers (shoppers is the better word, I guess), and there was a handwritten bookseller’s note, but that’s not what made my heart rattle its cage. It was seeing Ronan’s face looking out into that bookstore, and wondering in how many stores that was happening, repeating, an endless image loop of that forever eye, unblinking. How many gazes was he meeting with his sightless one? He was everywhere, suddenly, but he was also, literally, nowhere. And yet here was his likeness, a likeness of part of his body, his body that was gone now, disappeared, the body of my boy. It was noon and 110 degrees outside. Through the glass, the concrete and asphalt were on fire. There was a long line at the cash register and a single screaming child demanding a cookie. The espresso machine whirred in the café. I could not move. I wondered (not for the first time), “When will I ever be over this, what would that look like, and how the fuck am I supposed to feel for the rest of my life?” Where’s the grief guidebook, where’s the fancy scientist who can map all the lobes of my brain and insert (I’m willing to endure pain) the balm that will FIX IT.
At the Santa Fe Opera a few nights ago, restless, I listened to an aria I once sang during my short-lived opera singing years – Porgi Amor – from The Marriage of Figaro. The summer night air had finally cooled, and was scented with pine and juniper – for me, the scents of nostalgia, of childhood camping trips and board games in the camper with my brother. The words of the song, “Return my beloved to me or I will die” that I had once belted over the balcony in my voice teacher’s tiny house in Nebraska, the air conditioning unit kicking like a monster truck engine behind me, finally made sense to me. “Do something with your hands,” my teacher had pleaded, trying to school me in notes as well as the expected melodrama of opera. I probably lifted a palm over my head and tried to look puzzled (isn’t that what sad people were? Just momentarily puzzled?), not knowing what else to do, deeply intent on pronouncing the Italian correctly. I had no beloveds when I first sang that song; I had experienced significant loss, but not of people. I had no idea what I was singing about. Now, twenty years later, listening to the mezzo soprano swell those notes just to the point of breaking, just to the edge where they tremble at their most awesome, vibrating, impossible beauty, following those notes up and down the signature Mozart trills and slides, I understood it. Grief sometimes has me grabbing the air with my hands, as if I could pull in a new feeling; trust, or something like it. Or a weapon – an axe to slay grief; a gun to shoot it through its many-chambered, always-changing, totally wretched and selfish and unfaithful heart. If I could still reach those high notes, and if I could stand on my teacher’s balcony one more time, I would know exactly what to do with my hands.
This morning, restless, I left my beautiful writing studio – a studio built by Kent’s hands, my favorite hands, hands that are one of the strongest memories of Ronan’s death, in his last moments, those hands on my shoulders, steady, one of the few sensations I can resurrect from that moment, although I know I was shouting, and I know I was lifting, part of me going with Ronan, or so it felt, because who can imagine making that transition alone? There was a division, in any case, so it’s a good thing Kent’s hands were holding me to the ground. My hands create nothing but sentences; they hold memories and feelings but can barely pour cereal in a bowl.
On the gravel road to the coffee shop there was a little boy, nearing three years old I guessed, although having parented and buried a child without mobility has forever skewed my ability to correctly identify an age, ran toward me. The sun was already bright and strong at nine o’clock, the road soaked in shades of yellow and white. Llamas bleated in their “habitats” nearby. A few chickens poked around on the other side of the street, wandering out of their cages before the heat became unbearable.
The little boy wore a hat like Ronan used to wear, a hat I had pulled from the pile of his clothes and fingered just days before as if it were a piece of delicate lace, a colorful sun hat with a brim and side flaps. Ronan’s was dark blue with light blue sharks swimming around it; this little boy’s was covered in blue and yellow and red fish. He wore sandals and brown pants and (remarkably, given the heat) a light blue sweater.
“Mama!” he said, and ran to me. Instinctively, I moved toward him, like the image from a dream, as if all of my wishes for Ronan to reappear had just been granted, the veils between the worlds suddenly thinned, the last two years all a dream, or an unimaginable nightmare, and this was what was real. My boy – healthy, happy, saved! – and running in my direction. What had been a fantasy of the afterlife was suddenly a reality in this moment. When he realized I was not his mother, he gave me a hairy look, but then quickly recovered and turned to his babysitter, offering up a chubby hand for her to hold. “He thought you were his mom,” she explained, shrugging apologetically. “You look like his mom.”
A similar encounter took place this past October, while I was running through a park in London. A three-year-old boy had walked into the path, his hair a blaze of red, and stopped to look at me. “Mama?” he asked. I ran on, barely able to see through the instant tears, and when I looked back, there was no child there, nobody there at all. Had I imagined it? Maybe.
This time I saw the boy again, as I was leaving the coffee shop. He was looking ahead of himself, past me, his soft face fixed in an attitude of toddler concentration, those charged initial reactions with the sensory universe, reactions Ronan never had. I put my hand on his head. “Good little guy,” I said, and walked through the screen door into the garden. When I turned back (had I imagined him?), he had turned around in his sandaled feet and was watching me leave. I’m not sure what it felt like – maybe a benediction, a blessing – but it felt real the way only magical moments can feel. I felt, in that moment, with just the look from this little boy, that the boundaries of my body had been redrawn again. I wasn’t just melting into the world, helpless and afraid and fucked up. Relief, at least for the moment.
Almost five months gone. Before I know it, Ronan will have been gone as long as he lived, and then longer. How long will it take to lose this grip on vigilance? What span of time, what trick of the light or the season will obliterate this addiction, not just for the moment, but for good? And who will die next, and then when will it be my time? Who will put their hand on my head, close my eyes, wrap me in a shroud and see me out of this world?
This new and magical life that I have stepped into, yes, but this life and the life before Ronan’s death are not an even trade. It’s not out of one life and into the next; there’s always going to be some bleed. What is ahead then? Everything. Also, and eventually for all of us, nothing at all.
48 responses
Thanks Emily. I’m so glad you’re writing.
You blow me away. Every single fucking time. So thank you for that. I am so glad you wrote this particular piece.
jeez, emily….right in this moment after having read this, i thought, “she’s my favorite writer”. so evocative, so much of what i felt and still feel. especially because i read an essay very recently by a woman who had also lost a child and years after her anger and emotion pervaded the essay in such a negative way that it was difficult to identify with her even though our circumstances were eerily similar. There was very little self-introspection and quite a bit of blame for everyone around her. it’s always somewhat shocking to me that other people have experienced any of what i now know as just something that’s a part of my history….but the way that you look at this grief, how you dissect it from different angles and discuss all your strengths and weaknesses while doing it….it’s really liberating and a privilege to read. this made me cry for jordan and i haven’t cried for him in such a long time.
Beautiful.
Holy Shit.
Breathtaking… I agree with Jennifer.
Keep writing. Just keep writing. NO ONE writes like you do.
Just keep writing.
I cried. Especially at the part where you said you had wished you had died and he had lived. I’m so sorry for your loss. So very very sorry. I have experienced lots of loss in my life (of significant people- my mother to suicide and my twin sons at birth) and I can only say that the grief is always there, but it morphs into different forms. Sometimes it manifest at the strangest of moments- other times it allows me to recognize beauty and have empathy for people in ways I probably wouldn’t have before.
Your writing is raw and beautiful and will help lots of people. We need people like you. It’s unfortunate that such an experience has to ever be an endured by anyone. God bless you
When I read this paragraph:
“The problem is, I’m still on call. Or at least I think I am, if my strange behavior is any indication. There are well-documented grief stages, most of which are too prescriptive and orderly to be true, but this is more like an addiction. An addiction to dread, or an otherworldy commitment to vigilance; an insistent grip on anxiety as the ultimate familiar feeling, an emotional safety zone. I’m like an alcoholic who doesn’t drink anything but worst case scenarios, or anything else I can possibly do to cause self-torment (erroneous emotional algebra is a special gift of mine, where something = something else, and the equation is always wrong) as a way of giving my brain something to do apart from ruminate on those final images of my son’s wasted body lying in his crib, gone. But these images still come to me in dreams, with their violence and finality.”
it resonates deeply. I have not lost a child to death, and I am not comparing that totality of experience to my own experiences–I wouldn’t do that. I do know that this one part of what you feel has been what I have felt most of my life. My childhood taught me early, brutally early, that life has nightmares and suffering far beyond the more average experiences of poverty, divorce, illness. What I felt was that a void had opened in the fabric of my existence and everything was rushing through that void, while no one recognized the horror. I was alone in seeing the void; I was alone. The contrast between Everyone Else and myself made me look into the mirror and see someone horribly ugly and unworthy of love. I WAS ‘that girl’ you speak of, the one no one wants to be around and no one likes. Years and years and years of therapy and healing in all kinds of various forms… years of not being able to finish a book. Finish a poem. The only experience that changed my main way of experiencing the world after horror was the experience of love. It transformed the way I saw myself, and my place in this world, around other humans. I hope for you that love continues to find you in all forms, and you can find some comfort in this as you see what ‘everything…and nothing at all’ brings you.
Your writing speaks to me about the most important experiences and lessons of my life, many I never would chose to learn had I a choice. But that is moot. Thank you so much for sharing.
Your writing is beautiful. Your experience was a total hell and your trust has been shattered. Grief is demanding and otherworldly. It batters the body and soul. It mocks us. What might we be doing now if our beloved hadn’t been stolen from us? What joy might there be instead of this oppressive sadness? Grief is a thief with a master key to open every door we try to slam in its face. I think only love can defeat it. You are not ruined if you are loved.
In a recent experiment, one group of rats was given shocks with no warning. Another group of rats was given the same shocks, but before it happened, a red light would come on.
The red light rats stayed sane. And that’s what writers do: we keep the red light on all the time, so we don’t lose our minds.
What the next step is, I don’t know.
Thank you Emily for sharing your loss with us. Ronan must have been a beautiful little boy and so fortunate to have you as his mother and to have Kent in his life. Trust your feelings, Emily. Give them voice and expression. All those blessing that are mine to give, I give you.
How do I even say this, it feels like one of those conversations between my sober friends when you overhear a line like “oh, five months, that’s when you’re really crazy.” It takes a long long time. Stuff bubbles up at weird moments, even years, decades later. It’s never really over, but eventually you learn to live with it. I was going to say, for me it’s been like learning to live with an amputation …
i sometimes think of grief as beautiful agony.if it’s only been months you might look back at this time and it will seem like you were on drugs, crazed, vulnerable, in a surreal dream. all your senses are heightened. you’re afraid to dream, afraid not to dream. my marriage didn’t survive either. i say beautiful because there was so much love but the love did hurt. it’s a good time to take up painting, dance, go to a grief group; it made me feel like less of a freak. embrace your new love and embrace yourself; what a talented amazing woman you are. you are none of those nasty words you call yourself but you will be moody and full of anger sometimes; and it is perfectly NORMAL grieving.
I don’t have the right words to respond proportionately to this. but thank you
Thank you for finding the words and sharing them.
Last year today, my mother went into the hospital for the last time. I, too, would have traded my life for hers. I wanted her to take me with her. As time goes on, grief comes and goes, but I suspect it will never be truly over. You are a different person now.
Thank you, Emily, this is beautiful and so very accurate. Three years after losing my husband after a two-year cancer battle, I am still looking for the next anxiety-inducing worst-case scenario. After five years, I don’t seem to know any other way to live. And yet, we do go on and, with every step, wonder how and why. Please keep writing–to comfort those who share your circumstances, and to help those who don’t to understand.
Beautiful. There has not been a day since I first read about Ronan that I don’t think on him.
You are an incredible writer Emily.
Emily, Thank you. Thank you so much. You write, have written so, oh so beautifully.
I have been reading many pieces on The Rumpus and have many times felt like writing about my loss but nothing has quite stirred me like your piece to write, to try.
My loss was sudden, just too sudden, too unreal – my husband suddenly slipped away in the night or early morning when I was not around to pull him back. HE just slipped from our hands – my tiny daughter’s and mine.
It’s going to be a year soon but I don’t know where I’ve been. I am here I know and he is not. My daughter is between us. That we occupy three spaces now – him up there keeping watch on her from above, me on the ground, toiling the land, make a living and her trying to take root to grow, to reach new heights, reach for the stars.
When you say, “too prescriptive, too orderly to be trueâ€, or talk about the “addiction to dread, insistent grip on anxiety†and feeling, â€as insecure and strangely shifting as a sand dune in a wind storm†and where “self protection becomes self sabotageâ€, I understand, I understand now, because you showed it to me. I see myself.
And when you say, “me for him, him for me†– the feeling of failing to make the trade, yes, there too, I failed to die and “fail in continuing to live†and am afraid will fail my daughter, will not be able to keep the promise to her – me for her. I know I have to go on, like Beckett’s last line in The Unnamable, â€You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on†– till she is ready to take off on her own, till she is ready to set sail, till she has strong enough arms to swim against the tide, till her feet can longer seem to stay on the ground and till her wings have enough strength to take flight, reach greater heights and she no longer needs me to lift her to reach the top shelf – my job on the ground will be over and I can join forces with her dad above. Till then she fills the space between us, she is the thread between the cans. She will have us at either end till then, till she is ready to get her own wireless connection without the parental check. Until then – we for each other, each of us for the other.
My son Daniel was diagnosed with a fatal neurodegenerative condition when he was 3-years-old. As in your experience, it was a mutation neither my ex-husband (also similar, I think to your experence – divorce) nor I knew we were carriers for. I’ve watched my son learn to walk, and slowly, agonizingly lose that ability. I’ve watched him learn to eat, and been with him through surgery for placement of a gastric tube so he could get the majority of his calories from formula. He had lost his ability to swallow safely, and also could not eat enough to sustain his life. He is now 15, and if we are lucky he’ll live another five years. He has to sit through five long nebulizer treatments for his lungs twice per day, (he has mucous like melted mozzarella cheese and can’t clear it) and needs my help for bathing, going to the bathroom, and transferring from his power wheelchair to anywhere else. (he has Ataxia-Telangiectasia) I love your writing, your book was incredible, and I just wanted to offer a link to an article written by Roshi Joan Halifax. Her book, “Being With Dying” is excellent and has offered me comfort. May it be of help to you also. http://www.upaya.org/roshi/dox/Grief.pdf You are fortunate to have her nearby in New Mexico. I have recently lost my mother and am lost, wandering in an arid world devoid of her light and life. I send you blessings, peace, and deep empathy for your losses. Thank you for having the courage to write what I could not. You and Ronan are lucky to have had each other. Namaste’.
Oh, my god, Emily. Whoever already said it, I agree: no one writes like you. No one. This is breathtaking. Thank you.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with this 19th century poem entitled Along The Way by Robert Browning Hamilton. I think it’s profound.
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.
-Robert Browning Hamilton
i am so sorry for your incredible loss
Dear Emily,
Your writing hits me to my very core. For those of us who have experienced the death of a child, it is so hard to communicate to others what we are feeling. Is it the worst kind of loss. You do a beautiful job of writing about grief…especially in its rawest, earliest stages. I am so very sorry you lost Ronan. There are no other words. I walk beside you my friend.
Wow. I am not familiar with grief like this, but I know anxiety well. How you illustrate those feelings is right on. Sometimes this life makes you just crazy enough to start to believe in ghosts and signs and the fine, invisible thread that connects it all.
Sounds corny but you are writing about my life. You have so beautifully put into words your experience with grief and in doing so, have helped me to see my own.
Thankyou
This destroyed me. Then put me back together. Thank you.
No words can adequately respond to this experience you have so eloquently written about. I am deeply, deeply sorry for your loss. Jessica
honest reflection on terrible grief. please keep writing, emily.
There is a book called The Disappearance by Genevieve Jurgensen, an account of a parent surviving her children, written as letters to a friend. It is extraordinary.
There is another world, here in this world, of those who have experienced this loss. They are each other’s kin.
Writing is what writers do, no matter what. Writing has saved my life.
Thank you. You are worthy of love.
Emily,
I am ruined. and alive. and struggling. and grateful. and your writing moves me to the deepest place in my being. We are bound in a way in which I wish no mother had to be… but your heart your writing… a light in the darkness for me. One day.. I will be for another… and life is born out of our out of my loss… Thank you beyond words Emily
An absolutely beautiful piece. Thank you for writing this.
Words fail me.
Stunning. Thank you.
Dear Emily,
Thank you. One of the hugest ways to relieve grief, I think, is to be able to stumble upon reactions like yours and know I am not alone, to have someone put just the right words to what I am feeling. I’ll echo a lot of the other comments when I say that I don’t know if it does get any easier, it just gets different, as time goes on. I’m glad you have already seized upon A Grief Observed, because that helps a lot. I have not lost a child, but have lost my father, oldest brother, and all too many close friends. I am grateful for you that you have someone to lean on, but sad that there are many of us who don’t. Holidays, birthdays, and pretty much any day can tend to amplify the empty spaces where that person used to exist. Your essay has helped me immensely, just to make it through these last 10 minutes or so. It’s been a hard, strange summer, so once again, thank you for your words. They ministered to me today. I’m hoping you will find peace.
Emily,
My name is Daniel Shelton; I am a social worker and grief counselor for a hospice in Las Vegas, NV. I have a Google Alert set on my computer for grief and grieving and recently your thoughts popped up. I am always looking for personal thoughts and experiences that might prove useful to those I serve and wanted to thank you for having the courage to share your difficult experiences.
Sincerely,
Daniel Shelton, LSW, MSW
So beautiful. So nice to get to know Ronan through your writing. Grief over the loss of a beloved child is the most devastating thing that can happen to a parent. Yet within the grief, there are gifts for us to reap and one of them is a deeper understanding of the real meaning of life.
I am sure you know and feel that Ronan is not dead, his spirit, full of love and beauty, lives on. What we call ‘death’ is merely a discarding of the physical envelope, the body. There is unbroken continuity on a soul level.
May your life journey bring you many unexpected sweet gifts – just keep your eye out for them, they are there, waiting to be discovered.
I just have to leave a comment xxx because your words are beautiful and powerful and true and … So many feelings.thank you for unravelling the feelings I feel too xxxxx
I hope each day you heal a little more xxxxxxxxxx
Love Nicola xx
Oh my gosh! This: “nasty, pre-teen, hypersensitive, overly self-conscious, catty mean girl bitch….deeply unpleasant….whining”
We have had some pretty tough times the past four years. My adolescent son went off the deep end, and was physically and verbally abusive for some time until we could get his medication sorted out. Our baby died. My daughter was drugged with alcohol and sexually assaulted. And I turned into this….this…nasty catty mean girl bitch who was deeply unpleasant and whiny. I really liked the person I was before…softer, gentler, kinder, less granite-hard…and then all this happened and beat me into pulp and left me gasping for life and turned me into this bitter person I don’t particularly like. I feel ruined – like I will never again be that really nice person I was before.
I thought I was the only one.
“Somebody, anybody, do some magic, make it better.”
I am so so sorry about your son. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with all this pain. I’m so thankful for your articulate description; it brought some solace.
laikai,
i’m sorry for all the trauma you’ve been through. we went through all that with our son and then we lost him and now we’re not a we anymore. i hope things get better for you.
Second time I have come across this and it blew me away as much the second time. I expect it will every time I come back to it.
I would also like to add that while the inability to read in periods of extreme grief and stress is something I share with you, your book was an exception for me during this past year while dealing with a life turned upside down in many ways. And that is a tribute to your amazingly powerful writing. I look forward to your novel.
With each searing word, you add to humanity’s trove of wisdom and experience. You break my heart, and make it swell with love and connection… From the first time I read about Ronan, not a day has passed that I have not thought about him and you, with feelings of just simple love, and also, rage. I read everything you write, because you take my breath away.I, just simply, love you.
Thank you. I’ve read a lot about grief as I’ve struggled through my own, and none of what I’ve read has resonated like this. You have put grief into words. Reading this was invaluable to me, and will continue to be as I read it again and again.
there is no other piece of writing that could possibly articulate grief as you have written. deeply in the throes of it, I travel from place to place, worn to thin skin and nary a shred of heart. but tonight a thought; in memory of Rowan, let the Universe and all that is beyond it be saturated and delicious with the sweetness of love, with light, with forgiveness, with compassion, and with peace.
Emily,
I have wondered of you often, of the death of your son and the birth of your daughter and wondered, though I already knew the answer, if the great gift of new love and new life in any way eased the pain. I knew, of course, that it could not, having experienced my own irrevocable, irremediable losses, having witnessed the irrevocable, irremediable losses of others, each loss its own fresh and original hell. I wanted to believe, perhaps, that our gains could somehow eradicate our losses, though I knew that the do not, that they cannot, that they will not. Thank you for these beautiful truths which wash over me like what, like a tsunami? A tsunami of truth, that’s what this is. It obliterates any temptation to wonder (to wish, really) that your gains could in any way make up for what you have lost. They are just two different things, aren’t they? How do we suffer the losses that can never be healed and still step into what remains? It is a great comfort to know that I am not alone in this inquiry and that I am not alone in having no f-ing idea. Godspeed to you.
I was speechless with the weight of my own grief when I read this. You word it all so vividly, so truthfully. I haven’t lost a child but have PTSD for a different reason. Your line about how “self-protection becomes self-sabotage” just nails it. I feel like after my trauma I’ve lost myself and my coping methods are hurting more than helping. Even though we are both so adrift at least we aren’t alone in needing a new and difficult quest for calm. I’m so sorry about your son and I hope you can piece together new little measures of stability in the aftermath of his passing. Thank you so much for writing this.
Wow. Seven years after losing an infant to terminal brain cancer, I came across this essay which is the absolutely most correct, insightful, eloquent and heart-wrenching portrait of my own grief and challenges in ‘recovery’ from grief. Thank you for this.
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