Speaking of That

Mark Liebenow

We weren’t because people don’t like to talk about grief. It’s not particularly pleasant or easy to deal with, even though there are moments of beauty and grace that take our breath away. Yet, grief can be shared in words, even though it cannot be summarized in a paragraph, essay, or an entire book.

I thought I had a basic understanding of grief’s landscape because I’d been exposed to a variety of deaths—my grandparents first, as expected. Then the family dog was run over. A high school classmate bounced out of the back of a pickup speeding down a country road. A neighborhood teenager’s suicide by shotgun. The sister of my best friend hit by a car, abandoned by her husband because her recovery took too long, and died. A Chautauqua college friend hit by a car while riding her bike. A roommate in grad school hit by a car running a red light in San Francisco. A friend in his forties of AIDS. A friend stabbed in Greece for his passport, leaving his son an orphan. My mother’s long descent into dementia and death. A father-in-law whose brain dissolved in the spongiform prions of Creutzfeldt-Jakob after eating infected beef, the Mad Cow disease, and died in agony.

Then my wife died out of the blue in her forties from an unknown heart problem and dragged me to the edge of an inarticulate abyss and left me there tottering. People said, “There are no words” when she died, but there was still the compassion they held in their hearts. I was struggling and needed their help. Can I survive grief on my own?

Evelyn’s death unveiled the periodic chart of grief’s elements. If grief were a letter, it would be F— fragile, fractured, fatigue, forever, fucked. Is grief a noun or a verb? Grief is a drawerful of adjectives.

It’s a shade of blue that changes through the day. Sometimes it’s cobalt, azure, or cerulean. Even Prussian blue with its button-down, hard-soled formality. The blue lips of death. It’s the wistful blue glaze above the ocean as the last light of the setting sun fades, and a life that I loved disappeared forever. Grief is the deep, eternal blue of the cosmos at midnight when sleep won’t come and I drift like deadwood against the shores of distant constellations.

The notion that grief is blue feels right, no matter its shade, although in the beginning it was red. Blood red. Prussian red. Raging out-of-control red. The deep magenta bruise of a battered heart.

When grief’s Darkness came, I pushed it away, afraid of crossing over its border and getting lost in a place that had no familiar landmarks. No North Star to fix my position. A place set apart. A place far away. A place with fewer answers and more questions. The Far Territories. My hours were abandoned to staring out the window and listening to the hollow acoustics of an empty house. Slowly I began to discern what existed before words could surface, and what I felt most was longing.

In the beginning, there was the word unspoken. Without a useful vocabulary, I searched for words that could corral the wild horses of what I was experiencing. Words of anger and rage. Of intimacy and commitment. Of interment. Her first words, and her last. I searched for words because they created pathways through the wilderness, and words that rise out of affliction are true. I chanted the words with the mountains as evensong to the night and listened for its antiphonal response.

The articulation of sorrow. Is it possible to say what grief is and be precise? Disarticulation—pulling grief apart to examine its pieces. Perambulation—walking around grief to get a feel for the whole of the thing. Rearticulation—taking what I’m experiencing and translating this into something that makes sense to others. Misarticulation—when people repeat easy answers and platitudes that smile but ignore the trauma rumbling beneath, phrases like “there, there, it’ll be okay.” No, I don’t think that it will. We should not seek to understand grief with our heads, but only with our hearts.

The sound of grief is the ping of sonar in the silent depths of the ocean that doesn’t echo back. It’s the steeple bell in an abandoned church ringing softly as an afterthought in the breeze calling the dead home. It’s the cool, blue solitude of night when the machines of the city power down, and I can hear the creek gurgling nearby on its journey through the darkness to the Pacific Ocean. There it will evaporate, return as rain, and gurgle past me again. Grief is cyclical as rain.

Words are shadows of what is already gone.

How does grief feel? I once likened it to being hit by a Mack truck, the one with the chrome bulldog hood ornament, because every part of my body ached, and I had been run over. But lying on the couch and doing nothing became boring, so I moved a little and cried from the pain. This ache was replaced by dead-calm numbness, which was boring, too. My choice was either to suffer the arrows of death stoically, or push back against inertia and despair, and rage against the dying of her light.

Grief tastes like lemon juice on aluminum.

Grief is a mirage in the desert. A phantom. A shadow that leans against the red brick wall in the corner of my eye. It didn’t physically exist, yet I couldn’t shake its presence. It had no face, but I could smell the cedar scent of its skin, feel the cool of its fingers touch my arm, and the winter-coat weight of its embrace on my shoulders.

Were grief’s shadows black or blue? I became a shadow. While the passage of time continued for the rest of the world, time stopped for me because all of my plans for the future were tied to Evelyn, and without her I had nothing to look forward to, so the future ceased to exist. I existed only in the thin now, twiddling my fingers, and trying to generate the impulse to do something. From the sidelines I watched people rush by like freight trains in their frenzied push to fill their days with distractions and matters that didn’t matter that much in the long run, just tasks to take up the empty hours until they felt they had done enough to be worthy of going to bed, as if the measure of an honorable life is in the quantity of what we do but not in how we have taken care of others.

Friends sent cards of condolence and brought casseroles, but many of them didn’t know what to say, and I learned to protect my grief from those who said they cared but didn’t want to listen, saving my insights and questions for those who did. “I’m fine,” I said to most. For the few who came to listen, I wanted to find the words that were capable of expressing the terror and the emptiness, the chaos and the despair, the lingering hope and the remembrance of joy. Perhaps most of them were wounded, too, and hadn’t yet dealt with their own losses. Was this a place of transformation like a cocoon, or was I refusing to accept Ev’s death?

Grief’s emotions have the uncertainty of freckles. How many are too much; how few too little?

Nothing was normal anymore. Ordinary days no longer existed because I knew that death could intrude at any time without needing a reason. I had an urgent desire to tell friends that the barrier between life and death wasn’t as solid as we had hoped, so we needed to do what we thought was the most important, because tomorrow one of us might not be here. A rift had been torn in the fabric of my childhood expectation that most people lived into old age. Too many friends had died young for me to still believe this.

Ev flowed away with the restless movement of the river and into the past, to be preserved in photographs and the stories I knew. But the boulder of grief remained sitting in the water in front of me. I want to believe that my memories of her are accurate, but how will I know if there are holes in the narrative, or if wishful thinking has already filled in some of the gaps, and she isn’t here to correct me? Even if I knew everything about Ev, her memories would not add up to someone who breathes. Will her personality disappear when the edges to her stories are sanded away into generalities by time? The one thing I do not want to forget is how the light in her eyes shone with hope.

When a loved one dies, time divides into before and after, with the wilderness of grief shouldered between them. Old dreams become deficient, and the past insufficient to support a present that does not want to move. Months are spent swirling like driftwood in an eddy as the river flows on. The happily forever after I had been counting on was gone. What do I dream about now? If it’s our dreams that make us, then without dreams, am I unmade?

As long as I was here, I thought that I might as well explore grief’s landscape and try to understand its place in life. I probably lingered longer than I needed to because all the emotions made me feel alive, which seems ironic for someone focused on death.

Grief was a physical place. There was a there, in that I knew I was somewhere, wherever I was. Perhaps I am echoing Gertrude Stein that her house, her there, was gone, although both our Oaklands remained, there was a there here, just not the there I expected. Not that anyone ever expects the darkness that grief brings because it feels nowhere.

The longer I stayed in this place set apart, the more tempting it was to remain. I felt the allure of the forever. No one from the world bothered me here, and I could live in the past with my loved one. It was being in a private theater and watching the different movies of Evelyn’s life play over and over. I thought of becoming a hermit who lived alone in a cabin in the woods communing with nature and the spirits of my dead, because I figured that I had had my one great love, and that part of my life was over.

Much of what I believed about life turned out to be illusions, taught to me by my parents and grandparents to soften the hard edges of reality because they needed to believe that the dream was still possible. Society also worked to keep me in line and repeating what others had always done, instead of creating something new. Did my community even remember how to grieve honestly or how to take care of the grieving in nurturing ways? Whom could I trust? People who didn’t understand tried to place arbitrary deadlines on my grief, which wasn’t helpful, so I chose to grieve in the way that felt right.

The Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) of painters in Europe in the early 1900s, rejected the artificial rules of painting and did their own thing. They focused on being spontaneous, used bright colors to express emotions, and painted by intuition instead of trying to stuff their visions into the stilted boxes of overused conventions. Wassily Kandinsky belonged to this group along with Franz Marc and others. Marc painted his “Blue Horses” to express harmony and balance in the midst of society’s unsettledness that would lead to the First World War. For Kandinsky, the darker the blue, the more it awakened the desire in people for the eternal. Influenced by Cubist and Fauvist ideas, the Blue Riders moved beyond Impressionism towards abstraction. They erased the artificial lines between physical image and inner meaning, and tried to visually express what was hidden and had no form.

Can I do this with grief? I open my Crayola box of 96 colors and make swaths across the paper until I find the one that I’m feeling today. Sometimes my emotions feel purple or moss green, sometimes it’s gray with a tinge of blue. Is grief limited to what I color inside the lines drawn by others, or how I try to express them? Ev’s death has revealed that I’m not one emotion at a time, but dozens. My face may be calm, but I am a swirling, mottled rainbow of complexity underneath.

Our inner world is as real as our outer one, the one we can see, hear, and touch, because thoughts, feelings, and dreams are inside. Stimulus and response go both ways. Why shouldn’t there be a valley of wonder and light inside us that we can explore like the Grand Canyon?

I want today to mean something to myself or someone else. If what I did today doesn’t matter to anyone, then it was a wasted day. While small talk passes the time, it’s of no great importance, although it can lead to talking about the struggles where people’s lives are coming apart.

Grief has few linguistic handholds in its hard rock face to grasp or climbing ropes and pitons to tether me safely to its El Capitan. Yet risks have to be taken if I am to make my way through grief. Looking up at the mountain, I can see nooks and cracks where my fingers could go and begin climbing. Grief provides a chalk bag of metaphors that I can dip my hands into to improve my grip.

Other nature metaphors work, too, take your pick—Mountain. Forest. Ocean. Desert. Jungle. Places wild and untamed. Places stormy and cold. Places quiet and reflective where I could hear the chipmunks of thought scurrying through the leaves, the wrens of emotions singing today’s blues, and coyotes of wisdom padding by my tent in the middle of night calling to loneliness. Grief was the wilderness I had to cross that required more patience and courage than I thought I had.

I was hoping that grief’s darkness would be the cinematic version of being thrown into an alternative reality with colorful fractals and kaleidoscope images zooming past, like in Doctor Strange, but the place was just dark. Dark hours when little was visible, only fleeting images. Eternity came down with the stars to pause almost within touching distance, waiting for me to take a step towards it with a future that had yet to be imagined. I lingered in this peaceful silence that asked nothing of me, except everything.

My shadows held hard-won nuggets of wisdom, and I carry them in a pouch.

For a time, even my last place of refuge, the mountains and forests of Yosemite, were empty of beauty and joy because Evelyn’s death took them away. The ground I camped on was hard, thunderstorms were violent and wet, and Steller’s jays complained about everything. Yet, hiking alone in the otherness of the wilderness on backcountry trails gave me the time and space I needed to heal the rupture and find my way back. Over the months, staying a few days or a week at a time, my steps on the path lightened and nature’s wonder and awe returned. The sun rose, and set. The moon with its light rose from the dark side of the earth, illuminated the hidden places in the mountains, and set. They rose again, and set, and light gradually eased its way into the darkness that had filled my life.

A few brave friends came and sat with me in the silence knowing that they would not be able to take away my pain or fill the empty place within me. Yet, their simple presence and their hugs kept me connected to my community. I no longer felt alone.

In the beginning, I thought that grief was the enemy because it had knocked me down, so I fought back. That didn’t help. Then it seemed like a problem to figure out, but there were no solutions that took the pain away or brought Ev back. It became a therapist who kept asking questions and pushing me to go deeper, until the pressure became too much, the appendix of my emotions burst, and I finally understood what grief was trying to do.

Is grief necessary? Isn’t it an obsolete remnant, like the appendix, of a time from before scientific understanding enlightened us, and it no longer served a purpose? A vestigial organ that today doesn’t do anything? It may be superfluous, but if we ignore our appendix when it becomes inflamed, we die.

Is grief a wooden totem pole that stands in the center of town, with a raven on top to remind us of the gift of light, but also of death? And below this, a bear for courage. Then a carved frown of shame for our community’s failure to care for the grieving as we should. Or is grief a talisman, an amulet that we wear around our neck for protection, or a ring that we place on our finger to remind us that we have journeyed through fearful places and found the strength and wisdom to survive? Or is it a token we carry in our pocket that we flip every morning to decide which direction to head, each direction now being equal because we no longer fear death and because we desire to live?

Wild, wilder, a wild man in the wild West. The land west of longing. Desolate land, wasteland, the land of no return. I set the bones of my loved ones on the shelf and walk into the wilderness.

Grief is the blue shadow of things past. I think about this as I cook dinner for one, then wash my dishes at the sink, dry, and put them away, pausing now and then to remember what had been: warm sunny days, Ev’s cute little toes, her laughter, also the arguments, and the weariness of holding life together as it constantly threatened to pull apart. The struggle with low-paying jobs and bosses with limited imaginations. Her aches that came and went away, and one that didn’t. I lost more than my best friend when she died. I lost how the rumble of our days tumbled together into an eloquent life. I lost the one person who would always be there if I needed help. I lost the dreams we held in front of us to draw us through disappointments and doubts. We folded and refolded our lives together like origami for 18 years until her hands went limp. Now a flat sheet of paper lies on the table before me.

Is there any redemption in death? Perhaps for Evelyn who died young, full of compassion for every living creature, the reputed litmus test for heaven, before the bitterness, anger, and despair of old age seeped in and muddled her up. Any redemption for me? That I survived? Her death broke me apart, but her love salvaged my heart, so there’s that.

Salvage, savage. Salve in the fathomless dark. Time spools in the unmarked terrain of midnight when there are no hours. Time weightless and forever. I have come to trust the darkness, set aside what I once believed, and exist in the heart’s perpetual night. Everything is possible in a place that is not a place yet penetrates the illusions of ambition, pride, greed, and the curled smoke of regret and sorrow. All are let go. I stand in the water of a dark planet, under the stars and their birthing, in solitude’s long remembering, in an ocean that sways my body with its gathering swells and ebbing, its unhurried reflections, and the caress of sleepless waves. I listen to the distant buoy, and the soft dinging of its bell.

The desire to go on living remains, and I do not want to let it go because my dead wouldn’t want me to, and Ev would want to live, too, if she had the choice. A good life still seems possible, even one that has tattooed me with the emblems of death. And because the joy of living is strong enough to balance the sorrow that the deaths of loved ones bring. Grief has become an old friend who occasionally stops by for tea. I have grown fond of Celtic music with its twining melodies of sorrow and happiness, and I dance with grief in one hand and joy in the other.

In the blue hour of twilight, wild horses graze in the prairies of my heart. Sometimes they gallop in the stillness of night. Expression of how broken she felt by dementia, and this was her final gift of light before the darkness closed in. 

Image © Europeana