Loss is a Bitch
No matter how much I try, I'm sad more than I realize.
I’ve spent the last few days taking some time away from the keyboard. I felt burned out and honestly, not very motivated to say much. I told this to my wife and she said, “Perhaps you should write something more personal.” Of course, I drew a blank as to what that would be. Emotions…yuck.
Just a moment ago, some memories came back. Not sure why but I’ve stopped questioning when these things happen. I’ve taken it that the universe has decided this is something to process and share. So here goes nothing.
I was around eight years old when the next door neighbor to my grandmother had a heart attack. Her son came over and threw open the front door yelling for help. My aunt ran next door to see what she could do. I remember watching out the window, seeing the ambulance arrive, and my aunt walking back in my grandmother’s house crying as she collapsed on the floor. She provided CPR until the ambulance arrived and you know it took a while to get to the black neighborhood. She kept saying “I tried. I kept trying but she’s gone. She’s gone.” I saw the pain in her face but I remember feeling nothing. It was just something to observe but I understood death. I knew she was gone but not the pain of the loss.
I remember my Mother’s father (Grampa) passing away. I have this mental image of her leaning on the mantel above the fireplace where his picture was. She was crying, her forehead resting on her arms, and she lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were red and tears were falling. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what to do. She just said, “Hey bud. Mommy’s ok, I’m just really sad right now.” I nodded and went back to my room. That was that.
I was twelve when my girlfriend died in a plane crash. Our mutual friend called my house to tell me but I didn’t believe him. I don’t think I wanted to. It seemed so hard to conceive but I was worried. I called her house but nobody picked up. I even saw on the news that evening a Cessna had crashed at the local airfield but there was no further information.
This wasn’t possible, right?
I woke up the next day and walked into the living room asking my mother for the paper so I could check if any of this was true. She set the paper down in a hurry and guided me back to my room. I can still hear the sound the paper made when it was set down. She said, “I’m sorry, it’s true honey. She didn’t survive.” All sound stopped. I remember crying so hard and screaming, “No, no Mom, no, please no!” The pain sucked the air from my chest. She was only twelve like me. How does this happen?
I didn’t go to the funeral. It was open casket and I was told she was horribly disfigured by the crash. It was so bad her mother screamed in the church, “This isn’t my daughter! This isn’t my baby!” and broke down crying. Why it was open casket is beyond me.
My parents didn’t want me to have that as the last memory of her. What they didn’t know was she asked me at school if I wanted to go flying with her that evening to look at Christmas lights. I remember saying, “There was no way my Mom would let me. She’d kill me if I did that.” And we laughed as kids do. She said, “Well, I’ll call you later when I get back.” She gave my hand a squeeze before walking away. I can still see her walking down the hallway of our middle school, stopping before she went into the classroom to smile at me. I smiled back. That smile is frozen in time forever as my last memory of her.
I went to the house the next week to pay my respects to her family and her mother was just crying when the door opened. I remember she hugged me so tight. We sat on the couch together looking through their photo albums. I listened to her as she told me about each picture. When I left, I was sad, confused, and lost. The day she died is the last day I played with toys. None of it seemed to matter anymore. It was 5 days before Christmas.
I was fourteen when my father’s mother (Grandma) died. I remember walking into the living room and my dad was sitting on the couch. His face was wet, he was staring into nothing, and my mother was sitting beside him. I had never seen my father cry before. He turned his head and looked at me with so much sadness. Tears just falling off his face and he spoke in that voice we all know when the pain is too much to bear, “Grandma’s gone, son. My mother’s dead.” He broke down and my breath hitched from seeing him this way. Along with the knowledge that my grandmother was gone. Like her neighbor years before. I only nodded and went back to my room. My mother looked at me but she needed to be there for my father. I understood that. I sat on my bed and cried quietly as I said over and over to myself, “My grandmother’s gone.”
After a while I got up, walked in the living room, and told my parents I was going to ride my bike. Nobody tried to stop me or asked if I was ok. It’s just how we were. I left and went a few houses down to the only other black kid in the neighborhood. A friend I could rely on so I knocked on his door. When he answered I just said, “Hey man, my grandma’s dead and I don’t want to be at home. Wanna go for a ride?” He didn’t hesitate and we spent the day on our bikes, riding through the neighborhoods. There was so much pain at home, I didn’t want to be in it.
By the time I was an adult, I was no stranger to loss. Most of us aren’t but to me, having more than 20 people I was close to pass away before I was 18 seemed like a lot. Just how it felt. As an adult, I’ve lost friends to suicide, murder, drug overdoses, and illness. Death was a constant. I knew it well.
I was 36 when I became a widower. You could add all the loss I’ve faced in my entire life and it wouldn’t come close to watching my wife pass away in my arms. Brain cancer is one cruel fucking way to go. She had 3 brain surgeries, chemo, experimental treatments, and eventually we just ran out of options.
She passed away on her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. I watched them call the time of her death and I cried quietly, controlling my breathing and letting the tears fall. I didn’t want to cry out loud because I’d read that the last thing to go is hearing. I couldn’t fathom causing her any further distress by listening to me lose my shit so I put my head on her hand and held it. Her favorite song was playing in the background as I talked to her and told her it was ok. I’d take care of everything so just rest and save me a seat for when I get there. I finally whispered goodbye and sat with her until it was time for her to leave.
The coroner came and started to wheel her from the room and he asked me, “Do you want to say goodbye once more?” I was sitting in a chair across from her room by this point and replied, “No, she’s not there.” To some that may seem cold but to me it made sense. Who was I saying goodbye to and who was I doing it for? She and I had all the hard conversations we could over the 18 months she fought. There was nothing left to say. I only knew I had to go home and tell our children their mother was gone. That alone crushed what I had left of my soul that day.
She was adamant that I cook Thanksgiving dinner no matter what, so I did. The kids came down to help for a bit and when we sat down to eat, we all looked at her empty chair. Our youngest son was a little over one year old by now, sitting in his high chair oblivious to the way our world had shifted. The other four kids picked at their plates the best they could before they eventually drifted away from the table. I sat there feeding my son, alone, sad, and lost once again. Experiencing the saddest holiday of my life and of my children’s. I looked up at the ceiling and just asked, “Why? What did we do to deserve this? What did these kids do? Did I do something wrong? If I did, I’m sorry. Whatever it was, I’m sorry.” No answer I could hear. I looked at my son and he just smiled at me. So I pushed it all down and smiled back because he needed his father. Plus he was still hungry and loving his mother’s recipe for mashed potatoes.
After putting the food away, cleaning up, and everyone was asleep, I sat in the living room trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to do. I was a single father of 5 now. I had to work full-time as well. How was I going to do this? I felt sorry for the kids that I was the parent they were left with. Me. I wasn’t enough for them. I was going to fail them so badly. Life, as I already knew, was an unfair and cruel thing at times and this was the peak of terrible things as I saw it.
These memories swirl in my mind on a rotating basis and they feel hard to overcome some days. I tend to dive into work or writing about the war or trying to help people see the things that hide in plain sight. But some days that feels futile because I know how much bad will play out over the next few years. No matter what is said or written.
I’m sad for my children and the world they’ll inherit. Part of me is glad their mother doesn’t have to experience this but even that makes me feel guilty. I’m forty-four years old and still feel so damn lost most of the time.
But, I’m too dumb to quit so I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Trying the best I can each day, hoping for a better tomorrow.
Loss is a bitch.
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Thank you for these remembrances of your loved ones. I subscribe to your substack not only for your insightful analysis, but especially for the moral center in your worldview.
Your life contains so, so much loss. As someone who also experienced much loss early in his own life (dad at 9, mom at 15, all grandparents by 23), I’d gently suggest that ‘putting one foot in front of the other’, isn’t dumb, but wise and yes, hopeful. To paraphrase an incredibly helpful piece of writing on grief and loss, loss can transform us to become more compassionate people and to discover new reservoirs of strength. And when you channel that compassion and strength to help those around you, you not only make their lives better but honor your lost loved ones in doing so. It’s odd to say that I’m a better person for all of my loss (no matter how much I miss them); it’s also undeniably true.
I do my best to apply those lessons to navigate the ‘everything everywhere all at once’ political era we’re trapped in. There’s just too much good being shredded in real time to keep up or fully cope. So I do what I can, revisiting Rebecca Solnit’s counsel: ‘The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.’ So I help wherever I can and hold faith that our rebuilding will create something better and more decent.
Your writing is also a light shining up and pointing the way out for the rest of us. Onward.
Thanks for sharing these very personal reflections. It’s a very scary time to think of our children inheriting this world.