The Grief Club. Membership Non-Negotiable.

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For a whole amalgamation of reasons, people die. Whether we want them to or not because death comes to us all. It’s the inevitable consequence of life. An equal opportunity purveyor of souls that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the color of your skin, your age, your religion, your gender, sexual or political affiliation. It’s just that cruel and real and does not get any easier navigating through just because we know it’s coming — for those that leave, and for those that remain behind.

Thirty years ago my sister died of melanoma. Marilyn had just turned thirty-seven. I wish I could say my sister passed away quietly in her sleep. I wish I could say she felt no pain, wasn’t consciously aware of what was happening to her in those final weeks and moments leading up to her death when she’d lost all power of speech and lay in a vegetative state connected to a machine.

Oh yes, I’d love to believe that. But I knew differently. I knew despite her not uttering a word, or moving a muscle, the truth was after months of the usual fare on the cancer menu: radiation, chemo, blood transfusion, brain surgery and thoughts lost in moments of what would never be, my sister left this world pretty much in the same manner she came. Kicking and screaming. An unwilling comrade in this battle who did not go quietly into that good night as she silently fought, cried, yelled at an unforgiving God in a way that only warriors do when facing death. Ruthlessly and defiantly.

With me right by her side.

In the early hours before dawn as my family kept vigil, she waited for them all to leave the hospital room in order for us to be alone. There we said our goodbyes the only way we could, me clutching her hand, caressing her cheek, whispering, “I love you, it’s okay to go,” over and over. Everything inside those moments as I stood there, was utterly excruciating, waiting for the preordained. And when I saw her chest rise with what I knew was her final breath, I thought I would die with her.

And a part of me did.

In the days following her death things became what I would consider surreal. Cleaning out her apartment. The funeral. Sitting shiva. Everything and everyone around me appeared normal, in my mind though it was anything but as I lingered on the sidelines watching this muted macabre of bodies dressed all in black like a swarm of busy beetles, eating, drinking, carrying deli platters across the room as if this was just another family gathering.

I was lost in an infinite sea. Truly, truly lost. Unanchored to nothing or no one. And it was then when I felt myself sinking to this deep, dark abyss where I wasn’t sure anymore whether or not I wanted to hold on, I heard my sister’s voice in my head. So clear, so her … talking to me. At first I thought I was losing it. But as the conversation between us continued, the words filtering into my brain as if we were standing there together in the same room, something told me this was real. It just had to be Marilyn. Who else would be dictating to me what shoes to wear, that I better lay off the ice cream, why I needed to get rid of this thing and that, all the wonderfully nagging, bossy bitch things she would say to me when she was alive?

Like in life, she had remained my companion. The dialogue continued on a regular basis over the next twelve months. But then one day, right around the anniversary of her physical death, without warning, without so much of a goodbye, her voice disappeared. Suffice to say I was crushed to the bone as if she’d died all over again.

Over the past thirty years, I’ve thought a lot about the impact of death, the grieving process and that one burning question I’m positive we all ask ourselves from time to time, but never more so than when something divine shifts in the air and we’re forced to suspend our most fundamental belief. Is death really that final disconnect for us? In the physical sense, I think we can all agree that’s a yes. But on that beautifully tragic terrain where grief, loss, and love collide … maybe, just maybe not. What I experienced with my sister is something I know I’m not alone with. And if I’m not alone then we must allow for a greater landscape of possibilities that transcend the tangible. How as a civilization we perceive death. How we assimilate it. How we use it as a barometer from which we base our own lives because death is that never-again thing that happens to you where you’re suddenly facing a new reality that nine out of ten times isn’t so rosy. When death comes knocking … it owns you. It marks you. Then sucks you into a place from which you’ll never escape. Not completely or whole in the way you were before.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Psychiatrist

In the 1969 groundbreaking book, On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross laid out her theories on the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It was her contention that “through these stages we learn to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.”

I read this book. Although it offered some insightful things to consider as a whole, it fell short of helping me in any way. I knew immediately the bargaining stage, the acceptance, the denial, the depression didn’t apply. It was, however, the anger stage, the pure bitterness that stuck in my chest like barbed wire that I knew I simply could not get beyond.

For a long, long time.

I’ve come to believe that grief is a lonely, lingering sort of pain. Something that simply doesn’t go away. It has a beginning, but most times no end. The terrain is forever different and there’s no normal to return to while you learn to work through the mess. Oh yeah, it’s hard. It’s fucking brutal. Sometimes even frightening to the point ending it all seems the perfect solution. The only solution. But then you stop. You take a breath, look around at all you have to lose should you go down that path, then slug on.

One day at a time.

In the popular 1993 movie, Sleepless with Seattle, the main character, played by Tom Hanks, lost his wife, and the son seeing the depth of his father’s grief, feeling unable to reach him on his own, dials into a self-help guru for help.

Dr. Marcia Fieldstone: Sam, do you think there’s someone out there you could love as much as your wife?

Sam Baldwin: Well, Dr. Marcia Fieldstone, that’s hard to imagine.

Doctor Marcia Fieldstone: What are you going to do?

Sam Baldwin: Well, I’m gonna get out of bed every morning … breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out … and, then after a while, I won’t have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.”

The truth is when it comes to loss and grief as a culture we’re still very much behind the eight ball. We need to readjust the lens and see it for what it is. A process that can’t be fixed, dismissed, contained or forced into some sort of consensual form of expression. Because there are no one-size-fits-all, no pill or magic formula on how to get through it since grief has a mind of its own.

This is a club no one wants to be part of. It’s a membership that lasts for life. But with the right amount of support, time and endurance and resiliency, your status eventually does change and the darkness begins to lift.

It took me a long, long time to talk openly about my sister. The pain so bottomless the thought of it freaked me out, finding it so much easier to hold onto my armor rather than search for an understanding ear that would never replace the one I had lost. But twenty-five years after the fact, I did. And it felt like a door had cracked open. The sadness didn’t feel as intense, the hole in my heart not as wide, and the rock I’d been carrying around in my pocket with me all those years, not as heavy.

From the moment my sister died I understood that grief would always walk beside me. I understood it could not be rushed and that anyone experiencing a tragic loss, be it a loved one, a pet, a bad decision, a failed business, being told to “get over it,” was the last thing they wanted to hear. Because in truth, there’s no real getting over, letting go, or moving on. There’s simply you moving forward, letting life resume.

And that’s what I did. Sort of.

I woke up every morning. I breathed in and out. I saw sparks of something resembling happiness and grabbed it by the horns. I came to realize that although I might never let go of this sense of feeling cheated, or guilty that she had died and I had lived, I had to believe that my sister would really be pissed off at me for wasting one second of my life wallowing in this useless emotion. So I put it aside. For the most part anyway. Deciding enough of this shit. It’s high time to start honoring her memory. And I knew the only way for me to do that was to celebrate her most important legacy. Her life. To live each and every day as if it might be my last; while maintaining a sharp eye on the future — just in case it’s not.

These are things I tell myself because I have to. Which is okay. So I can be okay and continue this celebration that must never end with me shouting into the universe, “I love you. I miss you and I hope against hope you’re out there, somewhere, watching me from afar … and missing me too.”

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Inside The Garden Of Our Imagination. How We Create. Why We Write.

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“I think there are two types of writers: the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”

                                                               — George R. R. Martin

How we see ourselves creatively has always been a fascinating topic for me. So when I found this excerpt from one of the author’s interviews, I knew right away which camp I belonged. I saw the black and white of it. The explicitness versus the ambiguity. And although these approaches couldn’t be any more different, when it comes to creating, we all start at the same place: the beginning.

For a writer it’s with a blank sheet of paper. For an artist an empty canvas, for a sculptor a lump of clay, and for a novice literary gardener who hadn’t a clue what she was doing … it was nothing more than the dirt beneath her feet. That and vision, I thought when my husband and I first bought the house of our dreams. A house which, by the way, didn’t start out in that blissful condition of completeness nor the small runway strip of garden trailing up the walkway. Both needed loving hands to resuscitate them back to life and a healthy sense of humor which I obviously must have had gazing beyond the rusted pipes, the chipped ceilings, the rotted roof, the leaking swimming pool and the jungle of weeds crawling about—because I didn’t turn and run.

In no time at all I threw myself into the world of gardening. I learned its lingo. I adopted its blueprints, its perfectionisms in order to replicate what Home and Garden and Pinterest promised me. I even suited up in the requisite attire—floppy Aunt Bea hat, Nitrile gloves, gobs of sunscreeen—just to demonstrate my newfound devotion. But devotion wasn’t enough. As plants began dying left and right I realized no matter how quickly I wanted my garden to transform, it was a process. A learning curve. And ridiculously expensive.

I was by no means dripping in money. We had used all our savings as a down payment, so you can imagine the toll it took. But, back then, I was naive and undeterred. Back then my knees didn’t pop like the Tin Man’s. I wanted Monet’s garden no matter what it cost. Like I said … I was naive and undeterred.

Days after work and on weekends when I wasn’t shuttling the children to and from soccer practice and various playdates, I weeded. Up to my eyeballs in compost, I dug. I batted away flies that wanted a piece of me for lunch while watering my charges under a brutal ninety-degree Floridian sun. Weeks turned into months and months turned into years. And as the periwinkles took flight, as the pansies danced their way up to my front door, as the bougainvilleas exploded in purpley-purples up their filigree ladder, I continued to work the garden. Almost every day. Not because I had to anymore, but because I wanted to be surrounded by the comforting silence that had blossomed into a better marriage than the one I had; which was crumbling into ruins.

At a time when I’d hoped my life would take that much-needed uphill turn, the fate gods had different plans for me. So it was there, in the garden, I allowed myself to sink into myself. To reach that sacrosanct place of wounded splendor where judgment, broken hearts, crying babies and monsters did not exist.

Even if it meant for just a little while.

Eventually we got divorced. We sold the house. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do. I had visions of growing old in that house, creating family traditions and watching a life—my life—flourish all around me. But because the financial burden was simply too great for what little I was earning at the time, this place I called home would now be replaced by someone else’s vision. Someone else’s universe.

Yes, I was moving away, but not moving on. That would take a little bit longer.

The decision to write was never a conscious one. Nor did it come to me then. It came a few years later, out of need. The kind of need that feels like you’re drowning and flailing against a silent blue terror. And I knew, just knew if I didn’t at least try to give voice to this feeling, I would be lost.

Why one writes I believe is a question answered differently by everyone. To become famous, to affect change, to alter the course of humanity, to heal those bleeding wounds, to record our stories are the foundations for every work of art.

“We also write to heighten our own awareness of life,” said Anais Nin. “We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.”

And if we don’t write …

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart — your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice,” Anne Lamott observed. “That is really all you have to offer us, and it’s why you were born.”

They say those authors we read are those influences that tell us who we are, that help to define us as writers. And I believe that’s true. At one time or another we are the students and they are the teachers.

In my wildest dreams I never imagined myself a gardener. Nor a writer. And much like gardening, a writer’s life is a lonely one. We’re left to our own devices, endless hours at a time. Creating worlds in which we sit day after day, sometimes struggling for the words to come, sometimes not. Typing and trashing, sulking and laughing, drinking lots and lots of coffee, committed and bound — we’re a unique tribe. It’s so goddamn hard to bare all to a sea of nameless faces without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to give up. How many times I’ve wanted to scream at the air like a motherfucker! The truth is … it’s so many I’ve stopped counting. And yet, there I am. Every morning. Without fail. A graduate from the Glutton-For-Punishment University in front of that same white screen flashing that same reminder: let’s get busy!

And so I do.

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