Trajectories of grief (2019)
My mother grew up with one older brother, who lived outside of Seattle with his wife and children—also two girls and one boy, although his son was their youngest. The same blur of constant action as my mother, Howie divided his free time between the ocean and the mountains. He was a radiologist. In 1985, the week after Christmas, he left his new sailboat and went skiing with his family in Oregon. They drove home Saturday, his children teasing him and him humorously humiliated because he couldn’t keep up with them on the slopes. They pulled into their driveway and left the unpacking for Sunday.
My cousin Kathy and I were infants and then toddlers together in New Haven when our fathers were still finishing their residencies at Yale.
Graduated from college now and working in Seattle, Kathy spent that Saturday night in her own apartment. She came home the next morning to have breakfast with her family because Martha was returning to college. When their parents drove her younger sister to the airport that afternoon, Howie wore what Martha called his “signature sweatsuit”—brown and white and very ugly, which his children lovingly loathed.
Back home from the airport, just as it was getting dark, Howie left the kitchen in that same sweatsuit to go running. It was a short run, his first in a long time. Rel was in their bedroom unpacking, and Taylor was practicing drums in the basement. Coming back up the driveway after his run, Howie collected an armload of firewood from the garage. He had just closed the kitchen door behind himself when he collapsed. He fell face down, the firewood clattering across the floor.
Falling firewood was what Taylor heard. Running upstairs, he turned his father over, hollering for his mother to call 911. He was sixteen. “Taylor was directing me the entire time,” Rel remembers. They were going to do CPR, he told her, and they tried to resuscitate him until the paramedics arrived. A heart attack had killed Howie immediately. Facing a teenager who had just tried to save his father’s life, a paramedic told Taylor that he had been dead before he hit the floor.
But the paramedics didn’t take the body. When they backed their truck out of the driveway, they left Howie on the floor and Rel in another room, beside the phone. Martha was still in the air, and Kathy was now at the airport herself, saying goodbye to her boyfriend.
People could walk to the gate in those days without a ticket. Kathy was at the gate when she heard herself being paged. She picked up the phone. She spoke to her mother. She learned that her father had died. Hanging up the phone and turning away from the counter, she saw two friends running the length of the terminal toward her. One of them drove her home. The other drove her car. Stepping out of their car in her driveway, Kathy went in through the kitchen door as always and found her father’s body still in his sweatsuit, stretched out on the floor. Until that moment calm, she stood stock still in the doorway screaming and crying.
Later that night, Rel finally reached Martha at college. Martha didn’t believe her. She flat out denied it could have happened. Then she stayed up all night and flew home the next morning, huddled next to the window, weeping almost without stopping.
We joined them a few days later, there at the start of their long trajectory of grief, my mother and my sisters and I. I remember watching them in a living room, taking turns wearing Howie’s watch. Martha sat on the floor. Kathy and Taylor sat on the couch. Martha would wear the watch until Kathy asked for a turn. A few minutes later, Taylor would slip it gently off Kathy’s wrist and onto his own. It had a spring band. Then Martha would reach out silently and touch his knee. The bulky watch spun loosely around their narrow wrists. Peacefully it passed around this circle as they listened to everyone else in the room and said very little themselves.
We tend to think that our experiences of anything—grief, childbirth, or weddings, the first day of college or what it is like to fail a driver’s test—are more relevant than they are. My family knew, or thought we knew, what lay ahead for them. Standing off to one side of the altar, holding what she had written in one hand, my mother gave a eulogy at the memorial service. She talked about her childhood with Howie and her admiration for him, and she expressed her sense of loss:
Howie’s was an unfinished life—projects unfinished, unbegun, and yet to be invented. He probably never would have run out of plans, but this was much, much too soon to cut them off. … I myself am angry as well as bereaved—at what Howie lost, which he will never have to confront, and at our loss, which will always be with us.
Anger defined grief in our family. Grief entailed anger. When she searched for a description of being a widow and of watching her children mourn, this was the first word my mother found:
Anger does not need an object in order to exist—but it FINDS objects. It is a powerful poison for survivors. There is more emotion than can be dealt with. What happens to it all? Eventually it fades … at least mostly … maybe not entirely … I’m not sure.
When she reassured Rel and her children about their future, what I heard was her reflecting on the legacy of all that anger.
Rel—There is life after the widowing! Somewhere out there.
Kathy, Martha, Taylor—Your whole adult life lies ahead. This loss at this time will affect the rest of that life, for sure. The loss, the anger, the unfinished business of becoming your own person in the adult world, the profound change in your family dynamic—you cannot simply put it behind you and march on . . . because it won’t stay behind you. Please don’t stop trying to understand how it is affecting you . . . and please . . . don’t be afraid to ask for help.
That she had tried to do it all alone, that she hadn’t asked for help—this remains my mother’s primary regret even today.
I sat in the front row of that crowded church. Hundreds of people packed the pews and stood in the aisles. The audience didn’t seem to understand what my mother said about anger, particularly my aunt and my cousins. “I wasn’t aware of feeling angry,” Kathy told me years later. Ours was not their experience of grief. We shared no quiet moments of mourning, the way my cousins shared that watch. Grief was never peaceful in our house, but fierce and loud.
Head bowed over the program in my lap, flipping one page back and forth, I experienced again my shame at all our anger. I remembered a Christmas we spent here in Seattle with Howie and Rel, two years after my father died. We came so we wouldn’t spend the holiday at home without him, and my mother and I fought constantly. Anger atomized the four of us for a time, and that isolation became another loss, its own separate injury.
Then the service was over. Exhausted by a week of shock and grief, the extended family crowded into my aunt’s kitchen—the same kitchen where Howie’s body had lain, just inside the door. Everyone who wanted a drink had one. Voices rose. People laughed. One of my mother’s cousins sat on a banquette by a window, holding a cocktail. My sisters and I stood together near the doorway, and she spoke to us in a loud, stagey voice. “While we are thinking and talking about those who have died —”
The kitchen fell quiet.
“—I want to say how much I still miss your father. I enjoyed Clint, and I miss him every time we get together. Really, I do.” She paused, thinking about why. “I mean, there was someone who understood the whole world so deeply—” She stopped again, looking for the right contrast. “—yet he still loved it.”
The kitchen remained silent for a moment. I may have thanked her from across the room or gone to sit with her on the banquette, but I felt like I was standing stock still. I saw my father again, right at that moment, as if he lay stretched out before me on the floor. Amidst the immediacy of their loss, I confronted the hard, unyielding permanence of mine.
I had gone to college in New Haven, less than a mile from my mother and my sisters. I had finally left them only the summer before to study at Oxford. Howie died on my first trip home. Together, we flew back to Connecticut. Then I flew alone back into the dark, damp, and inhospitable English winter, where I had known no one for more than a few months.
I lived in a modern, brutalist building there just a few feet from a congested road. I had a bed and a desk between cinder block walls. Facing away from the congested road, my room looked into a beautiful college founded during the middle ages. What I most remember from that time is the sound of traffic behind me and the dark window beyond my desk while I stared through the reflection of the lamp and all my stacks of books at the shadows of medieval structures outside and the silhouettes of people walking past. In the months that followed, I kept stopping at travel agents to price flights back to New York. Then I would visualize the bus ride to Gatwick or Heathrow, passport in my pocket, as I struggled against a powerful longing to return home and fix something, although I couldn’t explain what I would fix or how I would fix it or why.
