The Evolution of Grief
I remember a couple years back driving with my now fiancée, Jackie, near Sunset Cliffs in San Diego with the top down as the sun was setting and Empress Of’s “When I’m with Him” was playing on the car stereo. The way she was rubbing my hair in the breeze from the passenger seat and the cinematic color in the sky through my polarized sunglasses. Literally driving off into the sunset.
That first winter in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles in 2019 after having relocated from Brooklyn. Long solo walks along the Strand, trying to understand how I could deserve all this. The pink and orange horizons. The sunset scooter rides with my son, Dash. The night swims in the Pacific. Poolside at the Parker. The courtyard of the Chateau Marmont. The good life beginning again. My late wife, Kit, wanted everything more than me. She wanted it all, and here I am.
I think back to the night when everything changed. I fell asleep on a couch in the waiting room of Weill Cornell on the Upper East Side on Monday, June 26, 2017, with my friend Matt and woke up before sunrise the next day. It was Dash’s second birthday and his mother, Kit, and unborn sister, Margeaux, were not going to make it out of that hospital. Soon I would be experiencing everything all over again: the false starts, the tidal waves. I would learn all too well that farewells are sudden and miracles are gradual.
I had 13 amazing years with his mother, and Dash got only two. He has no recollection of those two years. I tell him that his mother loved him more than anything and that she would be so proud of him. I think about all the moments that she is missing. Like his first-ever goal during the last match of his most recent soccer season. It saddens me to think that his mother was not there for that. I could see her on the sideline jumping up and down excitedly cheering for him. And then hosting the team and their families back at our house after the game to celebrate the season. But that’s a parallel universe.
Close to five years have passed since Kit’s death. I’m back to where I wanted to be professionally as a creative director for a makeup brand. Kit would have loved that. Dash is now six years old and in the first grade. I could never sketch as a kid, or even as an adult, but Dash has already developed that skill. He has started to draw pictures as a means of storytelling, and this frequently includes sketches of his mother. His pictures canvas the whole of our refrigerator. Time and again, he asks me why his mother had to die and what happened. I’m always very matter of fact. “She died suddenly from cardiac arrest; no blood would pump to her body.”
The reason for her death is a bit more complex. I tell him that what happened to her is very rare; there’s no rhyme or reason. I put it somewhat bluntly that a boy needs his mother and she should not have died. “But sometimes, that’s just how it goes.” This is always the most excruciating part of the grief. This is the piece that I can never reconcile. I tell him that we can come back from anything as people. I could lose my job tomorrow. We could lose the clothes on our backs and the roof over our head. But as long as we have our health and each other, we can recover from anything. What I didn’t understand when survival mode kicked in back in the summer of 2017 is the cumulative effect that all this would have on me. That there would be a ghost under the bed that I would eventually need to exorcise.
Dash tells me more and more that he doesn’t want to lose me. He doesn’t want me to die. I tell him that I’m not going anywhere. His dad is built for all of this. What I don’t tell him is that all the trauma takes its toll and the grief equates to internal bleeding. And at some point, you bleed out. There is an invisible urgency in everything that I do, but I’m weary. Though there are moments when the sight lines are panoramic, things don’t ever truly get back to feeling light. And I can’t tell if that is a by-product of parenting or the weight of the loss. All I know is, when I’m at my loneliest, I miss my best friend. I miss Kit.
I tell Dash a version of a story along the lines of this: Like anything, one day there’s an opening and you take it. So you pick the tempo back up and let go of what came before. You recover your nerve. You surprise yourself. And even though the house always wins, you go all in and get it all back. Some days, you can see everything again. There are these pockets, and when you encounter them, you need to lock in. That’s the over-under. You decide you want more and go for it. You distill the electric shock and make it energy.
There’s one other part to the story that I save for a later time. It’s something my grandmother told me before she passed away: “Life is what you make it.” That first summer in L.A., I remember being on the couch of my apartment with Jackie. I was running my hand through my hair, distressed that it was almost August. Growing up in New York, August always perpetuated anxiety in that the end of summer was imminent. Without hesitation, Jackie smiled back at me and gently proclaimed, “Summer is just starting.” We would have our last beach day that season sometime in November.
It occurred to me that there’s no imaginary plot—you continuously rewrite your future in stars. In the interim, you just bide your time on the bottom of the ocean until one day you are able to catapult yourself back to the surface. “All in good time,” as Kit would say.
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