The thing itself

Hi! It’s me, Zoe. You can read a little bit about Good Grief here. If someone you know could benefit from an online place that talks and thinks about sobbing and friendship, consider sharing with your buds.

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Hi. I’m Zoe, and I love to laugh. If you know me, you know this. If you don’t know me, it will become apparent as we spend some time together. There’s no way around it, though – I’m going to write about grief, and grief is decidedly unlaughy sometimes. But grief can also be kind of funny! Like the time this past summer I got a terrible sunburn on my ass and back because I, newly single, was so used to having someone apply sunscreen there for me (which honestly is an entire love language). Or the time I decided to ride a bike across France without much training, much French, or much in the way of a route with a stranger turned cherished pal. Or my disastrous foray into Hinge, which on my best date had me 100 miles from home, lost and pantsless in a parking lot in the rain, contemplating eating a wet hotdog out of a man’s truck. The things we do for dick love.

Anyway! Let’s talk about grief.

Whether or not you’ve experienced personal grief, we are in a moment of such immense collective grief. We survived an entire pandemic together and barely stopped to mourn the people and the way of life we left behind. We are witnessing a genocide, a famine, and several migration crises and wars in high definition. We are experiencing the dissolution of essential community structures that keep us all genuinely safe. We are watching natural ecosystems and human and animal populations suffer deeply in the face of climate change. We are, each of us, holding part of this grief. And so while my personal grief is so small, so specifically mine, it has helped me understand our grief better – how to face what is unfaceable, how to be with people in despair, how to be with a community in our collective lamentation, processing, and action.

Talking to people who’ve experienced deep personal grief, the attendant feelings and phenomena ring familiar, even if the precipitating experiences vary widely. These phenomena float along as chunks, as deeply specific, sometimes somatic, sometimes heady, sometimes emotional blocks of ice, insurmountable, changing in shape, melting with body heat and time. I plan to look at these chunks (like loss of appetite, sleeplessness, hope, despair, timelessness, groundlessness, magical thinking) in future writing, through interviews, conversations, essays, book reports. For now, though, I just want to talk about the thing itself. Today is the anniversary of my life falling apart.

One year ago, my partner of five years left me out of the blue. We woke up, we talked about planning our five-year anniversary trip, I asked him if he’d help me pick a new kitchen sink out later that day, and I left for therapy. During that session my therapist said, “Well, I’d consider that we’ve done good work on the things you initially came in for, so what’s next?” And I said, “I’d like to talk about deepening my relationship with my partner. We’re celebrating five years, and I’d love to focus on strengthening our communication with each other.” (I know this is so on the nose. It’s hard even for me to believe. I went back and read my journal from that day, and that’s what’s reflected there.) I got home, and something was terribly off. He was in his pajamas at 2 PM. He’d been crying. I asked what was wrong. He told me he was sad. I asked, without realizing I was serious, if he was leaving me. He stared at me, asked if we could sit and talk. It was a terrible day. I thought I was going to fall through the floor. I lost the person I’d been building my life with, but perhaps worst of all, I lost a dear friend.

I texted my friend Tia, and she and her partner Ross had me over, put me in cozy pants, brought me four to six different beverages, and made us a fire. I cried and hoped hard. I went back to the house I would keep calling “our” home for weeks, by accident. I called my sister, Rachel. That night, I couldn’t sleep in my own bed. I lay in front of the TV and played all the Harry Potter movies in a row, rousing from fitful, tearful napping the moment I’d hear the credits roll. I did this until 6 AM when I got up, fed the animals, and texted my best friend, Maggie. She left Chicago within the hour to come be with me. She made me do things I was dreading – build a fire (he’d always built the fire), cook dinner (I’d cooked dinner for my partner and I almost every night), move my body (I’d been in one position for nearly 24 hours). Before she left, we made up a best friend handshake that we promptly forgot, and she presented me with a handmade silver acorn charm on a thin chain that I have not taken off more than a couple of times for doctors appointments since that day.

Over the following days and weeks, I was passed gently between the hands of friends. Christine brought me noodles and drew with me, Augusta ate ice cream in savasana pose with me, Emily and her little boy Toma walked with me, Morgan and Holly made dinner with me, Michaela sat with me quietly and warmly, Terra rested in the weak sun in their yard with me, so many sweeties called me. It felt unfamiliar and hard to need so much, and it felt so warm and so good to be given so much.

What I could not have known as this was happening was that it was just the beginning of a life turning inside out. This event was the first sign of a fire that would transmute most of the structure of my life to ashes in the ensuing months. Rather than share the laundry list, I feel most comfortable saying that every part of my life was affected. As one grief stacked on top of another, the only thing that remained constant and trustworthy was friendship.

Over the course of the year, something I feared – that people would eventually retreat – has not come to pass. Instead, most of my relationships have deepened. I have found myself able to be more socially brave, vulnerable, and generous than I’ve felt in so long. I developed tools for weathering big storms that I’d love to share another time. Grief has cracked me open. As my gaze has become less myopic and my eyes have refocused on the world around me, I’ve found a renewed sense of mutual support in my relationships that has reattached me to the world, even if my place in it is different and more tenuous. I feel more sure about my capacity, about my responsibility to my friends, my community, and to the whole.

The end of this is getting a little too neat and tidy, which I don’t think is totally honest. So I think I’ll wrap it up and say, I don’t know what the future holds for me, but today, a year after my life began spectacularly unravelling, I am okay. I’m good. I’m literally smiling writing this, how freaking dorky!!! I guess the point of this is: grief is long, but friendship is longer. Next time, I want to bring you some tools I used to make it through this year.

To my friends, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you as much as a person can love you. I never fully knew who you were until I needed you so much.

P.S. If you’re reading this because you are grieving, I’m here from the future to tell you that it is not permanent. You will make it through. I’m here if you need someone. You are so loved.

P.P.S. As I was ending this, I was feeling like “Damn, I wish there was the perfect thing to illustrate what it feels like to be beloved for who I am and to belove people for who they are,” and then my friend Holly sent me this video of herself dancing in a field to “That’s the Way It Is” by Celine Dion, and I was like “Yeah OK this is it.” So, I’m sharing that with her permission. Don’t give up on your faith, love comes to those to who believe it. And THAT’S the way it is.