First, I practice dying.
The alarm goes off at seven-thirty. I claw through the thick, vaporous tendrils of dissipating nightmares, dreams of my parents drowning in pits of tar, my teeth crumbling like chalk. To die, to sleep—to sleep—perchance to dream.
The heavy Southern heat echoes against my body, pinning me down. Dense, misty, equatorial light dribbles through my window. My skin is damp, my hair tangled and stiff with salt, sheets twisting around my limbs, choking off the slow-moving blood in my veins. I don’t drink anymore—haven’t for a while—but the hangover lingers like a ghost in the walls—a phantom limb insisting upon itself.
In the palm tree outside my window, the birds trill stridently, desperately, with an exhausted persistence—projection, maybe, but New Orleans is a city that speaks in such tongues: raucous and bone-weary. And these are bona fide city birds—coarse, philistine creatures, batting their gasoline feathers against a cruel, white-hot sky.
My heartbeat slows. I set my timer. And I rehearse. I start with what’s inside before moving outward: initial panic, followed by a thread of tranquility. Then: a steady dissolution, pieces of me floating off until there is nothing but bone. Memories whirl about like leaves, reaching stillness, at last, on the glassy surface of a frozen pond.
In tenth grade, I read Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire.” Since then, my morbid fantasies always feature animals—an old dog, a phosphorescent whisper of fish, a cackling murder of crows. If things go my way, I’ll be bathing in the honey-blue haze of a potent painkiller and amenable to its attendant mirages.
Deep, shuddering inhale. My least favorite part of any story: the end. It’s the finality of it that bothers me the most. I am nothing if not a perfectionist, and the very notion of closure induces a toddler’s panic-driven tantrum. It has to be done just right—a sentiment that precludes all possibility of satisfaction. I focus on the sound of the exhale—the earth’s oceans wrapped in a seashell. Then I bring my life to a close with the sweet melancholy of finishing a good book. You were right, he murmured to the old fellow of Sulpher Creek; you were right.
If I’m feeling courageous, I might contemplate being dead for a minute or two. I might visualize my body disintegrating into the ground, feeding the creatures that grow there, the plants and animals that will embody the pieces of me. I might take a moment to appreciate the view from here—that is, nowhere—an emptiness I seem to remember, to which I long to return.
Later, the dog howled loudly. A little longer, it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and ran along the trail toward the camp it knew, where there were the other food providers and fire providers.
Here’s my big secret: despite my overt morbidity, I am afraid of dying. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have inculcated a brazen fascination with mortality into my persona out of superstition—out of the infantile impulse to domesticate the monsters under my bed.
Why is everything you create so steeped in misery and suffering, my aunt inquires, her voice crackling over the miles between us, our antithetical ethics clashing together somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Because courage isn’t the opposite of fear; it’s the remedy for it.
A more honest response: Because I have constructed an identity around my suffering, and without it, who would I be? What would I write about?
The artist Rick Rotante said: “the creative process seems indelibly linked to struggle and strife. The world believes that artists are meant to suffer.” Of course, the artist, being an indelible part of the world she seeks to transcend, is complicit in her own mythologizing; if the rest of us think the artist is meant to suffer, that’s because she gave us the idea. Those who spin stories eventually find themselves tangled up in them. The mythmaker becomes the myth.
We like our artists complicated, scarred by their undaunted exploration of the proverbial abyss. We want to believe that they have been somewhere we haven’t—that they can spare us the trouble of venturing there ourselves. “If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow,” asks Ai Weiwei, “then what is ‘art’ for?”
Art, as it turns out, is for the martyrs. It is the paramount civic duty of one who has selfishly surrendered herself to impulse—the price the artist pays for abstaining from the ordinary, the mundane. Creativity is modern mysticism; it is a ritualistic foray into the far edges of conventional experience. But revelation is rarely free, and art, as the tangible product of revelation, becomes the necessary sacrifice, a tribute to the Moirai who so willingly part the curtain.
The artist suffers, so the rest of us don’t have to—or so the story goes. She ventures into territory we wish to see only in pictures and pages. For this, we admire her—worship her, even. We erect monuments and cathedrals in her memory. We dedicate songs, books, poems, dreams, careers, fashion trends, and internet memes—we write biographies of her suffering and strife. We expect her imminent death—we require it to confirm the fundamental premises of a timeless, impenetrable argument: that art occurs in the liminal space between the artist’s encounter with mortality and her submission to it.
It goes without saying that I am an artist—or rather, that I have the ignominious tendency to refer to myself as such—and so am held to certain expectations (namely, my own). As Leslie Jamison writes: “stories about getting better are never quite as good as those about falling apart.” My traumas, my neuroses, take center stage—in my writing, my relationships, the things I say, and the clothes I wear. I was once proud of my dark sense of humor, my morose collection of teeth and taxidermy, the ease with which I recounted my epics of addiction, assault, agony. Now, I am mortified by my juvenile, Janus-faced games. Also, I’m afraid since poetic justice always seems to find a way.
In a moment of uncharacteristic solemnity, Mark Twain wrote, “the fear of death follows from the fear of life.” No self-respecting artist ought to be afraid of life—or death, for that matter. It makes me think of self-described “god-fearing” people: the notion that abstract fears can take hold of a person’s entire being, that the threat of dread can mimic the promise of relief, like a desert mirage of scintillating water.
It’s true: I’m afraid. I’m afraid of obsolescence and mediocrity, fearful of living and dying—of making one worth the other. And while I worry about my impending death, I also fear it won’t come soon enough—or in a sufficiently literary manner, whatever that means.
In my active addiction, I knew a painter—or rather, a woman who had once been a painter. When I met her, she spent her days shooting meth, watching Alex Jones on YouTube, and reading blog posts about flesh-eating bacteria and radio-wave sensitivity. In her time off, she sat by the window with a 32-caliber handgun, hoping to intercept any unlucky intruders. She told me once that she started using speed to facilitate her encounters with the divine. What a long way from that she had come. Twain’s quote makes me think of her—what I was once, what I’ve become.
Whether by default or design, creativity and suffering are inextricably linked in the collective unconscious. The Ancient Greeks believed that the muses bestowed creativity and lunacy concomitantly. Aristotle predicted a physiological correlation between insanity and genius. Lord Byron said: “we of the craft are crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.” Query: which came first, creativity or mental illness? And can the former exist without the latter?
Actually, there is no discernable scientific correlation between artistic talent and psychic instability. And yet anecdotal evidence reigns supreme in a discursive game that awards participation medals. The tortured artist, the literary madwoman: they are mere icons of our collective romanticization of artistic anguish as a vehicle for salvation. They aren’t real—at least, not the way we think they are. Because the truth of suffering is this: that is bleak and ugly. It is drinking the dregs of strangers and pissing in bed. It is emptiness, stasis—the antithesis of creativity. And I have ceased to marvel at it, to wonder at it, to cherish my suffering as the source of my art, because it is, as Jack London notes, dull and oppressive.
Drinking was, for me, a means of isolating this suffering, of distinguishing myself from it. It was a means of facilitating co-existence, of detaching the suffering from the part of me it threatened to devour. It didn’t matter that it didn’t work. Alcoholism was always more about the gesture than the object of desire, more about control than satisfaction—less about the substance than the act of reaching for it, the sadistic pleasure that accompanies the engineering of mind and mood.
Bad things happened. I hurt. There were moments—brief but memorable—in which I came to what felt like a logical conclusion: like my heroes, I would embrace the suffering handed to me. Recklessness and abandonment constituted my challenge to grief: that I would dominate death before it dominated me. Jamison writes of Burroughs that he “didn’t want to be broken into explanations and reassembled into well-being. He wanted to stand behind his subtitle: Unredeemed. The syllogisms of cause and effect dangle the prospect of transformation, but he’s not interested in that kind of redemption.” It was like that.
Morbidity was my ego: an anaphoric amalgam of everything I had read in books or on TV, the things that kids said about me at school. I slapped a label on it: Weltschmerz, a fundamental disbelief in the possibility of the redemption I had once craved, a gesture of disavowal, of willful submission. It was both performative and genuine. I drank, at first, because it seemed inextricably tied to courage, a symbol of my resistance to the conditions of modern life. But I also drank because to refrain was unimaginable. I picked up cigarettes for Simone De Beauvoir and for the feeling of control over my fate that smoking allowed. I cut myself for Courtney Love. But I did it also because there was, in me, a swelling, white-hot incandescence, an intolerable awareness of life, and by extension, the possibility of death and physical pain presented my only opportunity to drain it like a burning blister.
The word “suffering” comes from the Latin for “to bear,” which aptly describes the performative nature of grief in the voyeuristic age. Whether I had picked it up myself or someone else had handed it to me, I wore the pall of my pain for a long time, blinded by it, feeling for the contours of the person I thought I wanted to be. And the person I wanted to be was Sylvia Plath. Or Jean Rhys. Or Joan Didion. Anne Sexton.Virginia Woolfe. I wanted to be a tragedy—a woman who wanted to die.
James Baldwin spoke of writing as a means of confronting life and, by extension, outwitting death. I read this passage for the first time on a brisk April morning toward the end of my high school career. I’d skipped school in favor of smoking weed by the Hudson River, hoping to catch the space shuttle Enterprise on its historic journey to the Intrepid. Baldwin seemed an appropriate read for the occasion, given my growing distaste for American patriotism, and this particular passage struck me for its blunt appraisal of art as a gesture of protest, a means of beating death at its own game, of rewriting the rules of the battle in my favor. Whether or not it was affectation doesn’t matter; artifice eventually becomes indistinguishable from truth. I tell a story repeatedly, embellished for effect, and my white lies begin to darken, to melt into the colors of the memory until they are part of the original palette. “Make believe,” with enough encouragement, believes in itself.
The Buddha said to a student: “if an arrow strikes a person, does it hurt?” The monk nods. “If a second arrow strikes the person, is it even more painful?” The monk nods again. “In life, we cannot control the first arrow,” the Buddha continues, “the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is the one we aim at ourselves.” The first arrow is pain—inevitable, unforeseeable—but the second is suffering—the salt in the open wound. Most of what we mistake for pain is, in fact, suffering—the viral evolution of pain, emboldened by our attempts to quell it.“Pain is inevitable,” writes the Dalai Lama, but “suffering is optional.” Pain is the event—suffering is the story we spin to recount it. And the story of suffering is one interminable extended metaphor—a feeble attempt to draw meaning from the meaningless. As Sontag reminds us, dispelling metaphors is half the battle of alleviating unnecessary suffering. Relief comes when we “calm the imagination” rather than incite it. If we didn’t depend upon our tragic myths for validation, we might have a fighting chance.
Performative suffering was, for me, a means of externalizing pain and, in so doing, subduing it. My morbidity was an attempt at domination—control being the universal response to intolerable feelings of helplessness. Anticipatory suffering was my way of taking arms against a sea of troubles, of ensuring that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune would never take me by surprise. Like the hypochondriac—or the addict in the window—I aimed to outwit death, to find fate before it found me. Drinking, drugs, starving, purging, sex, love, spending—these were my metaphors, the monuments to my suffering. Addiction was, at first, a story I told about myself—a story far more tragic (and thus interesting) than the truth. I always suspected fiction to be far more compelling than fact.
Jacques Derrida writes of the addict that he “cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; escaping into a world of simulacrum and fiction—a pleasure taken in an experience without truth.” The truth of my experience was this: that I wasn’t the fragile, manic pixie dream girl character of my fantasies, but a girl who, like Jamison, “returned to the dumpster [...] with dirty fingers, leaning into the trash.” The girl who, for lack of sufficient suffering, did not starve herself but ate through hundreds of dollars a day, clogging the toilet with vomit, washing it down with whiskey and one-night stands—the girl who drank alone and lamented her loneliness.
My father died a year ago. He had an esophageal hemorrhage—hardly an enviable way to go. He died alone in his New York City apartment overlooking the lustrous folds of the Hudson River, the quilted play of stars and city lights woven through the dark—his favorite view. It was Cinco de Mayo, and he was making guacamole. He coughed too hard and died. He was 64. The last time we spoke, I put him on speakerphone and washed dishes while he prattled about Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party. I don’t remember much because I was heavily invested in my ongoing war with the impregnable battalion of fruit flies in my kitchen sink. “Have fun,” he cackled and hung up the phone.
A week later, he was dead, and I was decidedly not having fun. The dynamics of our ultimate interaction conveniently presented me with the proverbial noose with which to hang myself. I didn’t listen to him (and I should have.) I wasn’t there (and I should have been.) I didn’t love him enough (and I should have gotten started on that sooner.)
I spent the better part of a year bearing the dead weight of my self-inflicted shame and suffering, thinking: this is necessary; this is grief.
Bereavement is a nuisance. Basic tasks become impossibly complex. There is, throughout, the sense of being incomplete, hollowed out like a pumpkin, guts spilling out onto the ground, fingernails tearing at the underside of the skin, raw and feverish to the touch. Grief turns out to be lonelier than we’d imagined, having nothing at all to do with the loss of a person and more with what we’ve lost of ourselves. It’s also boring. It’s boring in the way we imagine death to be: fathomlessly dark and cavernously quiet.
But grief is also expansive and incandescent, a desert scintillating with blue mirages, whispering of a world beyond the barren horizon. While I imagined grief to be cluttered, claustrophobic, it was instead ethereal, edgeless, marked, as Joan Didion wrote, by “the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” I could hear nothing but my own aching heart, its lamentations bouncing off the walls of my echo chamber. Here, I heard myself clearly for the first time. I saw how much of this prison—the restrictive walls of my precious suffering—I had built with my hands.
I had negotiated myself into the fabric of a universal experience, appropriated circumstance to prove my terminal uniqueness. I wanted to be special, to be seen. But my grief wasn’t unique; it was devastatingly ordinary.
My propensity for narration, my perpetual urge to put my grief to paper, to lend it significance, had eclipsed all possibility of immersion and release. I clung to the story I had always told: one in which I was the perpetual victim, the sad, lonely white woman, aching at once for recognition and anonymity, deserving as much fulfillment as of tragedy. Like memories—or dreams—stories are necessarily reduced, commodified, in the telling. “We romanticize nothing,” writes author Alice Bolin, “so much as ourselves.”
And yet, the more I spun my story of suffering, the faster it unraveled. The center, it turns out, cannot hold. At its apotheosis, the storm revealed itself for what it was: a riot of sound and fury, at the eye of which, where I had once thought myself to stand, there was nothing at all.
This was my first encounter with anatta—the Pali word for “no-self,” the realization—both profound and unsettling—that the main character of my story was a figment of my imagination. The victim, the tortured artist, the bereaved, the architect of my sentimental education—they were nothing but paper dolls dressed up to look like the person I thought I should be.
Like the fairytale emperor proudly parading in invisible clothes, I had been blinded by the scintillating spotlight of ego, onlookers affirming my delusion with murmurs of praise and recognition. Naturally, I became attached to my tragic fantasy, triaging every experience according to its correspondence with precious belief. And I believed, above all else, in the primacy of my bereavement, in my role as the main character, willfully imprisoned in a two-dimensional world of my creation.
I kept a grief diary. I started writing the day my father died, driven by a predictable, didactic impulse to metaphorize my suffering, to communicate—and thus immortalize—myself. Of course, as Bolin reminds us, “the only way to grow up is to realize that the little tragedies that shock and devastate you are universal and inevitable.”
I kept the diary for three days. I should have understood then that my issue was not one of complexity but of abject simplicity, of infantile magical thinking. I supposed that my exquisite agony would, at the very least, lend me some literary credibility and bestow upon me some invaluable insight into human nature. Instead, it turned out to be a dreadfully dull, navel-gazing narrative of my uninteresting inner life, an evidence map of my losses, my pain, tangled together with blood-red string like the work of a histrionic cop on a TV drama, a conspiracy theorist desperate to weave a story where there isn’t one. My grief had nothing to do with the pain; it had to do mostly with my fear of being disfigured by it.
Day 1: Just like last time: the world collapses onto itself. Everyone celebrating Cinco de Mayo—with mom, it was Halloween. The difference: I am alone now, the characters of my childhood extinct. First, mom, then dad. A hero’s journey, perhaps?
Grief: moments of abject hopelessness punctuated by a bizarre manic certainty that I can communicate with the dead. Wish I could stop compulsively visualizing the moment/scene of his death? very upsetting. Today: run, yoga, call cremation people, edit book, eat safe foods (yogurt), therapy, AA.
Day 2: Went to Wal-Mart. Convinced I was having a seizure—fluorescent lights and screaming children. Everything has changed. There is a tear in the fabric of the universe, and objects, ideas—people—disappear into it. For everyone else, it has been the longest year in history. But for me, all of time crunched is into one moment, a moment so brief it evades me each time I grasp for it.
I have dreams I can’t tell apart from reality. I drink. Then, I wish (briefly) gas stoves still emitted carbon monoxide. I get sad thinking of people trying to kill themselves that way and getting very hot. I don’t think I will ever be happy again. I mull it over–life without you–ugly and pitted like a constellation of scars.
Day 3: Quick and painless. Messy. He didn’t suffer, says the medical examiner, but that doesn’t help. The hardwood floor sticky with blood. Tums crumbling in the sink, chalky dust over the toilet seat (always raised). Grasping for narrative and writing nothing. Words reduced to platitudes. Probably, I will never write again. Foolish, I know, but can’t/won’t stop going there. I fill the page, so it doesn’t stay blank, taunting me with its featureless face. It’s the emptiness I can’t stand. I am nothing if not industrious. I wrote the obituary. You always said, "I want my obituary to be funny and unique.” Humor is easy; originality is not. There is manic hilarity in grief, but creativity, there is not.
The truncated syntax, double-negatives, and monotonous repetition (I wrote; I spent; I want) all point to infantile, sanctimonious rage—a regression of sorts into a fiction far preferable to reality. In a moment meant to be about my father, I managed to write exclusively about myself, concerned much more with what I had left than with what I’d lost. It’s the same tired refrain, more about the runner than the race—a trail of crumbs paving the way back to an imaginary place of painlessness, of fairytale justice, in which the helpless, innocent princess always gets the ending she deserves.
There is anger, too—the restless, ravenous rage of the helpless and disenfranchised—and what could be more selfish, more steeped in suffering than self-righteous rage? It is the oldest and most exhausting of stories. Like suffering, rage is a symptom that outlives its stimulus, an emotion that lasts long beyond reason. It feeds on other feelings like a rapacious predator. Rage is cumulative: the deeper we venture, the denser and more impenetrable it becomes, like the thick fabric of a dark, lifeless forest, its landscape dotted with the hulking, imposing shadows of our likes and dislikes, our moral qualms and ethical stipulations, our past traumas and pet peeves. It’s easy to get lost there. But grief is a world unto itself, and anger is just one ecosystem among many.
Chimamanda Adichie reflects on how “ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger.” I am grateful to her for saying it first since it’s an ugly sentiment, raw and transparent like the gossamer skins of nightmarish deep-sea creatures. It’s also true. Do not go gentle into that good night, wrote the “roistering, drunken, and doomed poet.” But is mourning ungentle by nature, or because we make it so?
The modal verb can leaves room for the possibility of mourning as something other than ungentle; grief, rather than playing itself out in a static Kubler-Rossian series of pre-ordained steps, is a mutable thing, subject to influence. How full of anger, she adds, implying that grief is not the anger itself but the container we use to carry it.
Ungentle is how I felt addressing the somber, whispering crowd at my mother’s memorial, crying through my speech, red-faced and swollen-eyed, beating my hands against the pulpit. Ungentle was my father’s blood congealing against the nacreous oyster shells in his kitchen sink. Ungentle was my fury at those who dared try to match my grief.
The world stood accused: how dare you try to empathize with me? I excoriated all well-meaning words of comfort and gestures of solidarity as disguised self-pity. People always seemed to want to talk about the people they’d lost or the versions of my parents they knew: glittering youth, drinking red wine from paper cups, cross-legged in their Brooklyn Heights walkup, brimming with dreams, childless, in love.
My grief was cruel and solitary. My grief didn’t play nice. It didn’t play at all. Humor was insult; levity was betrayal. I lapsed into old patterns of creative self-harm—over-working, under-eating, compulsive exercise, sleep deprivation, bumping, bruising, the careless mistakes of a body with no regard for itself. My grief was self-important. My grief demanded sacrifice.
In this way, grief became my performative Sisyphean task—one I could not relinquish for fear of being crushed by the thing I carried. I proceeded obstinately in this way, trudging up the same illusory hill by day, tumbling down the other side by night, as Adichie writes, “with hands outstretched for things that [were] no longer there.” There was at once a sensation of unbearable lightness—the familiar feeling of evaporation, pieces of me drifting off beyond retrieval—countered only by the burden of rage—massive, opaque, obstructive—which sat obstinately on my chest, cracking my ribs, stealing my breath, and yet without which I feared I would float away.
I lived by the measure of my routines: repetitive, pacifying. I no longer wrote, painted, or meditated—nixing anything from my rigid schedule that might introduce novelty or stimulate creativity. As Alan Watts so aptly describes it, I wanted to “frantically flatten, rectangularize and uniformize the chthonic world into Euclidean patterns, which are wholly bereft of imagination and exuberance.” It was resistance, fear. I wanted no more changes, no more possibilities—only the dull comfort of certainty.
No alarms and no surprises.
Please.
I once heard a man say, “the grass is greener where you water it.” But I didn’t want to water the grass; I didn’t trust it to grow. I would have spray-painted it instead, prioritizing efficiency over authenticity. I couldn’t see the beauty of the wildflower for my vision of a tamed and manicured lawn. Security was concomitant with order, predictability. Serenity was just the absence of distress; well-being was reduced to the lack of discomfort. To experience relief from pain, I had to obliterate it.
I tried to transcend my suffering—to monumentalize it, to archive it in the editorial collective of painful—yet ultimately valuable—anecdotes of my imaginary autobiography. I wanted to tell the story in the past tense—to live in the eye of the storm rather than endure its turbulent environs. I wanted it to be over so I could write it down and reflect upon it wistfully: words weighted down with symbolism, events neatly arranged into narrative, everything leading up to a grand finale, a happy ending after which I got to close the book and leave it to gather dust on the shelf.
I wanted to be brave—to have courage like my father, who always seemed so powerful, as fathers often do. Courage was his prerogative, his prayer. At the close of every AA meeting, rather than reciting the Serenity Prayer, he barked only: “the courage to change the things I can.” Courage was our secret handshake, our shared ritual. He had me convinced until the very end that I alone could restore his faith in the future, his trust in himself. Together, we were brave.
I’m going to work, he would say when I was little, his fingernails bitten to blood, papers falling from his briefcase, or I’m going to the doctor, fear shuddering through his cool, dark eyes, his hair falling out in clumps. Courage Papa, I’d shout, and the world bloomed for us.
I told everyone my father was brave—he didn’t fear things like I did. But I’d made the mistake of conflating his courage with fearlessness—and my father wasn’t fearless. He was, like me, afraid of nearly everything. He was courageous because he didn’t relent—he didn’t run from the things he feared. I couldn’t say the same about myself. My efforts to temper the intensity of my grief had provoked a dissociative state, a mirage of nostalgia and confusion through which I wandered, avoiding anything of substance. I was ashamed of how insubstantial I’d become: an amalgam of my rote routines and suffocating coping mechanisms, a survival machine devoid of all creativity and risk.
Shame is the primary catalyst for self-annihilation, the stuff of martyrs, which is why so many social institutions make it their modus operandi. I depended on shame to nurture the illusion of control—anything was better than the helplessness I suspected of myself. If it was my fault, I could do something about it. I couldn’t stand the slow burn of gentle grief—I wanted heat and flame, something to point to and say I’m sorry, or better yet: they made me do it. So I struck the match. I set the fire. I nocked the second arrow onto the bow and aimed for a bull’s eye.
Susan Sontag writes of artistic interpretation that it “excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.” I remember thinking, when I read On Interpretation for the first time in rehab, sitting in a thick stormcloud of glittering cigarette smoke and thick Southern mist, that Sontag was speaking to me—echoes of my schizophrenic tendency to take the impersonal personally. I insisted on everything—from the suffocated contents of my liquor-saturated life to the dim, blinking words on a page—adding up to something more than itself. My task, as a writer and a martyr, was to risk my sanity trying to find the treasure—to excavate it. And yet, in the digging, I destroyed. There was no way to interpret, analyze, or metaphorize without damaging the truth of an object or experience. And it was this—the inevitability of destruction—that had me believe, for far too long, that I was a tragic character in a timeless myth about the dangers of abstraction, condemned to symbolism at the expense of Truth.
It’s funny: analytic psychology, for its appeal to our hermeneutic impulses, has so dominated popular discourse that most of us learn to articulate thoughts about feelings rather than feelings themselves. Where do you feel it in your body, asks my therapist. I don’t feel it in my body, I reply, but somewhere in my head.
This was writing—or rather, being a writer: prioritizing words over experiences, performance overexpression, symbolism over the elusive and messy underworld of reality. I refused to allow my grief to be just what it was—an exquisitely painful, blossoming thing, morphing, evolving, expanding into a vast tapestry of stars like the ever-unfolding universe. Fear, rage, shame: all attempts to subjugate the riotous rampage of pain that asked of me only that I acknowledge it. It seemed necessary to secure evidence of something—the deeper meaning of it all, the theme. My grief was meaningless if left unwritten, unredacted. But I was confusing meaning with value.
If the brain seeks patterns—relationships of cause and effect—mine searched for magic, some sleight of hand to explain away the hollow banality of bereavement: the grisly one-eyed cat in my therapist’s parking lot was my father reincarnate (never mind the practical impossibility of my father’s recently untethered soul inhabiting the body of an ancient animal); the condemning jury of crows eyeing me from the power lines were my parents, my friends–everyone I’d lost keeping an eye on me, making sure I never forgot them. The dream: a visit. The wind: a whisper. I didn’t want stars; I wanted constellations.
Rituals and superstitions took hold, echoes of my childhood compulsions, my once debilitating obsession with keeping misfortune at bay. If I touch this three times…If I step on this crack…If I don’t count the clouds, the seconds, the words on the page…It was mysticism. It was magical thinking. “I made him my Higher Power,” I said in an AA meeting, “so naturally, he died.”
Of course, it wasn’t just me—I learned from the best of them. C.S. Lewis wrote an entire book on the many dimensions of his grief—in response to those who would question him, he retorts obstinately: “there is death. And whatever is matters.” Joan Didion wrote of loss as a vehicle for self-awareness. Mark Twain concluded, somewhat morbidly, that the purpose of death was to relieve us of the burden of life.
Conversely, George Orwell wrote, "death is the price we pay for life.” Even the greatest among us—especially the greatest—fall prey to mildewed and moth-eaten platitudes. “Grief was the celebration of love,” Adichie writes with cloying bathos, “those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.” We frantically search for the meaning of life—and, by extension, the meaning of death—because the alternative is too bleak to bear: that neither means anything at all.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Fear—and the courage to transcend it—was the narrative thread that bound my etiology of creativity. Everything—drinking, writing, cutting, starving—was an attempt to quell it—or else to give it a voice. Fear was my master—the fear of nonexistence, of obsolescence, which I imagined to be akin to being trapped in a dark coffin for millennia, watching, helpless, as better artists, better writers, better martyrs took my vacant seat. It left no part of me untouched.
Everyone wants an origin myth, a riveting story to counter the impending threat of obsolescence, a transcendent theme to the otherwise banal and ephemeral thread of existence. I wanted my suffering to matter. I wanted it to mean something. And I found its meaning in the drinking and the writing: “two different responses,” Jamison writes, “to that same molten pain. Booze helped you see, and then it helped you survive the sight.”
That’s what drinking was for me: a justification bound together by the circular logic of conspiracy: I drink because I am a victim, and I am a victim because I drink. Suffering was the revelation, and drinking was the elixir of courage that emboldened me to bear it.
In the myopic manner of the alcoholic, I never once contemplated another way—a creative life cycle outside of sickness and suffering. Maybe if I hadn’t worked so hard to keep the fear at bay, I might have realized: the call is coming from inside the house.
Which came first, the hurt I was dealt or the one I chose?
Because the truth, I’m afraid, is that I needed my suffering—I craved it. My suffering had substance, direction. It was preferable to its predecessor—a primeval pain I could never quite place, an ache without a name, a tragedy with no plot. I didn’t want closure; I wanted limitless grief. I wanted a story worth telling. And a good story, at the expense of all else, is what it’s always been about.
What distinguishes a narrative from reality is the careful selection of detail. Stories are reductive, intentional—like statues carved from marble. As Michaelangelo describes it, we have only to “hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as [ours] see it.” A good story emerges only when we shear it of inconvenient truths, of details that detract from the “lovely apparition” we wish for others to see. The stories we tell ourselves and others—the fabrications on which legacies are built, the yarn from which history is spun—are only as good as our little white lies are convincing. Fiction is the art of selective self-deception—and we are all master storytellers.
Of course, we all want a story with a happy ending—one in which the threat of tragedy collapses into sweet relief, in which bad things happen to other people—the two-dimensional characters in the periphery. So much of what we do is in service of keeping the less palatable aspects of existence at bay: the progressive exile of the sick and elderly, the increasing sophistication of anti-aging technologies, the surgeries and injections, the products and procedures designed to keep us always camera-ready, frozen in time—the billion-dollar industries that keep us tethered to the myth of unrelenting self-improvement as a defensive mechanism, as a preventative measure. America, writes Bolin, is “a land of iterations, versions of versions, a swimming pool’s endless refractions, a city that sprawls forever—” a replica of reality, ribbons of Astro-turf choking the grass underneath.
The American origin myth, a tale of triumph over nature, relates to the forcible conquest of the primitive, unsophisticated wilderness. Death has no place in the “New World” epic—it is a failure of individualism, incongruous with the proto-American ideal of man’s ascendancy over base instinct. Death is a moral failure. Death is un-American.
I was nine when my aunt Jodie died. What’s going to happen to me, she asked me the last time I saw her. I was a child, but I already knew to lie. Jodie was afraid, so she was kept alive for as long as possible: tethered to blaring machines, bloated, soiled, matted, terrified, semi-conscious, and pumped with painkillers, clawing to the desperate hope of holding off a little longer.
Trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman wrote:
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness [...], but atrocities refuse to be buried. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called ‘doublethink,’ and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call ‘dissociation.’ It results in protein, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria.
We speak freely of grief, of suffering, until it happens to us, to someone we know. Then, the discourse is dominated by platitudes, euphemisms, secrets too terrible to be spoken, and superstitions too powerful to be discounted. Sontag wrote, "for those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.” And denial takes on many disguises: pragmatism, anger, fear—all iterations of endemic non-acceptance. It’s much easier to do something than to do nothing at all. But what if the most straightforward solution turns out to be the right one after all?
We operate in grief as in all else: under the illusion of control. A human being in unspeakable pain will—understandably—do just about anything for relief. But one merely perpetuates suffering by poking, prodding, manipulating— twisting the knife, so to speak. To interfere with injury is to exacerbate the damage. To compel recovery is to prolong illness. Scratching an itch only deepens the wound. Like skin and bone, grief does its job only when given room to breathe.
What we’re after, allegedly, is acceptance. But acceptance is a misleading term, loaded with saccharine appeal and narcotic ambiguity. Acceptance, conveniently, can be whatever we want it to be: elusion, escape, emotionlessness. As with most discarnate terms, it lends itself to distortion with use. A self-indulgence culture in which emotional experience takes precedence is likely to interpret acceptance as a condition of subjugation. Rather than allowing the emotion to carry us through the experience (and allowance is, in my view, a far more appropriate term, given that it is distinguished from acceptance as permission “granted within a set of rules or boundaries”), we surrender ourselves to it, prolonging the emotional state we seek to transcend. Popular culture, with its insatiable preoccupation with psychopathology, emphasizes a particular kind of introspection, according to Sontag, “which equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self.” For me, what masked as acceptance was assimilation. Instead of allowing my grief, I invited it to consume me whole.
In life as in etymology, contranyms abound—the oft-repeated term to process, for instance, which, rather than referring to a dynamic state of growth, carries, in a modern context, connotations of stasis rather than dynamism, of indulgence rather than contemplative consideration. I was processing when I drank and smoked and cried. I was processing when I threw plates at the wall, drawing glass against ribbons of skin. I was processing when I retreated into the darkness and disarray of my home, resorted to compulsion, rote repetition, paranoia. And because I was processing, no one questioned the merits of my process. When words lose all meaning, we can wield them in whatever way we like.
In communicating emotions, we split them into artificial, operational categories: happy vs. sad, angry vs. forgiving, fulfilled vs. deprived. Good vs. bad. But the words we use only possess a limited capacity to describe the things we feel—and such terms rest on certain erroneous assumptions about emotional states, namely, that they are discrete and discrepant—mutually incompatible. Again, semantics matter. It is easy to forget the subjective, ambiguous, coeval, and often contradictory nature of human feelings—to confuse the experience with the term we use to designate it.
Because the truth is grief is a complex character, resistant to unilateral qualification. Grief isn’t just sadness—it’s also joy, humor, liberation. Grief was listening to my father’s rambling voicemails to fall asleep. It was rubbing his ashes between my fingers, juxtaposing the memory of skin and hair over splinters of bone. Grief was recalling his mishaps with joy: the time he answered the door with no pants on, the expired lubricant in the fridge. Grief was laughter—aching and unmitigated.
“What a revelation,” Adichie notes, “how much laughter is a part of grief.” But why shouldn’t it be common knowledge: how grief finds its way across the full spectrum of human emotion, present in warmer waters and sunlit shallows as in the cool depths of melancholy? To reach the good we are told, we must relinquish the bad. To properly suffer, we must abandon all possibilities of joy. Emotional experience as a zero-sum game: an ultimatum in which we are compelled to abandon our angels or our demons.
There is a hackneyed story that illustrates the problem well. It is heavily trafficked in rehab facilities, self-help circles, and on Facebook to demonstrate the power of behavioral reinforcement. To this end, it achieves its purpose. Here is the abbreviated version. A Cherokee grandfather told his grandson: “there are two wolves at war inside of you. One is kind, compassionate, and gentle (boring). The other is cruel, violent, selfish, etc. Which one wins? The one you feed.”
Despite its overuse (at least, amongst the communities I frequent), the story is powerful for its axiomatic clarity. As with all good stories, it speaks to something we already know. But its conclusion is predicated on the assumption that one must win over the other, that there is room for only one wolf. Relinquishing joy is an understandably unappealing idea—but so is releasing suffering—for who would we be without our demons?
Analogies are never entirely accurate—partly because language isn’t entirely accurate. Words are mere approximations of the capital-T Truth. But the problem is made worse when the terms of an equation are poorly defined. And because human beings are metaphorical thinkers, we often struggle to distinguish between observation and interpretation. This begs the question: what do the wolves represent, and who is feeding them?
The popular interpretation, contingent upon decades of psycho-political polarization, contends that we are the wolves—both of them—the human psyche apparently consisting of a base, instinctual self and a superior, divine self—the proverbial angel and devil feuding over the strings of a clay puppet. Because such rigid dichotomies are rare in nature, I suspect they are also rare in human beings. Could the solution to all the evils of this world be that simple? Just starve it out.
But there is a risk in equating existential dilemmas to warring dualities. Life is not, as we should by now know, a zero-sum game. Such a restrictive paradigm quickly devolves into rabid dogmatism—zealotry is essentially the reduction of dichotomies into dualities. The issue with orthodoxy isn’t content validity but semantic rigidity; the wolf allegory is not untrue as much as it is superficial.
Given the broadly holistic worldview of America’s Indigenous people, the story’s alleged Native American origins are dubious. Further research confirmed my suspicions: Billy Graham, an evangelist (populist) Baptist minister, concocted the story in the late 1970s. Graham recounted the “ancient parable” in a 1978 sermon, electing to attribute his fabrication to the Cherokee tribe because Indigenous representation in the media was highly restricted throughout the 20th century (and across most of American history). Actually, Graham initially attributed the tale to the Inuit people, who were, in fact, significantly represented in the Canadian Press. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Undaunted, Graham simply changed his story; he was confident in his capacity to override Indigenous protests.
Indeed, the notion of “original sin” or “inner evil” so integral to the Judeo-Christian interpretation of this story is virtually non-existent in Native tradition. There are few universal constants across the diverse Indigenous ideologies. Still, one unifying factor is the rejection of Western, Judeo-Christian dualism: Indigenous people, by and large, adopt a monistic view of human experience and the natural world, one that emphasizes coexistence rather than exclusion, reciprocity over uniformity.
I relay this charming anecdote because it illustrates the unfortunate tendency of Western language (language being both the product and producer of belief) to reduce inconvenient nuances to remissive and simplistic terms—to “frantically flatten, rectangularize and uniformize the chthonic world into Euclidean patterns.” It’s an ultimatum: you are the wolf you feed, so choose wisely.
Thankfully, the beauty of allegory is that it admits the inescapability of interpretation. Perhaps we aren’t meant to see ourselves in the wolves at all—but in the one who feeds them, in which case, we have a vested responsibility to keep them both alive. Is it ethical to feed only one wolf at the expense of the other? And is that something we should wish for—a world devoid of contrast? And is fulfillment really just the absence of adversity?
The practices that comprise so much of modern spirituality—gratitude, affirmations, manifestation—do not equip us to manage the pain when it comes. And because practicing positivity is far preferable to accepting pain, what many refer to as enlightenment becomes, instead, evasion. Spiritual bypassing seems to be particularly pronounced in Anglo-American cultures, where damaging myths of self-reliance and solipsism are so deeply encoded in our mythos that we leave everything up to blame and bootstraps, a culture in which the primary operative belief is that if we aren’t happy or prosperous, it’s because we’ve decided not to be.
You can’t work out what is making you sad, said a wise woman whose advice I ignored; you have to let it out. Striving for allowance is a reductio ad absurdum—a self-defeating egoic exercise—yet effort seems to be a prerequisite for effortlessness.
Alan Watts wrote extensively of the “seeming conflict between those who held that the mystical experience required a supreme effort of will, and those who held that such effort was simply an exhibition of egocentric pride which could only postpone the experience and push it away.” It’s a “seeming conflict” because it’s not a conflict at all; surrender ultimately requires a profound, destabilizing awareness of the impotence of human willpower.
Allowance is not passive; it is a creative act, a fragile balance between effort and effortlessness, human reason and divine inspiration. A mind in flow is at once a generator and a conduit, the source, and recipient of insight. Pain itself is not creative—it is an arbitrary consequence of growth—but how we choose to meet it—whether with suffering or surrender—is in our hands. It is here that creativity lives. In her essay on the journals of Cesare Pavese, Sontag quotes his perspective on suffering: “to choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. This is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it.”
Pain, like money or religion, is neutral, anodyne—it fills the space we clear for it, amplifies what is already there. Pain defies influence, and eschews manipulation. It arises at random and subsides when satisfied. Only when we suppress emotions do they become pathological. Only when we resist thoughts are they intrusive. Characteristically, I had to learn this the hard way.
If suffering is selfish, then freedom from suffering is freedom from the self. In life as in death, in suffering as in grief, so much is dictated by self-preservation. “Death,” Sontag wrote, “is unbearable unless you can get beyond the ‘I.’” But how many of us cannot get beyond the “I,” fearful, as we so often are, of losing ourselves in the fray?
We know that death doesn’t just want our family, our pets, our friends: it wants us. “When we mourn our losses,” Didion wrote, “we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves as we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” I watch the seasons change and the sunlight dim. I watch death wrap itself around everything I love. Still, I think: surely it will not come for me.
Western cultures conspire to compel the repudiation of a world absent of the self. We are a nation of death-deniers, increasingly alienated from the birth and death of organic life, powered by pills, injections, operations, and diets that promise to keep it at bay. Like corporate scientists obfuscating the obvious–climate change, the dangers of cigarette smoking, the opioid epidemic—modernity cowers behind fortresses of money, marketing, and misinformation, striving to beat back that which is already there. This is the second arrow, summoned by our misguided attempts to remove the first. At best, one aims for resignation—acceptance—and leaves it at that.
The grieving person is likely to hear of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s six stages of grief, the last stage of which is acceptance. It was most frequently presented to me as a to-do list, a series of steps to be conquered—just get through the stages, and you’ll reach acceptance. But of course, suffering is not chronological, and I soon learned that acceptance, rather than being the end, is most often the beginning.
In “The Trouble With Being Born,” E.M.Cioran writes: “lucidity—” or acceptance—"is the only vice that makes us free: free in a desert.” Acceptance alone is ignorant—immoral even. It represents only one half of a cyclical, iterative process of surrender and creativity. Passivity is a desert devoid of creative life. It is a state in which we are free only because we do not exist. Healing halfway is worse than no healing at all.
The trouble with being born, as it were, is that one is inducted into duality, reliant upon operative terms like good and evil to make sense of nuance. It is a necessary illusion, reinforced by the limitations of language, without which communication and expression would be futile. But language shapes perception and experience. One forgets the operative nature of polarizing terms, their fundamental incongruity with the fluidity of nature. It’s the age-old problem of missing the forest for the trees.
It’s a strange paradox: this faith in the ceaseless wheel of desire and craving, the psychotic conviction that the cycle will one day resolve itself, that a special sort of freedom awaits us, one that consists only in freedom from pain, a heaven in which we embrace our loved ones and eat all the ice cream we can dream of—but are spared the pain of death and diabetes.
Evading the second arrow is simply a matter of refraining from nocking it on the bow. Contending with the first is the heart of grief work. It is here that one encounters the amalgamated world. It is here that immortality lives.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller conceives grief as an opportunity to cultivate one’s “apprenticeship” with sorrow. Apprenticeship implies proximity, and intimacy—a certain power dynamic that transcends the hierarchical. “Grief work,” Weller writes, is about “engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief,” developing rituals around these feelings and images that “deepen our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them.” Grief work is “an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion.” It is an apprenticeship: a relationship built on mutual recognition, founded to cultivate mastery.
Thus, I practice dying. It is my ritual of apprenticeship—an ongoing effort to steadily ameliorate my relationship with death in preparation for the day when it's the only one I am left with. Together, we practice our inevitable rapprochement.
And I meditate on the echoes that still haunt me: the silence, the whispers of an empty house in upstate New York, my father’s books and instruments gathering dust, his excitement about Eugene Debs, his parting advice: have fun. These are my rituals of grief. In acquainting me with pain, they release me from suffering.“Ritual,” Weller writes, “ is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.” When I allow my pain, it no longer itches to remind me of its presence.
Death isn’t suffering. It’s just death. Grief isn’t suffering, either. Sometimes, it’s anger. Often, it’s laughter. I think of my Dad, shucking oysters for the new boyfriend I’ve brought home from college, the flaps of his silk kimono swinging open to reveal more of him than any of us bargained for. I think of my Dad, swimming in neck-deep basement sewage, on a doomed mission to save the washing machine, sparks snapping on the water. I think of Dad on his motorcycle, riding the wind, transcending his broken body, toppling over in the parking lot, laughing.
Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s not. Often, it hurts. Mostly, it is many things at once, a kaleidoscopic vision of vaporous memories and complex feelings, glistening with teardrops as innumerable as the stars in the sky.
But these are my stars.
This is my astrology of grief.