My Grief Advisory Board
Three ladies help me follow the most expeditious path through a mountain of grief
As the ladies stood up from the table last night, one of my “Grief Advisory Board” members announced, “We are adding to the contract: No dating for a year.”
Whoa.
Adding insult to injury, I checked with other friends today, hoping for a sympathetic ear, but they concurred. “Yes, that seems wise.”
The Board members penciled an addendum in the margin: “Lesbians excepted.”
If you’ve been following along, I am engaged in “speed grieving” – not by choice or design, but by following my feral instinct to find the most expeditious path through the brambles of grief I stumbled into when Karen unexpectedly “left the building.” The basic premise is that grief is a motion, not an emotion.
Jokingly, I started to tell people I was “Speed Grieving” but soon discovered a movie on IMDB with the same title – comically nine minutes long. So, I changed course and settled on “Good Grief.” Yes, the double entendre is intended. I learned from the Charles M. Schulz Museum:
“Good Grief” is a cleaned-up version of the phrase “Good God.” Schulz often said “Good Grief!” himself expressing eye-rolling resignation at the absurdities of life.
Exactly. My face-to-face with the existential absurdity of loss is emerging as a book written in real-time (thank you, Karen). Will there be a happy ending? You’ll find out with me.
Good Grief is not meant to be a system, but if I’m ever interviewed on the TV, here are my four bullet points:
ONE - “The Universe Didn’t Make a Mistake”
Let’s start with the hardest, especially if you lost a child or a loved one “before their time.” The hard truth is that you have to unravel this mystery on your own. The key is to discern meaning from how it all went down. Does the entire narrative of your loved one’s time on earth make sense? What was their story about? How about yours?
The method is to acknowledge the Story Arc of One’s Life. Imagine going into the TV writer’s room with its wall of cards — of characters, scenes, plot points, and conflict. Follow the cards, and see how each step leads to the next as part of a larger journey, a search, a growing, or a knowing. Light begins to shine on the mystery when you see life’s thematic logic.
Coming to peace with this helped me celebrate the nine bonus years Karen wrangled from the Almighty after her original diagnosis, plus the triumphant new career she launched two weeks after brain surgery. Ultimately, there is only so much gas in the tank to complete one’s karmic mission. Because of the phenomenon of “selective attention,” we missed the looming recurrence of Karen’s cancer, as did her clinicians and radiologists. Still, for many months, the steady drumbeat of doom sounding its ominous tone went unnoticed.
TWO - “The Hereafter is Here”
The terror and despair of laying alone during those first nights softened with the realization that “Karen didn’t go anywhere.” Her proximity was confirmed by unsolicited reports from two intuitives who said the same. I experienced this “Karen energy” as an enveloping radiance. Bhagwan, my meditation teacher from India, explained, “If you think about her, tell stories about her, light candles for her, the radiance is gone. If you live fully in yourself, you are with her.” I will dig into this more deeply next week.
THREE - “Spread Your Wings”
Following the above, I shape-shifted into a new role –taking on Karen’s job in the love business, which meant reaching out in four directions to love everyone unconditionally. Karen’s the master at maintaining what we called "Bondo" - the capacity to form intimate human relationships. She maintained these relationships by “spinning the love plates - like the performer on the Ed Sullivan show who spun plates on sticks and darted back and forth each time a wobbly plate needed some love.
I set my New Year’s theme as “Circulation” – to act on every stray thought and invitation to get out of the house and engage with humans for the reasons discussed in this Atlantic article:
FOUR - “Don’t Let the Grief Plumbing Back Up”
The Grief Advisory Group guffawed when I shared this (something about the male versus female process), but if you’re a guy, there’s a tool for everything. Think about all the medical data, procedures, decisions, and feelings that flood those final days with a loved one. As death draws closer, you’re managing family flying in, hospice, morphine, funeral arrangements, food platters, and waves of awkward condolence. Points 1 through 4 force you to remain in the Present, which requires a clean deck and a blank sheet of paper to face each day fresh.
My feral instinct guided me to not text back to incoming messages but instead press the Call button. I could feel the forward flow of my emotional plumbing when I shared The Story over and over with friends. Calling wasn’t enough, so I began to write. Engaging the Creative Impulse by writing opened the floodgates so that The Story ran through me rather than burying me.
It doesn’t matter how you do it. But like everything in life, facing your circumstances head-on is the way through. Karen described how she navigated her diagnosis in my book, Uplift:
“It was like riding a wave,” Karen explained. “I’m going to get on top and ride it to the end. That meant reaching out, getting as much help as possible, and engaging and immersing myself in this experience.
“When you engage something with intention,” she continued, “like facing the wave head-on, there’s meaning in the experience. It’s a chicken and egg because when you engage, the meaning develops. I don’t know which comes first, but intention and meaning are connected.”
I’m following Karen’s instinct: to immerse myself in this experience. I’m not setting conditions or following timetables with speed-grieving. The most direct path is the scariest – surrendering to the Unknown.
During my manic month, I was keenly curious to know if a partner was on the horizon, but now, in month number two, my molting month, I realize that a partner would be a sideshow to the main event: the life-altering process of clarifying – turning dross into gold.
From GotQuestions.org:
“Dross is a substance related to the process of refining precious metals. The waste materials that are separated when metals are purified by smelting are called dross…. Intense heat causes the dross to separate from the ore and rise to the top where it forms a scum and can be extracted, leaving a pure metal base.”
Trust me; I didn’t choose this Odyssey. I feel like an astronaut who craves a four-course gourmet meal but must settle for a freeze-dried dinner. That’s the price one pays to witness the cosmos alone. In my day-to-day, I’m cooking up tasty cuisine but have been deprived of the warm sensual embrace of a lover at my side. It’s a freeze-dried kind of love.
I’m human and must struggle with the cost-benefit of having a partner or not. To my surprise, I realize that people my age aren’t rushing to find partners, and even more likely, are repelled by the idea of another person crowding their remaining bandwidth. With a partner, your entire being must re-form to accommodate another human being, and old people aren’t all that flexible (someone prove me wrong, please).
Case in point, I’m typing away at nearly midnight – a newfound freedom that would have been impossible three months ago. “Bruce, come to bed. I need my rubbies.”
Plus, I got to whip up a fresh pasta puttanesca without a shred of gluten guilt.
This is not just about old people. Case in point: Mama Cass sang at age 25, “You gotta go where you wanna go, Do what you wanna do…” If you know your pop history, maybe it didn’t serve her well.
This leaves me feeling conflicted with my Grief Advisory Board.
I invited them into my life during the first hours of solo living, Bruce à la seule. Everyone at the table experienced the loss of a loved one, or two, or more, and I needed warm hearts and attentive ears to say, “you’re not alone.”
Last night was our second meeting, accompanied by salmon with pesto, asparagus with anchovies and garlic, savory lentil spinach soup, quinoa salad, Brazilian cheese puffs, French fruit tart, and Seven Deadly Zins Zinfandel. Ooh la la.
I’m an old hand at dinner parties, so I was in my element. Except that I wasn’t. I invited a newly remarried friend and her husband to join because I enjoy her spunk and liveliness and to redress the male-female balance. Instead of three women and me, it would be four women and two guys. Plus, he’s Jewish, so we could trade a few oy’s across the table. But he knew better and declined the invite, which left Bruce, four women, and The Contract.
During the evening, I realized that my vaunted superpower – being able to hang comfortably with any number of women – was a mirage. Karen had been my Wing Woman. Yikes. I’m back to being a fish with a bicycle.
Back to Karen:
When you engage something with intention, like facing the wave head-on, there’s meaning in the experience. When you engage, the meaning develops.”
While writing Uplift, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but now realize that she had the secret to “actively engaging grief.” Engaging changes your sense of time – like a child engaging with every caterpillar on a timeless summer vacation. My manic month and molting month feel like two years. (Checking the fine print: My Grief Advisory Board didn’t specify Calendar Years versus Experience Years.)
I hope my Board members feel my gratitude and understand that they signed up a guy. One long diagnosed with a case of Chicago humor.
PS: So… wanna have coffee? We just have to call it a fig or a dried apricot, or a mango tango. I love to dance.