Recently, I read two powerful letters, both about life, death, love and grief. I realized that it’s been awhile since I articulated my own travels on the grief road. So now seems like the right time for that.
Now I’m no expert about how early on in life grief becomes part of our individual fabrics as human beings. But I’m certain that for most of us, it’s an inevitable and crucial element of a balanced emotional life. I believe that love and commitment almost automatically ensure that, joy and contentment, grief and despair, and every feeling in between, will affect most people. And, that through our varied experiences, we rotate between these opposite poles of feelings. Here’s an example. When I was a little girl, my family lived in Iowa for a time, and we had this wonderful dog named King. He was part of us and we all loved him. But when we moved to Chicago when I was seven, we had to leave King behind. Apartment life in the big city was not a place for a dog who roamed freely, and who once, even brought home a baby raccoon which became part of our organization for a while. Leaving King behind was hard, and even though I was a little kid, I felt deep pain at giving up the loving relationship with my first real pet. That early loss was my introduction to grief. One of those sad moments that became part of me forever.
I think that I can trace the beginning of my deeper grief life back to June, 1964, the day I graduated from my K-8th grade elementary school. I had just turned thirteen in May. I can still feel myself early that morning, around 6 a.m., when I excitedly leaped from my bed, after hearing my parents whispering in their bedroom. I thought they were talking about the great day ahead, when I’d march down the aisle with my classmates, singing our school song, my blue and white graduation ribbons with the gold and blue “honor roll” pinned proudly to the bodice of my dress. That dress was my older sister’s, one she’d worn to a prom two years earlier. I didn’t even mind the borrowed dress. After all, I was graduating. But when I entered my parents’ room, my mother looked at me and said, “Renee, your graduation has been marred. Your cousin Iris has died. Dad and I have to go help your aunt and uncle today.” How was this possible? Iris was a little baby, not even 2 years old. How could she be dead?
I learned that Iris was rushed to the hospital the night before, when her cold became a deep cough and her fever spiked. The diagnosis was bronchiolitis, likely caused by the RSV virus, although I didn’t know that back then. All I knew was that her airways were essentially closed and she succumbed quickly. My grandparents came to be with me and I cried in our kitchen while my grandfather tried to comfort me. I was so sad and very confused, because a part of me was miserable on my own behalf, since my parents were missing my big day. I felt terrible about my selfishness. Looking back, I realize that grief can be tangled up with all kinds of conflicting emotions. But back then, I just felt awful that I thought about myself at all during this tragedy for my family.
My high school years weren’t marked by any extraordinary traumas other than an always gnawing anxiety about my mother’s health and our family’s finances. Neither of those circumstances were within my power to either control or affect in significant ways, other than getting part-time jobs to help with my expenses. My two older siblings, five and eight years apart from me, were for all practical purposes, engaged in their own more adult issues. My sister suffered bouts of depression. My brother, miserable and broken hearted after his breakup with his high school sweetheart, had impulsively enlisted in the Air Force for a four year hitch. That was all grownup stuff to me. My main issues, however, were simply the growing pains many teenagers suffer through, managing insecurity, hunting for self-esteem, searching for an identity and a purpose, trying to find a place in the world. My heart got a little broken too, as I navigated dating and boyfriends. However, I didn’t experience any more death.
That changed when I went to college. During a semester break at home, in my freshman year of college, I wound up being the only available help when my grandfather collapsed in the kitchen one morning, sending my grandmother into an emotional tailspin. I was the person who called the fire department, ran to their apartment and rode with them in the ambulance, siren blaring, down Lake Shore Drive until we reached the hospital. In those days of no cell phones or internet, contacting my parents and my uncle to get help took a lot of time. I spent the entire day being the adult, holding my grandfather’s hand, talking to doctors, calming my grandmother, until my parents finally showed up to take me home. My dad told me I’d saved a life that day. I was seventeen years old. I mulled over his comment for a long time. Grownup life, indeed. A few months later, back at school, I received a call that grandpa was dead. I took a bus home to Chicago. On that long, over four hour drive, I thought a lot about life and death and felt the grief piece inside me, stretching itself, getting a little wider. A few months later, my mom had surgery for thyroid cancer. I remember sitting in my dorm room, feeling like life was as unstable as sand, running through my hands. Fortunately, my mom survived and recovered, but these mortality issues were subtly changing the way I looked at the world. And I knew it.
Back in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, my life was intense, spreading out from intellectually, emotionally and politically as I began growing into my adult self. I read a lot, aligned myself with the women’s rights, civil rights and anti-war movements and deepened my understanding of who I wanted to be as an adult. I fell madly in love when I was eighteen, interested in a serious relationship rather than the more casual hookups of the time. When that ended after almost three tumultuous years, I learned about a different facet of grief, the kind associated with what for me, was fortunately a temporary loss of self, and the loss of a future dream. Kinds of death, in and of themselves. Healing from that took about a year. Then I had the great good fortune of developing a deep friendship with Michael, who another half year later, would become my forever life partner.
Despite legitimately being labeled an adult somewhere between ages eighteen and twenty, I’ve always felt that the 20’s and 30’s are still decades of big growth and development. At least they were for me. I’d found my significant life relationship when I was only twenty, but both of us were still figuring ourselves out, both individually and together. For us, the good news was that our transitions didn’t separate us from each other – generally we grew in compatible ways with very few exceptions. Both of us had challenges that needed work, but that was okay. Aside from personal evolution challenges, for me, there were scary brushes with familial health issues. My mom’s being a continuation of her lifelong physical problems. But my dad had a heart attack at fifty-two and subsequently had two coronary bypass surgeries, one for five arteries and the other, three years later, for three. His father had died when he was only thirty-nine years old.
Those realities informed our life choices. Michael and I got married shortly after dad’s first heart attack, after living together for four years. My parents were happy we made that choice and I was glad for their relief. Through the lens of uncertainty about how quickly life could change, I was wanting to get our reality as solid as possible while we could. I was learning that life could change in an instant and didn’t want to take anything for granted. By the time the second bypass surgery rolled around, I was a mother. My only surviving grandparent, my maternal grandmother, died the following year at age eighty-nine. Another addition to my grief reservoir, her death was at least due to old age.
During those years, we also lost the pets we brought with us into our adult life. The deaths of the elders, coupled with being parents, and saying goodbye to the landmarks of our early years, are also factors which deepened our understanding of our inner tumbling emotional world.
But my grief process accelerated in the late 1980’s. In 1987, my cousin Eliot committed suicide after a decade of struggle with mental illness. We were close cousins, growing up in the same city, not a decade apart. I attended his funeral with my son, a nursing infant. The emotional dissonance was stunning, especially as Eliot was the second child my closest uncle had to bury. Now being a parent of two young children of my own, I couldn’t fathom the level of pain my uncle was experiencing.
Then, the following October, my oldest friend Fern committed suicide. We’d been like family for thirty years. She, too, had serious mental issues which finally proved more than she could manage. Her death was devastating for me. She had experienced inter-familial sexual abuse as a small child, a factor which incensed me. The odds of a successful life were stacked against her, almost from her very beginning. The rage element added to my grief was unexpected and enduring. I continue to see her death “wrong,” always feeling she was robbed and never able to know how she could’ve lived absent that horror.
And then came the spring of 1989. My parents had relocated from Chicago to my town, a relief as we anticipated the issues that accompany aging. Within a scant two and a half years, both my parents were diagnosed with cancer, within five weeks of each other.
These diagnoses were just two months after Michael’s election as alderman to our local city council. In addition, we were in the midst of a roofing job, estimated to take a week, but already stretching out into months.The upheaval in our lives cannot be overstated. Mom was recovering from a radical mastectomy and my dad was being treated with a potent cocktail of chemotherapy drugs. To cap all that off, Michael’s years-long, intermittent nagging backache, had finally evolved into a full-blown herniated disc. Ultimately he was bedridden for three weeks before it became clear he wouldn’t heal without surgery. By the time that happened, my dad was hospitalized from dehydration brought on by profound nausea and vomiting. While my mom, still recovering and never having gotten a driver’s license, stayed at home, I ran around between her and the hospital, somehow still managing to parent my two young kids. The day after Michael’s surgery, a powerful thunderstorm struck our community. I was called home to see that the huge tree on our parkway had been struck by lightning and crashed straight through our new recently finished roof. A fitting metaphor for that year – even the sky was falling. Grief? Sadness? You bet. Life was really piling it on, or so it seemed…
Those three successive deaths permanently changed me. I distinctly remember visualizing myself as a planet, rotating on my axis, except I knew that axis had been jolted and that my movement was forever tipped in some different way. I was deeper and shades darker. Grief was a constant from then on, although on the positive side, so were my memories of the dead and all the love I’d shared. I remember that my dad, who didn’t really have any intimate relationships outside his family, was stunned by my powerful grief over Fern’s death. He thought that intensity was reserved only for blood relatives. His surprise informed my own intention to savor the other loves I acquired, making my own way through my the world. A lesson learned. A lesson carried forward.
So the years went by. My genetic history and life experiences always led me to believe that a long lifespan wasn’t in my future. I imagined that someday, Michael, with all his family members who lived well into their nineties, would one day be crying over my absence. All my dark death ideas, which annoyed everyone who loved me, turned out to be totally wrong. Michael was the one who got the hideous cancer diagnosis when he was only sixty-two. That tiny innocuous-looking little bump on his cheek would turn out to be the one of the most lethal diseases on the planet. Retrospectively, I suppose I should’ve known that he was actually always more vulnerable than me. If the forty years leading up to diagnosis day in April, 2012 proved anything, it was that between the two of us, Michael consistently had more health issues than I ever did. But that was hindsight.
I think the profound grieving started almost the minute of his initial diagnosis. I’d gotten a phone call from his dermatologist telling me to get Michael out of teaching so we could have an instant consultation with a head and neck oncologist. When he got home from school we had about an hour to sit in front of the computer, reading all the terrifying information about Merkel cell carcinoma, before heading to the appointment. Stunned, shell-shocked, what else? We hung onto each other and went off to get a rapid education. From then on, nothing was the same. Our lives were still happening but they were irrevocably altered. After crying in each other’s arms that first night, we entered a whole new world of living moment to moment. Of course that’s what we’d always been doing, although for the most part, we were blissfully unaware of that knife-like edge.
Michael had surgery and thirty radiation treatments through the summer of 2012. He returned to teaching that fall. In November, he had a full body scan which was negative for disease. We were happy but still aware that for people like him, who had an initial lesion and a few metastatic lymph nodes, our journey was far from over. We lived with that constant knowledge for months, until late 2013, when the cancer returned with a vengeance, widespread throughout his bones. We were flung into the treatment/remission cycle for the next three and a half years.
I had become accustomed to my grief as a companion since those sad losses in the late ‘80’s. Michael, on the other hand, hadn’t experienced any pain like mine and marveled that the only person he’d ever grieved for, was apparently himself. As with anything else, practice always helps. As devastated as I was, I recognized myself in this role, albeit the most challenging one of my life. But I knew how I functioned with carrying Fern with me, year in and year out. I still heard the voices of my grandmother and dad in my head. Somehow that prior experience helped. Unimaginably, in 2015, as Michael’s health nosedived again, my brother died in April. My big brother, gone forever. Parts of life just slipping away. But, one foot in front of the other. Michael continued to fail, but then, so did my mother. She died on July 25th, following a slide into dementia, coupled with a broken hip. She’d survived 25 years without my father, and it dawned on me, that a good deal of her bonus life was largely due to my support for her. One time, when her memory was working, she asked me if I thought that when Michael died, we might try living together. We’d already done that but she’d forgotten. Except for Michael and my own children, my relationship with my mother was the most intimate of my life. She was almost 92 when she died, the most unhealthy one of her family of origin, and yet the longest-lived. Another major passage for me. Five days after her death, my beloved dog, Flash, almost 15 years old, was diagnosed with a cancer that symptomatically, resembled Michael’s. I held him while he was euthanized. Three deaths in a few short months while Michael was getting a last ditch experimental treatment. That targeted therapy bought him almost another year and a half. An unbelievable time.
Michael and I made the most of our time together during what would be the last part of our deep connection. We traveled, saw movies, listened to music, made love and spent time with our kids. The mixture of experiencing our rich life, coupled with the constant thought of how it would soon likely end, was like no other feeling I’ve ever known. In its way, it was both life-affirming and death-defying. When Michael died on May 28th, 2017, in the midst of my devastation, I also felt lucky that we’d managed to get him an extra five years of life when there might have been so much less time. In addition, I knew that I’d done every single thing I could to help him. I had lived up to our relationship standards until there was nothing left to do but hold his hand and kiss him goodbye forever. Goodbye to his body, that is. I didn’t know about what was to come.
The grief I feel for all those important people is a like living entity inside me, a necessary element, alongside my continued zest for life, my curiosity and my pleasure in the living world. I can’t say how long those opposites will stay balanced for me. I hear the voice of my mother now, alongside that of my grandmother and my dad. My older sister is gone now, too, along with some of my dearest old friends. My memories keep them alive for me, as does the writing of our stories over the years.
As for Michael, he is with me, in me, around me, always. He said he would be; he even wrote that to me.
I have no explanations for why this is. I had no expectations for what I’d feel, following his death. Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want or need to sink into his arms until I draw my last breath, whatever this ghostly stuff is, goes a long way in helping me squeeze whatever I can out of this life. The grief remains but it’s tempered by my essential life force which so far, is unrelenting. When will that change? I have no idea. The following two letters are better at describing my feelings than my own words. They really spoke to me. I can say that I feel fortunate to have loved in such huge ways that transcend the boundaries of the physical. I hope someone out there feels the same way. So here they are…
In 1945, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988), lost his first wife and childhood sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, to incurable tuberculosis when she was just twenty-five. The following sealed love letter was found after his death in 1988.
