Things I've Thought About Grief from Books

Lately, as I go through the mechanics of performing the role of Me in the continuing saga Daily Life, I have a line from Hamlet rattling around my head, “I have, I know not where, lost all my mirth,” (or, as Hammy actually says, “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.”)

I know where I lost all my mirth. It was last seen in Shetland, evaporating off my skin in cold prickles as Mom told me about Hannah. And I didn’t lose exactly all my mirth—I still laugh with people I love, and I find bright joy simply being in the world. It is a beautiful place, the world, and deserves to be cherished and enjoyed. But there is a heaviness in my chest, like a cold that is lingering in deep, that cannot be shaken out. Every time something wonderful happens, every time something frustrating happens, every time the average Tuesday happens, I want to tell my sister. Last night, I woke up in a strange sweat from a vague bad dream, nothing memorable, just the awful sick feeling of deeply calibrated loss. I know where the bad dreams come from. It’s near where my mirth has run off to.

Not to spoil things, but Hamlet doesn’t end well. I’ve, at times, smugly enjoyed tying myself in bleak emo knots and intellectual complexity of Hamlet. I used to revel in that sort of English-major’s elitism, before anything truly sad ever happened to me, and I had the mental energy for mooning over fictional drama. Hamlet actually does grief well, but pretty much botches the revenge pieces, and then nothing goes right. Perhaps because vengeance is almost always a bad idea, perhaps because trying to fill the void of a loved one’s death is an impossible task in any instance. 

I read King Lear, at least the storm scenes and Cordelia’s death, during a thunderstorm last month—because I know the play well enough to recognize the horrible pain in those scenes and thought that maybe it would make me feel better to find some words for the horrible pain in me. I didn’t feel much better, I didn’t much feel worse, but learned that crying while a storm rages is fairly cathartic. And Lear’s howling, I like, although I feel pretentious howling myself. The sound that comes out of my mouth when I try is not nearly ragged and feral enough to make the keening hollow noise that feels right for this. 

But really, I don’t read much these days. Shakespeare is probably a bit much to wade into as a grief read, anyway. (Other than that ancient, timeless quality of his words and their general commentary on the human condition, the foot-fall cadence of the words, and the understanding that these words have mattered to humans for hundreds of years…I guess they have something to offer. But it is a bit of a dense tangle.) 

I do find myself carting around and occasionally even opening and reading a few pages of Voltaire’s Candide, and Brendan “Semi-Rad” Leonard’s The New American Roadtrip Mixtape. Candide I picked up because Olof told a story about Hannah making a great joke about the last line of Candide with him at a ski race once and jokes like that were part of why he loved her. I’d never read it, but if Hannah knew it well enough to make a joke that made Olof laugh, I want to join that club. (Technically, that’s the same reason I first read Hamlet—high-school Hannah said she loved it. So middle-school me read it.) 

And Andy and Jesse recommended The New American Roadtrip Mixtape. Trustworthy sources, who got to know some of the best of Hannah through adventures after they’d each made their separate ways west from Hopkinton to Colorado. 

Perhaps when your problem is a nail, all tools look like hammers, but I am finding the shallow waters of both Candide and TNARM’s early pages to be similar pilgrimages. Man-boy has thing happen to him, goes out into the wide world to explore, eventually comes home and will either tend a garden, or live a sort of peaceable existence having adventures and writing about them and growing that spirit among any who read his words. I like that Leonard is upfront about that part of his drive to adventure away from a heartache involves frank yet poetic descriptions of the physical pain of some of his running and climbing. There is something to this idea of pushing yourself hard enough that your corporeal misery matches your emotional kaleidoscope. But maybe trail running out of sadness is just the same as a Christian pilgrim’s hair-shirt and self-flagellation.

Because, it’s all the same, all of these pilgrimages, all of this going out and returning—changed but unchanged, deepened. Forty days in the wilderness, mindfulness retreats, vision quests, T.S. Eliot not ceasing from exploration, Kerouac, Chris McCandless, Elizabeth Gilbert, and all the rest of them and us. 

A lot of these pilgrimages grow out of what I think of as “the post break-up renaissance”—that window of time where the person who has broken and battered your heart and who you have also accidentally damaged becomes less important and there is sweet relief in getting back to the things that you did and loved with or without them. 

And you can, I believe, outrun that kind of heartbreak. I’ve always ended up coming back to myself, eventually sloughing off most of the baggage from different chaps, taking as much of good as doesn’t hurt to carry through the wreckage, and moving forward. You can struggle-slog-adventure-pilgrimage out from break-ups in personal growth and expectation, because it’s the typical adage of “wherever you go, there you are,” and a confidence and peace can come from more time, alone, with your Self, a “paragon of animals,” (Hammy’s words).

Grief, on the other hand…where could I go, what could I do, that could somehow bring me to a reckoned peace with a world without Hannah? I can’t think of any place. “It’s not down on any map; true places never are,” says the swath of Moby-Dick  that lives in my head. Wherever it is, every sunrise, every load of laundry, every tank of gas brings me deeper and deeper into the uncharted world where Hannah isn’t laughing and messing around in mountains, I don’t really want to go where she isn’t and where I somehow emerge healed from this loss. Healing, to me, sounds like the shit-fit that the narrator of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael throws when he learns Ishmael has a syllabus, because a syllabus implies an end of a process. I reject that there is a tidy end point to any of this.

Even the places that I do want to go, and the things that I do want to do—more hiking by headlamp, more running, more skiing, more camping, more lying out and looking at stars, visiting glaciers, getting another dog, going to Hawaii, to India, to Turkey, to Sweden—it all becomes just so much less appealing to do these things without Hannah, to imagine that I have her excited good wishes to propel me for the rest of my life, but to not have her waiting for me at trail junctions, to not have her packing a secret bag of potato chips for me, to not have her offering the shirt off her back, the skis off her feet, the anything and everything to highlight that here we are, together, in this place. 

The boys in the books about adventurous pilgrims, they want to leave where they are. From what I've gathered from the few girl-books out there, we want to leave who we are, who the bounds of society and relationships of our lives make us. Everyone wants to be unfettered, to see what is new out on the road. It is self-discovery and self-rediscovery. I had that phase, and one of the things I discovered is that being Hannah and Emily's sister, Dijit and Jeff's daughter is one of the best things I can do with my life. And now, I hesitate to embrace newness, even the best new things, because it hurts my chest to not be able to tell the people I most want to tell.

For the last three and a half year, because of the way the words embrace his loss of the world as well as our loss of him, I’ve found it hard to say, “Dad would love this,” when the ocean is aggressively choppy, when New Hampshire is particularly good at something, when the sunlight hits a wooden boat in the water, when Emily and Alex got married and their wedding was beautiful and the most fun my family has ever had. Writing “will ever have” seems dark and melodramatic, but I think that we will never be “okay” without Hannah in the same way Mom and Hannah and Emily and I were just this summer cusping onto a new normal without Dad. Hannah’s loss was too sudden, too unfair to the life she still should be living. Dad had a disease that had been hurting his body for years and we all knew it, and while he went too soon for me, sixty-seven years of life is more time than thirty-nine. 

I doubt I’ll ever be able to say “Hannah would love this” without bawling because she cannot be here to love it herself. I balk at the reality that, once I can eat enough to have energy to run, I will likely start doing more things that Hannah loves, because she loves them. It’s a pattern I’ve had for much my life, anyway. I reverse the words from Eddie Vedder’s Society “I hope you’re not lonely, without me” to something more like “I hope the world isn’t lonely without Hannah’s exuberance and constant presence,” and so I want to get out there and put some joy back where it belongs. Who is to say that mirth isn’t a crucial part of any ecosystem? And given the combined loss of both my dad and Hannah’s fierce glee at being alive in the world, that’s some major keystone species collapse and some of us the living should pull our socks up and get out there to remedy.

But, still, when I get close to doing things like what Hannah loves, I feel the double ache of her loss of all the life she’s lost on top of my own sadness. It is hard to enjoy new adventures, to enjoy anything new when the people you most want to share the best and worst of everything with are absent. And every day is new. And every day is hard. 

The Brutal Importance of Accuracy

All my Best People,  June 2018

In the last week, I have had to tell nineteen new people about Hannah.

My job gives me the summer off, so there is a lot of naive enthusiasm of “how was your summer?” that needs to be navigated. And I have about thirty college students who work for me, and I felt that in the first meetings I have with them each, I should explain why I may be a hot mess this year.

One of the folks I told, a professor rather than a college kid, said that he'd read an article about Hannah online in a running magazine post.

“Oh, that one?” I said. “They got her wrong, they said she slipped. She didn’t slip. They corrected things eventually, but they got it wrong at first.” An edge of hysteria sharpened as my words came out faster and the professor backed off making desultory conversation about how he'd read a sad story about a woman who turned out to be my sister. She is my sister, Emily’s sister, Mom’s daughter, Will’s lady, the beloved family and dear friend of many, and a coach and mentor and person to more people than can be counted.

Hannah is too much to be a quick one-offed news story.

I know that this running magazine wrote about her online. I know this because Olof and Whitney called me in a fury because the writer had gotten permission to use Summit Nordic photos, had been offered the contact information for Olof—who has the desolate honor of sharing Hannah’s last hours, minutes, seconds—and then the writer just copied and pasted together the words of earlier articles in other papers, including the misinformation that Hannah slipped.

The words “she didn’t slip” are important to me. It’s a bitter little mantra, something that I can breathe in and out to while bawling, which I do best when I’m alone in my car.

It matters that she didn’t slip, because Hannah was not out of her depth or beyond her abilities. One rock crumbled in her hand, another hit her head. It is stark and it is random and it gives me night and daymares, but it is the truth.

It’s somehow easier when a person dies in the mountains to tell a story of hubris. It’s especially easy and common and untrue with women who die in wild places, to paint them as dumb Bambis who just weren’t strong enough or experienced enough to be where they were.

There is also the more awestruck bro-y rationale that, “well, they knew the risks and they went for it anyway,” as if there was some mystic purity in being a martyr to the Spirit of Adventure. This seems to give comfort to the same sort of idiots who offer up the “at least they went doing something they loved” platitude. When I wrote that Hannah’s death was as random as walking into a grocery store, past a display of watermelons and being hit in the head, imagine the idiocy of a person saying that there was to be some comfort in “at least…she always loved watermelons.”

To make it a question of skill or preparedness or even of belonging in the outdoors puts the possibility of any of us going so quickly and randomly far away. “I would be prepared,” we can say. “I wouldn’t do that, go there, make that choice…”

Any of us would. Any of us could. Some of us may. I was fussing with a hose today, watering the flowering tree my grandmother has given my mother as a memorial to Hannah—something pretty, that will grow. The tree is planted right next to the porch Hannah painted in the days before Emily’s wedding. The margin between lacing up your sneakers for another hike and having your family choose a species of tree to memorialize you is less than razor thin, and none of us are as in control of our own fates as we imagine.

But that is not the point. The point is that death is awful and permanent and painful for those who remain. (I have no ideas about how it is for those who go—I only hope it doesn’t hurt as much for Hannah to be without us.) If words are one of the only ways to do justice to a life, to tell the stories that keep a memory alive, that send little girls flocking to roller skis, that get teenage boys punch-dancing to Taylor Swift, that make us all dig a little deeper to live a little better and be stronger and kinder and go farther to keep the world from being too lonely for all that Hannah brought to it…if all that is the case, then it is crucially important to get the words right.

I write. I like words. I like when I find the ones that can give needle-like accuracy to the feelings I want to convey. I know I get it right when it feels clean and when people say "that's just what I felt, but I didn't have the words," and we can connect over the shared experience of whatever it is to be human.

When professional writers use their platform and words wrongly or poorly, I am deeply furious and offended at the tools being put to uses beneath their power. Objectively, Hannah made a great news story for papers in Colorado and New Hampshire and for running and skiing and adventure race forums. Beautiful white girl dies in tragic dramatic accident in mountains. Boom. Probably there is a formula for how many more likes you get on an article based on the wattage of the girl’s smile. Hannah’s was a million.

I wish all of this attention had come to her in life, because she hasn’t been made extraordinary by death. She was even more so in life. Everything that is now listed as an accomplishment and evidence of a vibrant life…she was doing all of that which is now missed and celebrated and mourned, all of it unsung, underpaid, and often unnoticed.

And, as that is impossible now, I wish that newspaper writers and online magazine compilers would show a little more humanity and responsibility in their writing about death. I wish that the two local New Hampshire papers had gotten in touch with my mother before she went out to grab her paper from the driveway and saw the front-page story that highlighted Hannah’s local roots, yet did not mention her local family. That the Colorado papers had waited for the official report from the Coroner’s Office before writing anything about how Hannah died, because those small errors were compounded each time another lazy writer used those stories as a base, rather than doing their own research. That, if Hannah was a news story on the local New England news, someone at WMUR had asked us or told us before Emily’s coworker mentioned it in passing. That the running-writer had used the contact information for Olof he was provided with at the start, and gotten the story right, the first time.

All of this was poorly done. I know that our news media is broken. I know that the sub 24-news cycle is absurd, that journalists are under more pressure to get likes and shares and retweets than to get their facts straight, because profit matters more than truth.

And I know that I don’t care about any of those bullshit reasons for making avoidable mistakes.

These stories, like all news, are about people. In this case, they were about one of my best People, and anything that was wrong or inaccurate or sloppy about her is painful, because all we get from now on are memories and sharing stories. Hannah has become a finite resource, in some ways. While I have the rest of my life to tell Hannah stories, there is also no second chance for how news of her death entered the worlds she touched.

It is that lack of care and respect that enrages me about things that were written about Hannah, that people who wrote stories about Hannah without knowing her and without reaching out to those who did know her. It was, actually, kind of the professor to say he’d read about Hannah—my fury is that there is any inaccuracy about my sister in the world.

It’s quite bad enough that she is gone.

Hannah was such a stickler for truth and accuracy and responsible grammar, though, that it is a little insulting to have to correct these statements. I’m sure there are more places than I know that wrote about Hannah—rightly and wrongly—but there is only so much policing the internet for accuracy that I have the stamina to do. It should not fall to the bereaved to correct the record of a passing—the record should be correct before it is published.

My mom asked me today if I thought there would be a time when we’d run out of Hannah stories, or if people who love us would simply have had enough of hearing the same thirty-nine years of stories about Hannah.

I don’t think I will ever be sick of them.   

At the Beach with my Sisters

Hannah & Me, after deciding to "swim" in storm infused waves in 1997

Emily and I had a wonderful afternoon at Popham yesterday. Mom and Emily and I took a walk along Back Cove last night. Emily and I went sailing with great friends today. The beach was beautiful…for all that the climate is changing the shape of that beach, there is something eternally lovely and comforting about being there. At Back Cove, I got to point out to Mom, across the dwindling light, all the places I like about this city I’ve loved for two years. The sail was also fantastic—two of my favorite Short Friends climbed all over the boat, all over us, and the weather was as gorgeous as September could possibly be. It’s better to be sad outside in the world than sad in a basement, but all the beauty of these days doesn’t much touch the ache within.

All of this good living, this is what I miss for Hannah. 

She would have run more 100 mile races. I loved looking at the ages for the Big Horn 100 race and seeing that most of the lady endurance athletes are in their 40s. Hannah was literally running into her prime. She did the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse this year, for the third or fourth or fifth time now. And doing it with the usual suspects wasn’t as fun anymore, she said, and thought seriously about skipping it this last year. After the race, she said the only way she’d do it again was if Emily or I wanted to give it a try. And we could probably been talked into it. I wanted to crew for my sisters whenever they were ready to ski the Birkebeiner together. Hannah was over the moon with the idea that if Emily and Alex have kids someday, she was going to be Adventure Auntie, and get those babies up their first 14,000 foot mountains before they were 10. Hannah’s running of 100 mile races has helped Mom get excited about running, and Hannah was as thrilled about any of Mom’s 5 and 10k races as she was about her own longer jaunts—"our Mum! She's so cute. And strong," said Hannah when we talked about The Dij going for a run.

I’m sure that the folks who skied and ran with Hannah have a million more trails they were looking forward to doing with her. I’m sure Hannah would have wanted to do them all with you too…as long as you brought snacks and weren’t going to be either an idiot or a dick. 

But, although I once made Hannah laugh so hard she almost fell of her bike by deadpan stating that “I am primarily an Athlete,” and I would give a lot to spend more time doing any sport she wanted with her, it’s not the trails run and the miles skied that I miss for Hannah. To me, all of Hannah’s sports were things she did, not who she was. Her warmth and grit and delight at being out in and seeing how far she could go in this beautiful world were part of who she was, and whatever sport that manifested in were just a symptom of her personhood. If her love of the world had taken the form of oil painting and rebuilding engines, she would have been the same person to me.

Yesterday, Em and I walked and sat and swam at Popham Beach, where we grew up spending a week every summer from birth until we were all in middle and high school. This is the place where Hannah turned cartwheels on ever grain of sand one summer. She'd just gotten her ears pierced and lost an earring in the sand. I looked for it for years, wanting to get it back to her. This is the place where Hannah and I ran down together into the rainy windy hurricane improved surf one morning to jump in and swim because everyone else said it would be crazy. This is the beach we walked down when Hannah told me about Austin Powers movies and said “we need to get you to watch some movies outside The Parents’ domain,” This is the place where Hannah put my best doll into the cabin freezer to “cool off,” so I took Hannah’s last pair of clean underpants, ran them under the faucet, and stuck them in the freezer. This place that is as much a part of my childhood as the houses I grew up in…I am shattered that Hannah can’t ever come here again, wrap up in her ten-towel Burd-kini, and watch the water come in and out. I don’t know when the last time she was here was, but I called her almost every time I went, and always got a “Jeezums. I love that place.” 

I want to sit here with her when we’re forty and sixty and seventy and eighty and tell these stories. Emily and I have our own code, our own stories and history of this place, and the beauty of being the middle sister is that I have rich and robust lives with both my sisters in ways that I’ve always found their particular relationship without me to lack. They big-baby sister worshipped and protected each other, and have come to a different beautiful mode of being in grown-up sistership. Me, I’ve always gotten to be more of a friend to each, apart from us being our intesimable trio, being Hannah’s first team, being my best people always. No one of us would trade what we each have had, but I’ve always felt like I got the best deal. 

Lately, when I walk around alone anywhere, I imagine my knees just buckling under me and falling. The Christmas Carol “O Holy Night,” and the line “fall, fall on your knees” sung with such emotion that the words could topple a cathedral comes to me.

I want to fall on my knees most of the time.

Because how, how on earth do we keep going? I can convince myself on one level of the brain that Hannah is gone on a trip and will be back. It’s the permanency of death that fells me. Days are long, and to want to seize each day and throttle it for me, for Dad, and now for Hannah, to not always feel capable of getting out of bed, to feel hollow enough to be unstable, and then also to find myself in beautiful places, surrounded by people I also love, smiling and laughing and talking about every day things like politics and grocery stores, all the while knowing that I have lost forever the person who traced around my ears as a newborn and announced “her ears are small,” I just don’t see how we do it. I know we can and will. It's the how that boggles. 

A dear friend told me today “you’re stronger than you think you are.” Thank goodness. However, I already know we all are strong enough to do what needs to be done. Heck. We’re strong enough to do it with some style and maybe even grace. I simply don’t want this to be what needs to be done, and all the strength in the world and in me cannot change that obstinancy. A part of my heart simply isn’t in this new post-Hannah world, because part of my heart was in her. I identify as Hannah and Emily’s sister before any other part of my being, before even my name. 

Emily and I talked yesterday about how we are still and always three sisters, there’s me here and her there and then there’s Hannah…we’re not sure where. Molecularly, some of the fire of Hannah has already been released into the world. The rest of her, at some time we and Will somehow will find the right place to let those parts of her go into the ecosystems—and we all know she’d be sort of fascinated to understand exactly the science of that. But, the molecules that go into the ocean or forest or mountains…these don’t have Hannah’s laugh. They don’t know the stories I want to laugh over and try to explain what we were thinking or weren’t thinking. Hannah always said it was great for her that I have a good memory, because it meant she could use me as a reference for her childhood. I have Emily, I have Mom, but I am missing the parts that maybe only Hannah also knew. I want her to fact check me, I want her version of events, I want her.

Because, when we share memories, it’s not at all about getting the facts right. It’s about the mutual adoration society, and about being able to see each other from and as all the stages we’ve been through. When Hannah and I laughed now about the underwear incident, we could see how far we’d come, without making a fuss over things. Memories are emotional shorthand, because “I love you so” falls far short and is much too serious when you are speaking Minion and trying to find wedding shoes and doing all the more important work of being aboard the sistership. 

That Hannah doesn’t share any more chapters with me, with any of us, that we all don’t get to make any more great stories together, that fact knocks me flat. Every time. 

(This is Emily, yesterday, standing in a hole and eating a sandwich, to make a point and making another great story that we'll have for this place.)