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.