New Year, Same Me
I have a love-hate relationship with the new year, all of the build-up around clean slate, “new you” promises. I like the idea of building a new me, creating new habits, getting things off my eternal to-do list, but I also am human and tend to over-promise and under deliver. January has also not been a great month for me. It is the month when two terrible things happened: Daryl’s cancer diagnosis in January 2019, and my mom’s sudden death in January 2022. Because of these Two Terrible Things, January comes with more foreboding than promise. I’d prefer to spend it with my head under the covers and maybe come out in March.
I recently listened to an interview with psychologist Hal Hershfield on the podcast 10 Percent Happier. He was talking about how we perceive time, form habits and actually keep resolutions. The general idea is we have many different future selves, but “me now doing something for me later” can be hard and runs the risk of doing too much for that future self and missing out on the present. “There’s a world in which living for right now is actually doing a service for our future selves.”
After Daryl died, I was fine with missing out and speeding through my present to find my future self. I’d lost the co-pilot to my life, to my day. Every day, I went through a million small actions and had no one to notice. If I didn’t wake up, walk the dog, feed myself, pay the bills, go to the grocery store–how long would it take for anyone to notice? I read a news story about the corpse of a woman found in the walls of her house by new owners many years after she died and thought to myself, “Could be me!” If I had wanted to disappear from the earth, winter 2021 was the time.
I didn’t want to disappear. In movies, it’s the “All is lost” moment when the hero has bottomed out, their world has exploded in some way, and either they stay there or they make a choice to move forward. I was uncertain and kind of excited by what a future version of me might look like, yet I didn’t really want to know a version of me without Daryl.
Bad habits re-emerged and felt more potent after Daryl died. Procrastination, issues with money, hyper-focus on my body, blind romanticism, anger/temper issues. Even my identity seemed rickety. Being a writer with a completed book manuscript and an agent lost its glimmer. Time, deadlines, the future felt like a worn out piece of elastic with no snap, no strength.
Good habits and a sense of clarity came, too. I doubled down on my convictions and beliefs and helped run a political campaign for a third-party gubernatorial candidate. I found new ways to move my body and be healthy, practicing meditation, letting music save me (again), allowing myself to be vulnerable and share my personal experiences on my blog and in essays. I let go of people who were not really there for me, dating again and relearning how to trust men, being present for friends going through hard things, getting comfortable with death.
Grief is an internal restructuring, and I had to adapt.
As soon as Daryl was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in January of 2019, I felt like a new element entered my body. We talk about “Grief Brain” and “Grief Fog” and a myriad of “Grief + X, Y, Z” terms, but what if the grief is in us?
At times, I felt like the Incredible Hulk, unable to control my emotions. The anger had nowhere to sink, so it bounced. Not long after his diagnosis, I heard secondhand that someone was talking shit about me in a meeting and thought I should be fired. I was filled with such rage I felt it coursing through me in an uncontrollable way and I wanted to find this person and let them have it. I remember marching across the street, toward their store and calling Daryl who talked me down.
I also noticed all of the things in the most intense way: Beautiful patterns of leaves on the pavement, messages to me were everywhere. I was blinded by the FEELING OF EVERYTHING (See: Sobbing listening to a Foo Fighters song, a band I don’t even like).
It turns out, a “Screw it, my husband died” can be used as an excuse for many, many things. Some excuses were valid, as some days the grief was so overpowering moving from bedroom to couch and to the TV felt like enough.
On the podcast, Hirshfield uses an analogy from a language professor at Stanford, Dr. Joshua Landy. It involves a bus and its passengers. The driver is the most current self, and “the passengers are different iterations of our past and future selves, some of whom may be having a louder voice at other times and can almost impact the driver and some of whom may be quiet. When we have someone close to us who dies, the driver at that time may be most influenced by the sadness and possible trauma of that moment, but then eventually that driver is going to step to the back and a new driver will take over, and he’ll become a passenger and he may shout occasionally and other times he may just be quietly sitting there.” It is impossible to describe the speed at which you will go through emotions, versions of yourself, like flipping and reshuffling a deck of cards, like peeling a tarot card and wondering at its meaning. Each time, at the end, you are someone completely different.
In the movie The Prestige the “trick” involves escaping a water tank while bound. Two rival magicians played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale vie to be the better illusionist. When Jackman’s wife dies in the tank, he blames Bale’s character, a schism occurs and the stakes get higher and crazier and eventually involve Tesla and some sort of teleportation machine madness. (Spoiler Alert!) There is a horrifying scene at the end of the film when you see all the lifeless doppelgängers of Hugh Jackman floating in tanks, a new version extinguished every night for the trick to be pulled off. There are bigger metaphors director and writer Christopher Nolan is getting at—doubling, revenge, grief, identity. I think about the bodies in the tank, the visual of it is so powerful, all of those selves used and extinguished.
There have been a lot of metaphorical Shannons in a Tank the last few years. I describe grief as a hyper-aware version of puberty because you are changing so quickly, untying yourself from constraints real and imagined. Likes and dislikes disappear overnight.
“In Irish when you talk about an emotion, you don’t say, ‘I am sad.’ You’d say, ‘Sadness is on me – Ta’ Bron Orm.’ I love that because there’s an implication of not identifying yourself with the emotion fully. I am not sad, it’s just that sadness is on me for a while. Something else will be on me another time, and that’s a good thing to recognize.”
Over the course of the last five years, grief has been on me. I could not sequester it, or compartmentalize (which is one of my favorite tricks). I had to figure out how to incorporate it into my internal structure, see how it could help illuminate good and bad things, or allow it to destroy me.
At some point, I let go of the idea that I wanted to or could do these things by myself. I had to re-learn how to be and trust myself. I hired a lot of experts, for nutrition or intention/goal setting, fitness, mental health, meditation, finances, all of it.
We think of grief as a place someone goes to, but it is so much bigger than that. It’s not that you go to the place of grief, but that grief moves into your place, your body and mind.