home for the holidays

an essay (sort of) about grief (sort of)

I am shivering, reading cold northeastern prose
and there is a word for what I do
but I do it anyway,
carefully setting dinner on the table uncooked,
before setting the table on fire.

— David Berman, Of Things Found Where They Are Not Supposed To Be

1.

Nobody takes care of southern Ontario.¹ On the drive from my parent’s house to the hospital — a two-hour stretch of deep suburban highway we’ve driven hundreds of times in my life, for hundreds of reasons — this is the only thing I can think about, again and again. Nobody takes care of anything here.

In Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, he theorizes that the feeling of eerie is formed from absence; eerieness is conjured “either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something.” Ontario, too, is defined by absence: acres of empty farmland, dead or dying; an occasional horse with no stable, brushing off flies; abandoned barns, their rotted roofs slumping into them like bedsheets, black with mildew and so eaten-through that you can see pockets of sky peeking through from the other side of the wooden slats. 

Ontario in the winter is a province in greyscale. It’s the kind of grey that takes something from you; you are less of yourself for being surrounded by it. There are stretches of the road that make you colourblind — you’re left desperate for stimulation, reaching for the abstract idea of colour in the forgotten past or distant future (maybe one of these barns used to be red, you think, before the rot). And then, just when you’re sure you’ll never see anything but grey ever again in your life, you see a glimpse of a blue car or a bright yellow billboard that says JESUS SAVES. It never makes you feel better; mostly it just serves to remind you that there is theoretical colour in the world, far away, kept from you. Someone in this place must have stolen some colour from somewhere it naturally grows and transplanted it here, in its ugliest possible form, for no reason other than to torture us. Then the blue car drives out of your field of view and you’re colourblind again. 

One year, we were driving down this stretch of road and saw one of the abandoned barns engulfed in flames. The fire was two stories high, hypnotic in its efficiency, made fiercer and brighter and hotter by the flat monotony of the landscape around it. It was the most viscerally destructive thing I had ever seen in real life, and this is the part that really put a pit in my stomach: all this sound and fury, and it wasn’t destroying anything that anyone had cared about for a long, long time.

2.

In Ontario, I am a child again. Don’t tell me what to do. When you’re a nail, everything looks like a hammer; when you’re a child, everything sounds like derision. I have made myself so small in my mind that I can only ever be looked down upon. This is my worst trick.

We drive through towns where the tallest building is the Catholic church and the main street downtown is five storefronts lined up in a row. Two of them are always dispensaries, somehow. All these Catholics must be smoking weed.

We go to the church where my parents got married. We go to the house where my grandparents died. We check on if the new family is taking good care of it — they are, we determine, although it’s hard to know by what metric. I’m sure the new family doesn’t chainsmoke in the kitchen with the radio on. Maybe they washed the nicotine out of the walls. Maybe they don’t let the kids sit so close to the high-static television. What a prison, to take such good care of a house so carefully and lovingly ruined — what a tragedy, what a loss.

My mother grew up on the military base next to town. My grandfather worked on the planes and never flew them. He cleaned floors and toilets at night. He drank too much and had a beautiful singing voice, warbling and sad, full to bursting with everything that had happened to him. This is what I am. I belong to it all.

3.

My publisher sends me some books in the mail. (I love the mail, now — my whole life is the mail.) I rip the package open and read the jackets on the way back up to my mother’s room, where the shades are drawn and the light is heavy and blue even at midday. I say, look, they sent me a book about a young mother grappling with the death of her sister. Isn’t that funny? (It is funny, but it’s not ha-ha funny.) She can’t answer me — she’s suspended somewhere between conscious and unconscious, hanging by a string just beyond my reach — but if she could, she might say: well, I’m not that young anymore. 

If she had said that, of course, she would have been right; she’s not that young anymore. But grief does funny things to time, I’ve noticed. Last week I went to make a plate from the casserole dish full of leftovers I’d left on my kitchen table only to find, when I lifted the lid, that the whole chicken inside had been frosted with a thick layer of blue-grey mold. Maybe that was a month ago, actually. Maybe it’s still there.

It might be more accurate to say that grief obliterates time: it strips it of meaning, destroys its constancy, renders it useless as a measure of anything that matters. My mom used to say that her mother, Mary, would see her as a kid until the day she died — she was a miracle child, the youngest of four by a wide margin, a happy surprise to an aging Irish Catholic, the baby forever and ever. They drove each other crazy and called on the phone every day. When her mother died a few years ago, I watched time warp and stretch around her. The stress of a loss makes everyone feel weary and old, of course, but I always felt as though the loss of her mother aged my mom in a way that was both far less tangible and much more real: she was no longer forever young in comparison to someone else, no longer still a baby in somebody’s heart and mind. 

But tragedy makes her young, too. When I talk to anyone about what’s going on, they shake their heads and say, she’s far too young for all that grief. Far too young for all that loss. We’ve never felt older and we’ve never had so many people tell us how young we are. Grief does funny things to time. 

4. 

I’m reading The Year of Magical Thinking and it’s not doing as much for me as I thought it would. A few months ago, I went on three dates with a pretty nice guy who spoke very highly of it. He told me he admired the restraint in Didion’s prose when writing about unfathomable emotion; he appreciated her ability to act like a journalist of her own pain, a third-party observer writing news-copy in the wreckage of a war zone. I agreed with him — it gestures towards Didion’s toughness, I said, her clarity of thought, her preeminent and much-discussed self-respect — and then I made him promise to never, ever read any of my writing. 

5.

I’m crying in front of my ex-boyfriend in the living room of someone else’s house. We can only ever be in other people’s houses, now. It feels sort of nice — nostalgic, maybe — to cry in front of him again. I think that he’s already so different. I wonder, crying at him from across the floor of our friend’s co-op, if the end of our relationship forced him to change, or if he was changing the whole time and I was just too near to notice it. I used to feel sometimes like we were suspended in each other, motionless and free from autonomy, like flies in honey — both of us the flies, both of us the honey. Now, the motion never stops. I ask him if I seem any different now and he says, well, you used to just be so miserable. 

He shows me the song he wrote, and it might be sort of about me, but I don’t know for sure. He asks me if I’ll help him write the rest of it. I can’t tell if this is cruel or not, but I do it anyway. I write the rest of the song about the girl who’s maybe-me from the perspective of a boy who’s maybe-him, and I really think about this fictional girl, and I really try to imagine what it must have been like for this fictional boy to love her. I imagine her fictional neuroses and her fictional sexual hangups and the fictional thoughts that kept her awake at night, staring at him, scared of herself. I feel like I can hold her in my hands. 

I finish the song about the make-believe girl who looks and acts exactly like me, and I make her sound like kind of a shitty person. But I make him miss her, in the song. I think that maybe I’m being cruel this time but I can’t tell exactly who I’m being cruel to. It’s pretty — it sounded like Dan Reeder when he started but when I play it it sounds like the Moldy Peaches. He says we should sing it as a duet. 

At some point I tell him I’m seeing someone new, and he says, you know you don’t have to tell me everything, and I don’t say: really? since when?

6. 

I am the world’s leading expert at saying something a little mean to my mom by accident. I am setting international records in receiving a text that says hey, just checking in, and I am reaching never-before-seen heights at not responding. I am competing at the Olympic level in having a bad feeling lodged in the bottom of my stomach. Sports analysts are touching their fingers to their earpieces and saying, our top guys think she’s going to take it all the way this season. The press is picking up the story. The bad feeling in my stomach is instigating cultural conversation and creating local jobs (union, health and dental). Television ratings are up across the board, print media is back; the groundswell of public support for my bad feeling’s unprecedented athletic performance has positively impacted the local economy. Strangers are talking to each other on the bus to work again. They’re saying, you tuning in tonight? I read in the Post that she curled up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor for 45 minutes yesterday. God, she’s serious about gold this year. She’s going to take it. The bad feeling in my stomach is a hometown hero. 

In the car after Christmas I make a joke to my dad about wanting to kill myself. I really am joking, and he laughs, and I feel guilty anyway. Recently, he told me that he was so worried about me a few months ago that he almost got on a flight to New York. 

Later, he asks me to please not make those jokes anymore. I am the biggest star at being worried about. I am crushing the competition. 

7. 

All my computers know that I’m grieving. On Instagram, the algorithm serves me ads for ketamine therapy, online counselling services, and an app that describes itself, mystifyingly, as “Duolingo for anger”. It nudges me towards brightly-coloured infographics that say “HOW TO BE HAPPIER” or “Rough Patches Are Normal :)” in cheery, organic font, and then it politely directs my attention towards a baby-pink girlblogger post about suicidal depression and thinly-veiled anorexia. A girl who’s much skinnier than me poses with a hard-boiled egg on a plate, garnished and arranged with suspicious effort. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is excerpted again and again, in different fonts, with varying levels of self-awareness. A post tells me to end my relationship. A post tells me to try microdosing mushrooms. A post tells me to like and follow for more tips on managing grief (bravely, I refuse; this is a last-gasp attempt at asserting my autonomy against the computer that is approximately as effective as a baby’s burp against an atom bomb).

I know that these posts are not generated by Instagram itself; I know that, in fact, they’re mostly produced by a largely well-meaning network of individuals who are only subconsciously interested in mining my newly-vulnerable brain for consumer engagement. I know that when I look at one of these posts, about grief or death or OCD or existential malaise or hating your body and your brain and yourself, what I’m really seeing is one person on another computer somewhere calling out into the void — attempting to make a peer-to-peer connection that is undeniably real even when it’s negotiated through the endless alienating layers of techno-bureaucracy. The algorithm has paired us together, me and this sad anorexic on an iPhone somewhere, me and this peppy divorcee posting about healthy relationship patterns. It has recognized something so similar in us that the power of our connection might just help Instagram turn a profit.

I know the person who made the stupid fucking infographic about grief on my explore page has surely felt grief themselves. It has decimated them. It has torn their world apart and built a new one. I know, also, that their experience of it was surely no less intense or complex or human than my own. But I feel angry anyway. I feel like the computer is saying to me, we know you’re in so much pain, and boy, do we have a product for you. The answer to your pain is posts. I almost threw my phone at the wall the other day but stopped myself because I felt too much like I was putting on a show — performing a song-and-dance of suffering that I’d probably also just seen online somewhere. Sometimes I’m angry that I feel so angry.  

8.

One of the posts on my feed says, in large, self-serious serif: what is grief if not love persevering? Another, this one presented to me in tumblr text post format by an account dedicated to the pursuit of “dark academia”: grief is the last and final translation of love. The posts are constant and beautiful and empty, gesturing toward meaningfulness while simultaneously being completely void of meaning. I am fed Joan Didion and Cheryl Strayed and Ocean Vuong, Kafka and Bradbury and Carson, Jenny Slate, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Rose Etter — all in perfectly square morsels of visual text, single lines wrenched without mercy from their original artistic contexts, meant to help me microdose catharsis without having to stomach the full weight of anyone else’s grief. I open my mouth, dutifully, and swallow. I am still hungry.

What is grief if not love persevering? The post has attributed this quote to Sylvia Plath or something but I’m pretty sure it’s actually by a pretend robot superhero from a Disney show. Not that it matters, I suppose — people seem to find comfort in the idea regardless. The post has many thousands of likes. The algorithm expects that I will be one of them.

But I don’t feel comforted; I feel angry again. What a profound relief, that love and grief are positioned on opposite ends of a road that only goes one way. Grief is the last and final translation of love. Grief is love’s exit wound. Grief is love with no place to go. One day, apparently, the sky cracks open and your love becomes grief, and all you can do to cope with this sudden and purportedly irreversible transformation is remind yourself that you used to have something better. And listen — maybe it’s true, all of it. Maybe grief is the last and final translation of love; maybe when love perseveres through tragedy, it really can only persevere as pain. I don’t know enough about either love or grief to suggest otherwise. But I do know the big, stubborn problem I’ve found with accepting that idea: I have felt so much grief at the end of so much love that all of my love has started to feel like the beginning of grief. 

So, I can’t stop talking about what will happen if my best friend dies. I am decimated by the loss of things that aren’t even gone yet. I am so full of the people I love — I have let so much of myself be made of them — that I can tell, with clinical specificity, precisely how little of me there could be if they were gone. The more firmly and reliably entrenched they are in my life, the more the fear persists. I, too, am defined by absence. I am a child, and anything could be taken from me at any moment.

I tell Liam, if Sadie ever dies, put me in the hospital for a year. If Seb dies, sedate me. I can’t take any more of it. I can picture myself empty. He says, are you sure it’s good for you to be talking about this, and I don’t say: what else could I possibly talk about?

9.

The backs of my eyelids look like the hospital. I can’t stop imagining funerals. I either sleep all the time or I can’t sleep at all — I’m always changing my mind. When I can’t sleep, I script paralyzing, self-indulgent scenes in my head: I’m waking up screaming the night before the service; I’m watching my father cry; I’m being led off the pulpit mid-speech, hysterical, by an anonymous lover dressed in black. I text Sadie in the middle of the night and say it again: please don’t die, please don’t die. I can’t stop writing eulogies in my head, which is really just another way of making it all about myself. 

10.

I’m not sure if I should be writing about any of this, but I don’t know what else to do with it.

11. 

People keep telling me they’re sorry. I never understand what they’re saying. Tragedy rips through language. I feel slow and dumb, fumbling at words, teaching myself again what they mean, my stubby little baby fingers struggling to stack alphabet blocks into a wobbly tower. I have to keep reminding myself: now we say hello, now we say thank you, now we say how we feel. Sometimes an apology means I wish this wasn’t happening to you, and sometimes an apology means I’m sorry I did this to you. When people tell you they’re sorry, they mean the first one, remember?

12.

The palliative care unit of the hospital is decorated for Christmas. I feel confused for a second, and then I remember that it actually is Christmas tomorrow. (I remind myself: grief does funny things to time.) There’s a banner at the entrance that says “Palliative Care’s Winter Wonderland” in big, swoopy text, written by a nurse who might have seen three people die today. I feel empathy for her, this imaginary nurse. I understand what she was trying to do. I wonder, looking at her sad, earnest banner, how she reckons with the riptide of existential tragedy that surrounds her — the death and the dying and the people who are left afterwards, new ones every day, a never-ending lineup of people on the precipice of a smaller, emptier life. I know, obviously, that tragedy is only compounded by the denial of joy and the elimination of beauty; I know, obviously, that sick people want to see Christmas decorations too. But I still want to rip the sign off the wall. I am a child again, and nobody who knows me would suggest that I’m fit to take care of a child. Everything feels patronizing. I can’t stop her from screaming in the grocery store. Sometimes I’m angry that I feel so angry. 

13. 

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m on my knees. The Penitential Act at Midnight Mass reminds me, paternally, of my sins. I recite the only part of it I remember in submissive monotone with the rest of the congregation: I have greatly sinned, through my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. (It all feels a little redundant to me, and I think of that Nico song: please don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them.) My dad, the perennial atheist, whispers a swear word into my ear. 

14. 

In the car ride home from the train station, my father says he’s sorry that I was born with a brain that wants to hurt me. I remind myself: sometimes an apology means I wish this wasn’t happening to you, and sometimes an apology means I’m sorry I did this to you. This time, I can’t tell exactly which one he’s trying to say.

15.

I made it to Montreal just in time for the snowstorm. It feels better to be in a place where everybody speaks French because now at least it’s not my fault that I can’t understand what anyone says to me. I used to cry everywhere, in front of anyone, a big open wound begging to be looked at. Now I can’t cry. I haven’t cried in a long time.

Tomorrow the plow will push the snow into the gutters. In three days it will be slush, and then black sheets of ice that make the sidewalks look like sinkholes. Now, at night, the streetlight pouring over the untouched snow makes it so that nothing is grey — it feels like a soundstage, or like I’m inside a dollhouse town all crafted in miniature. The sky feels so close when it snows. I could reach up and touch the ceiling. 

I walk around in the night for an hour until my bones hurt and my eyes sting and my bangs are frozen into icicles on my forehead. Then, I can’t walk anymore, and for a moment I just stand still — spotlit by the honey-yellow streetlight, thick snowfall burying me alive, catatonic with grief and loss, overcome in equal measure by the beauty of the world around me and my unrelenting smallness and powerlessness in the face of it. I’ve never felt an emotion I could hold in my hand. If I move, I’ll spill out of myself onto the crosswalk. The snow-plow would collect me in the morning. 

I recognize this as something like what Romain Rolland called the oceanic feeling — a trance-like “sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded” that has served as the basis for a universal religious experience throughout history. Freud famously said, rather pessimistically, that this feeling was a kind of deformity — a fragment of consciousness left over from infancy when a child has not yet developed the ability to differentiate itself from anything around it. I could buy this, I think. My edges are blurry. I don’t know where I end and everything else begins. Sometimes I feel illuminated in the glow of other people’s love, warmer for being around it even when it’s not directed at me, soft and half-awake and responsible for nothing like a child sleeping on the couch at the end of a grown-up party. Sometimes I feel so wrong, so rotten, that it makes me physically sick — black with mildew, vacant, caving-in, ready to be engulfed in flame.

But love spills all over me anyway. Sadie says I’m not doing shit except thinking about being with you. Amina lets me stay in her apartment; we spend New Year’s curled up in her bed. I make Seb dinner and bring it to his house in the cold. I fall asleep on the couch while he plays video games. Liam visits me in Montreal even though it takes eleven hours on the train. Noah makes us tea after we walk home through the snow. Ella and Andrew text me almost every day and they don’t get mad when I don’t respond. Strangers are very kind to me, again and again. I go out at night; in the morning, I curl up into the fetal position and pull the sheets over my head until it gets too hard to breathe. I go out again the next day and everyone acts happy to see me. I think horrible thoughts about people I love and then I love them anyway.

This is it, I think: the great tragedy at the centre of everything is not that the world is empty or evil or ugly, but that it’s full of immeasurably beautiful things that tend towards decay. I’m still unsure if I can accept the idea of grief as a final form of love, but I understand intimately, now, its fundamental truth: horror and pain and loss do not exist in opposition to love, but as affirmation of it. All this terror because of all this beauty. All this just to have something worthwhile to ruin. 

---

When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

— David Berman, Snow

1. I tried to write an essay about grief, but because writing about grief is sort of like staring at the sun, I mostly ended up writing about everything that’s around it. I think, in the end, I tried to write an essay with a grief-shaped hole.