From Bliss to Grief: Or How My New Year Did Not Turn Out the Way I Thought It Would

On Monday, January 4, I posted my simple three-word goal for 2021: "Bliss, not dread."

On Tuesday, January 5, I got the call that when the nursing home staff had checked on my husband that morning, they found him, in their words, "with no vital signs." Our long, complicated, challenging, beautiful, frustrating, strange, loving, and often heartbreaking life together had come to an end. 

Needless to say, I haven't had what I would call "bliss" since then. 

The closest I came was in the miraculous gift of the truck ride I had with my first-born son through the Colorado mountains that same day, the landscape that had been so dear to my husband, the landscape we had experienced so often as a family. That day was one of God's greatest gifts to me, as was the knowledge that my husband's passing, after years of agonizing decline, was in every way a blessing.

But then the grief came, and I was surprised at its intensity. 

When my father died, my mother, who didn't go in for grief (private or public), chose poems for my sister and me to read at his memorial service. Mine was Christina Rosetti's poem that begins, "When I am dead my dearest /  sing no sad songs for me," and instructs those left behind, "And if thou wilt, remember/ And if thou wilt, forget." 

When my mother died, twenty-five years later, I was teaching Maymester, which is an entire semester crammed into thirteen days. I taught the day before she died, I missed class on her dying day, and I taught the day after she died; after all, missing one day of Maymester was equivalent to missing an entire week of a regular course. And my mother had so wanted to leave this life behind, asking me every day to "pray that it will be today." Her passing was so peaceful and beautiful, with my sister and me there beside her, each holding one of her thin, wasted hands. 

This time, however, I'm barely able to function. I'm haunted by sadness that I wasn't there with him in those final moments, that indeed I hadn't even seen him in person since late summer, thanks to the cruelty of COVID's enforced isolation. I'm spending untold hours reading over the journals I kept on our trips to Europe together: our honeymoon in the hill towns of Tuscany, the trip to Austria when I was finally pregnant (after years of infertility) with our first child, the family trip to France when my husband's health problems were just beginning and I foolishly thought a trip to Paris could cure anybody of anything. I keep listening over and over again to a song we sang back in Girls' Chorus in high school, "Softly, As I Leave You," and sobbing as I listen to my favorite version, sung by the great and under-appreciated Eydie Gorme. 

I've lost interest in trying to find a new book idea, even though writing has been my life's most reliable source of joy. I don't feel like reading, though I did find peace in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a stunningly beautiful hymn to love, loss, forgiveness, and redemption. I sleep a lot. I eat huge quantities of comfort food. I waste hours doing Sudoku puzzles on my I-pad, even though I have long considered this a terrible vice - oh, but such a soothing one. And then I listen again to "Softly, As I Leave You" and cry some more.

Everyone tells me that grief is good and right and necessary and inescapable. On a friend's recommendation, I read Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. May reminds us that life is cyclical, that winters come to us, not once in a lifetime, but with recurring regularity, and we need to learn how to accept and even appreciate their austere beauty. But it's easier to appreciate winter's gifts, I might add, when one can swim in geothermal pools in Reykjavik, witness the solstice at Stonehenge, and fly to the Arctic to behold the Northern Lights, as May recounts doing!  My wintering is much less glamorous. It feels a lot more like plain old depression.

So I'm setting aside my new year's goal of "bliss." Bliss feels awfully strenuous right now. It feels like too much effort. It actually sounds like quite a greedy goal, come to think of it. What was wrong with aspiring just for "joy"? Or humdrum happiness? I would welcome humdrum happiness right now.

Here's what I do know. Happiness, joy, and even bliss will all come again. I can help them along by doing what I can to conduct my wintering with a modicum of self-care. On days when I tell myself, "It's all right not to floss your teeth today because you are just SO SAD," I can force myself to spend two minutes flossing. My little dog, Tanky, does a good job of urging me to go outside for lengthy walks. I have no choice but to prepare to teach my online children's literature class for this spring and to help my three writing mentees grow in their craft.  When I make myself work on these projects, it does feel good, as if a little bit of the life force is stirring within me, a little bit of life's sap is beginning to rise.

The poet Shelley wrote, "Oh wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Spring will come again, for me and for all who grieve, though not necessarily on any prescribed schedule. But for now, my only goal for this no-longer-new year is to let myself grieve, to weather this winter of my heart, and let spring come again to me in her own sweet time. 

Saying Yes to Life, and Saying Yes in Death

This is a post I hadn't expected to be writing, and I wasn't sure it was even appropriate to go public with this private family grief. But I know there are readers of this blog that care about me and my family. So here it is. 

My year is off to a strange, sad start. My husband died a week ago today. 

He had been declining more drastically each month from advanced Parkinson's, made worse by COVID-caused isolation in the care home where he now had to live. I hadn't been able to visit him in-person for months, although we had phone calls and staff-facilitated FaceTime. But I could tell he was slipping away further day by day. Still it was a shock to get a call early on that Tuesday morning that he was gone from this world forever. 

My older son, Christopher, and I had already planned to spend that day together. Christopher had told me over the holidays that he wanted to ask his boss if his mom could come along for one day of driving on "the highway route" which is up in the mountains; his current truck-driver job is driving new truck models to gather data for the engineers. He was so excited to have me witness his driving prowess in navigating a huge semi over treacherous Berthoud Pass. At first, I had told him, "Oh, no, you don't need to do that, I have so much work of my own that I need to do." Yes, I actually said that. And he said, "Aw, come on, it will be fun!" So I agreed to go. 

I used this anecdote in the end-of-year guest sermon I gave in church on December 27th, paired with the parable of the banquet in the Gospel of Luke, where the rich man invites countless friends to a feast he is hosting, and they all come up with excuses for saying no, so the man issues invitations to the hungry and homeless instead. I built the sermon around what I was calling "the Gospel according to Jerry Herman," composer of the musicals Hello Dolly, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles, all of which feature a show-stopping song about seizing the moment and living for TODAY.  Perfect for my purposes, Mame even utters the famous line, "Life's a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death." So my message in the sermon was: when you are invited to the richness of the banquet of life that God has laid out for us, say YES. So what choice did I have but say YES to Christopher's invitation to spend a day riding in his big rig through the gorgeous wintry mountains of Colorado?

 

We had already set the day for this adventure to be that Tuesday. When I got the news about Rich's passing, I called both boys immediately (my younger son, Gregory, now lives in Chicago). Christopher and I agreed to proceed as planned. Rich loved the mountains so much and engaged in so much environmental activism to preserve their unspoiled beauty. The "highway route" goes past the turnoff for the very area of wilderness he loved best: the Troublesome. We would have the whole day to be together in the mountains he loved, and to listen to music he loved (Mauricio Pollini playing Chopin, the overture to The Magic Flute, Arlo Guthrie singing about Alice's restaurant), and to share memories. 

Well, an unexpected snowstorm came up, and the Eisenhower tunnel was closed for our return trip, and we had to spend an extra three hours backtracking to go over Berthoud Pass a second time, this time in pitch-black darkness with intensely blowing snow. Christopher, always cheerful and chipper, said, "I think this is Daddy's way of having us spend more time in the mountains today." I said, "I just hope this isn't Daddy's way of having us come spend eternity in heaven with him today!" But Christopher handled the hairpin curves with amazing calm confidence. We had left in the morning at 8:30 and didn't get back to "the yard" until 7:30 that evening. It was exhausting for both of us. But it also felt so right: Rich loved grueling mountain treks and preposterous plans gone awry . And so we had ours. This summer Gregory will come, and we will scatter Rich's ashes in the Troublesome, along Trail 1135 on Arapaho Ridge. 

I'm very sad, of course, but also enormously relieved that Rich won't linger in depression and pain in a nursing home for another twenty years, as happened to his mother.  I have many conflicting emotions now, but the dominant one is gratitude. I am grateful not only that he is now released from suffering, but that I did say YES to the banquet on that remarkable day that proved the most fitting way to remember the man my children and I loved. And I'm grateful that I said YES to all the adventures we had together as a family.

When that final farewell comes, may we all be able to be grateful for the times we said YES.

 

My Three-Word New Year's Resolution

 Last year I made the world's most convoluted set of new year's goals, which predictably failed. 

This year I'm making an extremely simple new year's goal, which I'm summing up for myself in a three-word mantra.

Bliss, not dread.

Last year, in writing two verse novels for young readers, I discovered a pleasure in writing that went beyond joy to BLISS. These two books (one, The Lost Language, set for publication in September 2021; the other awaiting an initial verdict from my editor) have been judged by all early readers to be BY FAR my best books. My agent even emailed me a couple of months after selling the first one to ask me, "What HAPPENED? How did YOU write THIS?" (He didn't use those exact words, but that was the the gist of his question.) 

I'm still not sure what the answer is. Part of it is that the verse novel form invited me to pour out my soul with a new honesty onto the page. Part of it is that in both books I tackled bigger and harder subjects than usual (though this isn't quite true; I'd already written about divorce, death, and mental illness - but not with this same new power). All I really know is that I LIKE BLISS. I WANT MORE BLISS. Bliss apparently brings out the best in me as a writer. It's pretty darned good for me as a person, too.

Last year I also found unusual dread in other areas of my professional life. Thanks in part to the COVID close-down of all in-person activities, I developed new self-doubt about myself as a teacher, as I was forced to teach online and grapple with technologies challenging for this technophobe. I also struggled with a huge academic assignment that was beyond my self-appraised level of competence. When I woke up in the morning, knowing that I would have to force myself to trudge forward on these tasks, I faced the day with a sick knot of dread in my stomach. (Hollins University Graduate Programs in Children's Literature: I am not talking about teaching for you!! You remain a reliable source of bliss!)

I tried to talk myself out of the dread. For one of the online courses, I told myself, look you are really only spending two hours a day on this course! And you are being paid a lot of much-needed money to do it! And as soon as you sit down at your computer and actually face the task, it's all fine and even enjoyable!! Just suck it up, buttercup!  But I still woke up each teaching day with that same knot of unshakeable dread.

What I learned from 2020: I want more bliss and less dread. As I am self-employed and able to make my own professional choices, it is within my power to act on this desire. (Though even when I was employed full-time, I did make efforts to seek out situations that would provide more of what I loved from my work and less of what I hated. We have more power to change our life situations than we realize. To quote the wonderful words of Alice Walker: "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.")

So my goal for 2021 is: bliss, not dread. This is NOT a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based). I don't have any detailed guidelines for how to proceed and how to know if I have succeeded. But it is a DELICIOUS goal, which is what really matters for me regarding goals.  

Of course, I will still have to do some things I dread. This is called "being alive in the world as a human being." Sometimes bliss and dread are commingled: this is the case when my little granddaughters come for their monthly extended visits, which are both exhilarating and exhausting for me as their primary caregiver. As I said, I have no clear guidance right now on exactly how this plan is going to work. 

I just know that this year, when I'm faced with a choice about taking on new projects, I'm going to ask myself, "Bliss or dread?" 

And when given the choice in 2021, I'm going to choose BLISS.