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. 

Why My Last Year's Goals Failed (and no, it wasn't all because of COVID)

I'm seeing lots of rueful laughter on social media right now about the folly of having bothered to purchase a planner for 2020. This was the year when the best-laid plans of all of us (in a butchering of Robert Burns's famous words) ganged a-gley. 

I launched 2020 with a sprawling, unwieldy, unworkable plan already doomed to early abandonment. Even though I am a veteran life-planner who knows that simple goals are best, I opted for my most complicated and convoluted set of plans ever. Faced with looming family crises, I decided that mere survival was too dispiriting a goal for the year. Instead, I would work on improving my health on EIGHT different dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, social, professional, financial, environmental, and spiritual - with half a dozen activities listed under each heading.

Some of the mandated activities didn't happen because of COVID. Under "social health," I had "Make sure to have one social outing every week" and "Plan SIX special getaways with friends this year!" HA! Under "environmental health," I had "Buy carbon offsets for flights." WHAT FLIGHTS? 

But mainly I didn't do most of the things I said I was going to do because it made my head hurt to look at that long, daunting list. Plus, some of the things I already knew I would never do, even as I dutifully wrote them down in my little notebook. I already knew I wasn't going to follow through on some additional new form of exercise, when for 66 years the only exercise I've ever loved (and do love passionately) is walking. I already knew I wasn't going to make radical alterations in my food intake, when for 66 years I've mainly lived on English muffins with butter and jam and am the healthiest person I know by far. Some of the things I might have done if they were the ONLY thing I asked of myself for the year, but not as one of several dozen!

The items I did succeed in crossing off the humongous list were the one-and-done things. I made a new will from a free online template (financial health): it felt great to know that if I died from COVID, my family would find my affairs in good order. I deleted the Twitter app on my phone, which took ten seconds and greatly improved the quality of my life (emotional health). 

But basically the list depressed me and didn't motivate me AT ALL. 

Looking back at the year, just in narrowly personal terms (i.e., not thinking about COVID, the election, my family, or the fate of the planet), the best part of the year was writing two verse novels for young readers. Every hour I spent on those projects was BLISS, and the two books those hours produced are the two best things I've ever written (according to all readers so far, including me). I also got clarity on the kinds of projects I DREAD: projects that make me feel bad about myself (teaching courses I'm not qualified to teach, and writing articles I'm not qualified to write). 

I'm going to use these twin insights - about BLISS and DREAD - to make my (VERY simple and VERY minimalist) plan for 2021. Stay tuned! 

Lessons Learned from a Project Dreaded

Well, I knew I couldn't live with myself (with my shamefully procrastinating self) if I didn't complete this one long-overdue, mega-daunting, academic assignment by the end of the year. (Details in my previous whiny, whimpering post.) I wasn't qualified to write this thing, I had no idea how to write this thing, this thing wasn't a thing anybody would really know how to write. But I had agreed to do it.  So now it simply had to be done. 

So I did it. I emailed it off on Christmas Eve. It was a huge relief when, for better or worse, I pressed SEND.

Some of the lessons I learned in finally making myself do the undoable-task-that-nonetheless-needed-to-be-done are lessons I already knew, but keep forgetting. Others are new to me, and I'm glad I learned them before the new year begins.

Here they are.

1. The way to eat an elephant really is one bite at a time. When the elephant is overwhelming enough, for me the best way to measure the bites is by the clock, not by the task. The tasks are too awful to think about! But if I turn over my beloved hourglass and sit at my computer for an hour, SOMETHING WILL GET DONE. The Grateful Dead told us to keep on trucking, but I do best when I keep on trudging. 

2. The ONLY way that anything you have to do will get done is if you actually DO it. In real life, sad but true, no elves show up in the night to do your work for you. (Complaining about the work, making social media posts about the work, and blogging about the work are NOT the same thing as DOING the work.) One of my life mantras generally, which also applies here, is "If it is to be, it's up to me."

3. BUT that said, if you show up faithfully to do the work, the elves (or the angels, or the muses, or your sub-conscious) are likely to feel sorry for you, too, and show up with additional assistance. A brilliant insight may pop into your head - well, not brilliant, exactly, but a new idea you didn't have before. As you write, without really knowing what you are going to say, you will start to figure out what you need to say. THE MAGIC WILL HAPPEN. Or at least a glimmer or two of magic.

4. Those people (colleagues, editors, peer-reviewers) who are going to end up reading this disappointing, dismal draft are not your terrifying adversaries; they are actually ON YOUR SIDE. If you are making any terrible mistakes along the way, they will likely catch them and help you correct them. The making of this thing is a collaborative venture. You are not alone.

5. It will feel so good to have this thing done!! You will wish you had just sat yourself down at your desk months ago! But sometimes the time of dread bears unexpected fruit. While I was endlessly deferring the writing of this academic essay, I wrote my first two verse novels for young readers, which I believe are the best books I have ever written. I will never regret that I did that instead. Could I have reversed the order: duty and drudgery first, THEN the dessert of writing bliss? Maybe. But maybe not. I can't be sorry that I chose bliss instead. 

6. MAYBE the fact that you dreaded, feared, and loathed the doing of this thing so much means that in the future you should do less of it??  Maybe it doesn't: some people do dread and fear the work they love. But if you LOATHE the work? Well, maybe that's a sign that it's time to make some different choices. Note to self for 2021!

The Kind of Writing I Hate Most: or The Terror of Having to Write Something You Are Completely Unqualified to Write

I have a writing project I have been procrastinating on for MONTHS. 

It was due October 1, and it's now mid-December.

Every single day I tell myself, "Just write on this project for ONE HOUR." Or "Just write on this project for HALF AN HOUR." Or "Just glance at this project for FIVE MINUTES!"

But every day I don't do any of these things. 

During this extended session of procrastination I have written not one, but two, middle-grade books in the new-to-me-form of the verse novel; one of them is already far along in the production process for publication in the fall of 2021. So it isn't as if the pandemic has made me utterly unable to function (though I certainly have those moments). It is only this particular project that has me paralyzed. 

Why can't I make myself do this perpetually undone project?

It's because it is the kind of writing I hate most. 

What kind of writing do I hate most?

 I hate most when I have to write something I am completely unqualified to write. For me, this is anything where I have to sound like an authority, or an expert, a person who is supposed to KNOW something. Worst is when the thing I'm supposed to know is HUGE, so huge that it's pretty much unknowable by anybody. But particularly by me.

It's all I can to do confide to you what this hated project is. This is partly because the editors who commissioned it might read this blog post, and this would make me LOOK BAD. It's also because when I do, you will all say, "Yup, that is TOTALLY something you are not qualified to do." But I might as well face the worst right here and now. So.... gulp....  I've been asked to write a 7500-word entry on "Ethics" for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English, Volume 3, 1914-Present. 

"Ethics" is a huge topic. 

 A century is a long stretch of time for anybody to know anything about anything.

Why, you may ask, did I say I'd do this given that I knew it would generate toxic levels of terror and dread? Well, in my career as an academic I figured out right away that in order to get tenure I would have to say yes to many things I knew I was unqualified to do. After all, when I started out, I was pretty much unqualified to do anything. I'd try to reassure myself that it was fine to answer student questions in class with a frank "I don't know," but I wouldn't have been able to keep my job if I hadn't offered actual answers at least occasionally and written the requisite number of tenure-worthy articles trying to act as if I had something noteworthy to say on various topics. 

I finally got tenure - hooray! Then a few years ago I relinquished my tenure and took early retirement from my academic job. So, freed from annual performance evaluations, I truly didn't have to accept this latest assignment. But saying yes to things becomes a habit. I've always taken pride in describing myself as a yay-sayer to the universe. In any case, now that I've said yes to this, for better or worse, I pretty much have to follow through on this commitment. 

Here is what I'm telling myself as I promise the universe that tomorrow I really TRULY will do this thing!! Maybe my wise self-talk will be useful to you, too.

1. MANY people have imposter syndrome, not just academics, and not just me. MANY people are put in a position where they are expected to do something for which they feel woefully unqualified. Decades ago on a Greyhound bus I sat next to a man who covered international affairs for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He told me that after seeing his authoritative articles in print, written just by him, just by this regular guy, he now knew that all journalism was written by regular mortals just like him. Ditto for me writing academic articles: I'm just one more regular mortal who will be pretending to know more than she actually does.

2. I may consider myself unqualified for this assignment, but the people who offered it to me apparently thought I would do just fine. Why should I persist in second-guessing their assessment? In fact, I have my name on the cover of an award-winning edited collection titled Ethics and Children's Literature. I'm sure I was asked to contribute to this book on the strength of that book. Why shouldn't the person who produced a book with that title have at least some authority to write about ethics and children's literature?

3. The very (ridiculous) breadth and depth of the topic means there are at least a million things that could be included within its scope. It is clearly impossible to include them all. Selectivity is needed. Selectivity is desirable. Since I am the selector, I might as well select the subset of things that I do feel somewhat more qualified to write about. 

4. Finally, my piece will go through peer review, so I'm not the only one who bears the burden of making sure the final product is acceptable. Others will be able to weigh in with their comments and suggestions. If they think my piece is truly terrible, they will say so: peer reviewers are not shy! I once had a chapter by me for an edited collection utterly fail in peer review, but only once. I doubt that will happen here. But if it does, it happened once before, and guess what? The world kept on turning.

All right. All this self-talk is only preamble to ACTUALLY SITTING DOWN AND WRITING THE DARNED THING. I have been alive for enough decades that I know from experience that dreading a thing is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS worse than simply doing it.

Dear friends, I am announcing to the universe that I, the Unqualified One, the Terrified One, the One Hopelessly Out of Her Depth, is going to get up tomorrow morning very early and get to work on this thing. (And to be fair to me, and I am always scrupulously fair to myself, I do have notes, and thoughts, and stuff I've read, so I'm hardly starting from scratch.)

 Cue the Little (Completely Unqualified) Engine That Could: "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...."

The Unexpected Difference Our Words Can Make

Writers write for many reasons. Surely one of the most important is to connect with readers: to have our words make a difference to some reader, sometime, somewhere. 

Here is a story of how words I wrote for the most ephemeral of audiences, to be heard for three or four brief minutes and then forgotten forever, ended up having, a decade later, an impact I could never have imagined.

The University of Colorado Philosophy Department hosts a fabulous conference every summer, the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME), billed as "an international conference geared to offer the highest quality, highest altitude discussion of ethics, broadly conceived." Each conference features dozens of submitted papers as well as three keynote addresses by the most prominent figures in the field of philosophical ethics. In 2009, one of these was Prof. Judith Jarvis Thomson of MIT, who happened to have been my teacher when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s at Wellesley College; Wellesley and MIIT had a partnership, which continues to this day, where students at one institution could take courses at the other.

I asked if I could give the introduction for Prof. Thomson. I had wonderful material in the notebook I still had from that course, as she was such a charismatic teacher that every sentence she uttered was one I wanted to preserve for posterity. 

In the notebook I even preserved her advice to us for our paper on utilitarianism:

If you can read my tiny writing, you'll see that the main instruction to us was "No eloquence!" Prof. Thomson valued crystalline clarity in writing and despised flowery prose. I also remembered many other pithy pieces of writing criticism she gave me during the time of our acquaintance as well as bracing advice from her mentoring as I applied to graduate school.

So I wrote a page and a half of introductory remarks and delivered them one summer day in 2009 to the RoME audience. I was stunned by the impact of that three-minute speech. One colleague, not known for effusive compliments, called it "the introduction greater than which no introduction can be conceived." At RoME conferences years later, strangers would approach me and say, "You're the one who gave that introduction for Judy Thomson!" Of course, the introduction was so wonderful only because Judy Thomson was so wonderful; it was the details about this unforgettable women that were the unforgettable part of my speech.

This past month, on November 20, Judith Jarvis Thomson died. The chair of the CU Philosophy Department asked if I could send him a copy of my introduction for wider sharing, and it was posted here, on the leading blog of the philosophy profession, the Daily Nous.

I started to get emails: from a University of Maryland colleague from decades ago; from a children's literature colleague who attended the same high school as Judith Jarvis Thomson and had seen my post quoted on their website; from a friend who said my post was the subject of their Thanksgiving dinner conversation, as her son had also benefitted from Prof. Thomson's wisdom; and from Judy Thomson's nephew.

I would never have guessed that a three-minute introduction of a speaker would be widely circulated eleven years later. Oh, writers, little do we know what unexpected power our words may have. And, oh teachers, little do you know how much every utterance from your lips may be cherished by hundreds of students a generation later.