Grief and Loss
Grief is the price of deep love
“Perhaps the most radical act of resistance in the face of adversity is to live joyfully.”
-Ari Honarvar
Hi friends,
Since losing my best friend Stewart in April, I’ve been thinking a lot about grief.
Grief has become less of an idea from childhood and more of a companion. As I approach age 30, I’m facing loss more routinely, and I’m recognizing how many other people are dealing with their own version of grief, whether it’s a sibling, a parent, a spouse, a pet, or a friend. Sometimes it's a relationship that ended, a job that disappeared, or a place that no longer feels like home. Sometimes the stories I hear from friends and family are about painful divorces or struggles with addiction or simply the many ways we come to believe we can’t go on…. but somehow do.
We spend years preparing for careers, relationships, and success, but little time preparing for loss, even though it comes for all of us. So learning how to deal with pain and grief may be one of the most useful skills in life.
The past few months have been emotionally exhausting and painful. I think of Stewart throughout each day. He’d love this sunset. He’d love this walk. He’d enjoy this day so much. I still glance at the backseat of the car, looking for his beautiful face. I still expect to hear his paws on the floor or see him waiting at the window.
My best friend is always with me. Two months have gone by, and I still ache for him every day. I wonder if that feeling will ever go away.
Amid the grief, I've been searching for people who can articulate this experience better than I can, and I keep coming back to the authors Cheryl Strayed and Michael Lewis. More from Lewis below, after this beautiful reflection from Strayed, who is no stranger to grief. She lost her mother to lung cancer in March 1991, passing away at 45. Last month, she lost her husband after a battle with a rare neurological brain disease.
The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
Your grief has taught you too. Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most profound revelation. Create something of him.
Make it beautiful.
In 2021, the author Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side) experienced just about the worst thing that can happen to a parent when his daughter was killed in a car accident. Asked about the grief of losing a child, Lewis said that it’s exhausting. “Every night I go to bed,” he said, “I’m thinking about Dixie Lewis. And every morning I wake up, I’m thinking about Dixie Lewis.”
Then he said:
“I can’t control that she died. I can’t do anything about that. All I can control is what her death causes, and I’m determined that it cause good things, not bad things. That’s what I’m focused on, is what does this cause? Like make sure it doesn’t cause more pain, see if it causes something else.”
Below is more from Lewis on grieving, based on interviews he’s done since his daughter’s death:
The intensity of that pain I felt and still feel is in direct proportion to the power of the love I felt. I didn't just love my child – all three of my children, I feel the same way – I liked my child. It was a friendship and parenting relationship at the same time and I'm incredibly grateful I felt that way.
The grief is so pure, like the sadness, it's not these toxic emotions. It's not anger, there's not guilt there's not whatever it is that you regret – those kinds of things that kind of eat at you – sadness doesn't eat at you, tears and laughter go together. You're in a different emotional space, when you're in tears and laughter than you are with anger, resentment and guilt. I'm grateful that the relationship was such that she's left me with tears and laughter.
I have a peculiar way of dealing with the death of my child. Right from the beginning, I felt there was a serious gap between what people expected me to feel and how I actually felt. I received many letters from parents who had lost children, telling me that I would live with guilt forever. And I remember thinking, that’s strange, because I don’t feel guilt…I feel incredible sadness. I feel loss. And I’ve realized the loss I’m feeling is really the loss of love.
But I don’t feel guilt. I was a great dad. She had a great life. We loved each other deeply. To use a sports metaphor, which she would have loved, we left it all on the field. We lost. But it wasn’t because we didn’t try.
I’ve also insisted on telling myself a certain story about Dixie’s death. That’s another way of honoring her. She wouldn’t want me to curl up in a ball and never do anything again. She would want me to be big and brave. That’s how I honor her.
None of the metaphors I’ve been handed off the shelf seem to really work. The idea that it’s a process that you get through—I don’t think that’s really kind of true. It does feel like a hole has been blown in our lives….The question is what do you grow in that hole?...How you grow from this experience?
My path right now to the extent I can try to patch together hours of distracted pleasure and normalcy, I should, because the sheer sadness of the moment is going to surface no matter what I do, so don’t go trying try to surface it.
I loved her so much and it's a loss that is just very hard to describe. She was brave, she worked her ass off, she tried hard. I was so proud of her. The best thing I can do is live really well in her honor. It's the best thing I can do, so that's what I intend to do and find some way to make beautiful things that might not have been made otherwise because of it.