Love and Sadness, together.

Back into lockdown, comforting thoughts, the myth of closure, and you just are.

Some quick thoughts on the sadness you might be feeling right now, the myth of closure, and comforting thoughts… Ending with a poem from Jericho Brown.

After a couple of more relaxed months, we got word last week that we needed to go back into lockdown. There would be no more trips to get coffee, no more museums, no more friends over, or being with anyone in person in general outside of our bubble. These were all things that I had started to enjoy again.

We got word mid-week. It was a message from our nurse saying that we were no longer going to be going in anywhere anymore. Our clinic was going back to virtual. (We typically go to clinic once a month for four hours to have M’s vitals and the like updated, her meds checked, and her throat swabbed).

It made me sad. I mean, really sad. Not the part where we didn’t have to go in person to clinic—that was a relief. Going to clinic in person with a 2-year-old who cannot touch anything and has to be tested for hours is not fun. It is hard to tell someone that anytime anything touches the ground, it is basically dead, it cannot exist anymore in the way it did. She loves throwing things on the ground and is always upset when it happens.

All of this was going on and at the same time, in LA, my sister and her family had confirmed cases, which is a total trip since it is the second time they have gotten it. Everyone was sick. But not too sick. They didn’t have to stay in the hospital or be put on oxygen. She did text me one night, asking if her IG stories were offensive. I checked. And really, I don’t know what is and is not offensive these days. But I love her so deeply that I think that I am not able to be objective. It was about her playing during quarantine. About how having covid was also kinda fun. There was a silver lining. I hope that that is the case for everyone with Covid. I know it is not.

But this sadness, I think, falls pretty clearly under the umbrella of ambiguous loss. For anyone who is not familiar with the term, you are not alone. I first came into contact with the term in 2016 from Krista Tippett’s interview with Pauline Boss on the podcast “On Being.” Pauline Boss is a psychologist at the University of Minnesota whose research has had a profound effect on how we think about grief and loss. Challenging the linear narrative of grief, Boss suggests that there is no Freudian timeline of grief (kind of a bummer in some ways, that we cannot just get “over it”). Like cleaning up a mess in the kitchen, once the milk is sopped up, there is no trace of the pain.

Boss’s understanding of grief is that it doesn’t come in stages finally reaching a resolution. That closure is a myth. That the goal in the healing process is learning coping skills to sit with the ambiguity that life is. Part of our existence in life is shifting between the states of hope and hopelessness, joy and sadness, wellbeing and pain.

If the solution is not to get over it, how do we live with the pain? By understanding it and coping with it.

At the moment, I am sad about, if I am honest, the loss of a healthy child. The life I imagined her to have. Missing my grandparent’s final years. The loss of connection to my partner as we power through the days just trying to get by. I know there is more in this world to be sad about. And maybe I am just bad at coping, or maybe one can just feel sad sometimes. And know that there are sadder things in the world. That I am both lucky and sad at this moment.

Boss has a new book out: The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and
Change. I haven’t read it. I don’t know if it would even matter at this moment since my brain is not able to retain information. I spent over half an hour trying to do a Paw Patrol twelve-piece puzzle with M the other night. I couldn’t understand how we had the correct number of pieces, but the last piece of the puzzle was the wrong piece. I was convinced that the company had sent us the wrong final piece in exchange for a piece from a different puzzle. One look from my father, he was able to see the problem. I had forced one other piece into the wrong spot and when switched, the puzzle could be completed. Perhaps this is how therapy works. We sit in these incorrect assumptions for hours trying to solve them when perhaps the answer is in plain sight. One only needs fresh eyes.

I feel like I need this right now, so I am going to share the book description of The Myth of Closure with you:

The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us haunted by feelings of anxiety, despair, and even anger. In this book, pioneering therapist Pauline Boss identifies these vague feelings of distress as caused by ambiguous loss, losses that remain unclear and hard to pin down, and thus have no closure. Collectively the world is grieving as the pandemic continues to change our everyday lives.

With a loss of trust in the world as a safe place, a loss of certainty about health care, education, employment, lingering anxieties plague many of us, even as parts of the world are opening back up again. Yet after so much loss, our search must be for a sense of meaning, and not something as elusive and impossible as "closure."

This book provides many strategies for coping: encouraging us to increase our tolerance of ambiguity and acknowledging our resilience as we express a normal grief, and still look to the future with hope and possibility.

There is something I have been mulling over that I feel like I read from Pauline Boss, but I cannot find a record of it, so I will paraphrase: When we have loved, we will want to remember.

Do you ever question why your mind goes to sad places? Wanting to remember the love seems like an obvious reason to me that was hidden in plain sight for so long that I forgot why. Love and Sadness are not mutually exclusive; they cannot exist without each other. It helps me to understand. And in that, I find comfort.

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Leah Rosenberg and I are working on a short edition of quilts for the CJM exhibition Tikkun: For the Cosmos, The Community, and Ourselves (tikkun is Hebrew for “to repair”). Our collaborative creative process is kinda messy, like our friendship. It’s funny, I have met more than a few people recently who know Leah, and when I have introduced myself as someone who is lucky enough to collaborate with her, they have all said: “Leah is my collaborator. We have been working together for longer than you. I love Leah.” In some ways trying to secure their bond with Leah. And I have the impulse to do the same.

I am a jealous human. And I want to be special. And I want to be special to Leah. This is all besides the point. I have never told this to Leah.

We reached out to Coyuchi to see if they would donate quilts to the project, Our intention was to make 20 quilts by hand, however, after a quick attempt, it was obvious that this was not possible. Leah and I both are attracted to doing more without time on our side. They had 20 quilts that had slight defects, that we could mend or heal with comforting thoughts. We will be lucky if we can get 10 done by the time we install tomorrow…

So here is the ask: What are some comforting thoughts for you that we could use to put on these quilts? We will also be making a free poster/book that will be available when the exhibition opens. I would love to know how you are comforting yourself in this moment.

I am going to leave you with two things:

1. This tweet from last week’s author who I interviewed on IG Live, Dr. Devon Price:

(I think this falls under comforting thoughts…")

2. This week is a big one for me, I get to talk to Jericho Brown. He said something while I was depressed and pregnant that hit me. I was worried about why any art was important. Why make anything in this world of excess and no new ideas? He said a reason for writing is: Whenever I write something, there is someone who needs to hear it. I think about this as a type of faith that helps me push through self-doubt. And most of the time, it feels true. If that doesn’t offer a sense of purpose and comfort, I don’t know what will…

All my anxiety is separation anxiety.
I want to believe you are here with me,
But the bed is bigger and the trash
Overflows. Someone righteous should
Take out my garbage. I am so many odd
And enviable things. Righteous is not
One of them. I’d rather a man to avoid
Than a man to imagine in a realm
Unseen, though even the doctor who
Shut your eyes swears you’re somewhere
As close as breath. Mine, not yours.
You don’t have breath. You got
Heaven. That’s supposed to be my
Haven. I want you to tell me it sparkles
There. I want you to tell me anything
Again and again while I turn you over
To quiet you or to wake and remind you
I can’t be expected to clean up after a man.
― Jericho Brown, The Tradition