Breathing Through Grief

I didn't want to be a grief talker, but when I crash landed in the belly of grief, my journey into the grief world launched. Grief is one of my love languages. I can sit with you in yours, be with you, hear you. I express mine full out. I talk and write about grief and support others living with and through and beyond grief. Grief is part of life. Everybody grieves. It's part of our humanity. When we stumble and crawl through grief's fire, it both scorches and transforms us. Grief makes us more of who we are.Widowed and pregnant at 28, my life veered off on a trajectory I couldn't have imagined before my first husband died on an icy mountain road on his way to go night skiing. I went from feeling at the beginning of everything: married to the light of my life, new teaching job, first home, pregnant with my first child, everything new and shiny, everything on the precipice of beginnings. Until it all ended. Or that's how it felt at the time. With my husband's death, my life screeched to a halt. I thought it was over. I thought I was over. I'm so glad I was wrong.In between sobbing oceans of tears, I turned to books. I'd always been a reader. In my early grief, my sister went to the library and checked out every grief book. “Did you leave any for someone else?” I joked as I eyed the pile she plopped on an end table. “There's nothing in there for me,” I told her too. I didn't want to need these books. I didn't want to be part of the grief club. Who does? But when you find yourself there, it's a balm to find good books, good words. Once I started reading grief, I read whatever I could find.In 1987 grief literature was skinny. I read When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold S. Kushner; A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis; In the Midst of Winter: Selections from the Literature of Mourning, edited by Mary Jane Moffat; the iconic On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross; and more titles buried in memory. While I appreciated those books, I longed for personal stories. I wanted to know how someone got out of bed, ate something besides M&Ms, showered, slept. I wanted to know how a broken heart could keep beating, how it could lead you forward.I wish Megan Riordan Jarvis's book End of the Hour was around when I was searching for a way to stitch my life. I wish she'd already written her memoir for the depth and understanding of grief. For the compassion. For the hope. Jarvis's memoir layers her work as a trauma therapist with her personal grief. As she grieved her father's death from cancer, followed by her mother's unexpected death, mixed in with an unprocessed childhood tragedy, Jarvis felt undone, raw, and overcooked. She literally found herself sobbing on the basement floor. She knew she needed support, so she checked herself into the treatment center she previously recommended to clients.End of the Hour is a tender dance between knowing grief in your head and knowing it in your heart. Jarvis is vulnerable and raw. In writing her personal story, she leaves room for us to see ourselves. She doesn't shy away from feelings, especially anger: “‘Fuck you, Tim,’ I mumbled under my breath. My anger always showed up as an emotional bouncer for my fear.”Jarvis explores her broadening spirituality too. There's no religion. Nothing prescriptive. She has moments where she feels a connection to the universe, where there's magic beyond logic. As her father is dying, she describes this scene where she and her daughter are alone in a parking lot, waiting for a bakery to open. Then they're not alone: An unmistakable, dissonant, melodic moaning. I stumbled out of the car in a lunge as the sound got louder. Still not convinced we weren't collectively hallucinating, I asked Lucy again, “You can hear that, right?” She nodded again.I was already crying, though I hardly realized it. I took out my phone and began to record. In the video, you can hear me say, “How is this possible? It's nine in the morning. We are the only people here.” The music gets louder, and the camera settles on a man in khaki pants and a blue shirt, standing at an intersection—playing the bagpipes.Bagpipes are a staple at an Irish funeral.Along with her raw and vulnerable personal stories, Jarvis weaves in her therapist smarts. She lets another therapist describe how the “amygdala is the brain's smoke alarm . . . and means well, but it can really screw you over,” so gently that we get to learn along with her, rather than feeling we're being told the rules of grief. Because there are no rules.For years the grief book I gifted grievers was Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Still a great book. And I'm delighted more grief books exist. I'm grateful Jarvis wrote End of the Hour and now it's the book I'll be giving when someone is in heartbreak, when they need a middle-of-the-night companion on those long nights when sleep sneaks off and hides no matter how you track it, no matter how gently you invite it in.What Lasts by Mary Mandeville is a heart-scorching story, beautifully told. Written with a poet's ear and an artist's eye, this collection of nine essays chronicles Mandeville's nineteen-year-old son's death by suicide and the aftershocks. We learn how she navigated grief in all its sorrow, and how she came to fully embrace that she's still alive and living out loud to honor her son.In the essay “Contagion,” Mandeville is on a rafting trip, funded and gifted through the Dougy Center, a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, that supports grieving children and their families. One morning as they're preparing to float down the river, another woman, a mother, quietly asks: “How do I know,” she stammered, “that it wasn't my fault? I'm sure it was my fault.” Her voice cracked with grief . . . The fear that my son's death was my fault clenched my throat. I stared straight into this other mother's blue irises, her slender face pinched, her straight blond hair askew, her eyes childless-mother wild.“I don't know why he died,” I whispered and squeezed her hands. “I don't know anything at all except this: it wasn't your fault.”Mandeville takes us on her grief journey. Up close. No holding back, and yet, even in the hardest hard, hope laces through every essay, every dark day and dark thought.Another essay, “Inheritance,” starts and ends with breath, just like life. First breath. Last breath, with life in between. Mandeville writes: I crave breath. Not just the ordinary in and out, chest rising and falling, inspiration and exhalation. I love to huff and puff, to pant, to strain. Collar bones rising, ribs expanding, diaphragm tenting, lungs gasping. . . .You think you can't breathe, but you can. It hurts like hell, each breath sharp and stabbing, but the air comes in and goes out.You can still breathe. Because you can, you do. You just keep on breathing.It feels like an obligation. It feels like privilege. And so you breathe.Mandeville writes her grief story with compassion and grace, with tenderness and honesty. In the end, What Lasts is a beautiful love song, sung soft, sung loud to her son, to all our beloveds who have died. In her story, we can glimpse our grief stories, and maybe, just maybe we can understand our grief in softer light because of how beautifully Mandeville shares her heart, her wisdom, herself.I'm a better human for having read these books. Jarvis's and Mandeville's words stretched my heart and confirmed again and again the best part of being human: loving self and loving others, sharing honest stories with bravery and truth, experiencing how even in tragedy, even in complicated grief, the heart beats and beats.