To My Future Self in Grief
I am listening to the song Figment, by Philip G. Anderson while writing this. It is currently July 13th, 2022, my 20th birthday.
Dear Future Ben,
I am writing this note to a man in grief. For I know sometimes I’ve found wonder and yearning to have a reprieve in a more youthful naive perspective of mine, one that I would reminisce about, my energized nature to face life’s future challenges. In hopes that in future, in challenges, you will have the same desire to look back on me now, I write this letter on facing grief to you:
To your worst pains, to the most horrible of losses, to your unbearably darkest hours, I say to you:
I don’t get it. I know I don’t.
You know just earlier today, I was listening to a book by one of the world’s most renowned therapists, a trailblazing author and practitioner in the area of existentialism and facing death, and the book was on the experience of him and his wife dying. You know Ben, you would find it interesting. What a prolific author, thought leader, and practitioner. So much experience working with grief in others, so much writing from the perspective of his own. And yet when he faces the horned bull of the lost lover’s portrait himself, all he could do was fall apart.
Cliff learned something before he died. He learned what it meant when the people who came to him said they were suffering. He studied this suffering all his life, he devoted his life (and his death) to caring for it. And yet when the end came near, he still learned something new. Nothing in his endeavors allowed him to understand the experience of such grief. Even Cliff learned something of suffering before he died.
And over a year later, on July 13th, 2022, one year from the first night of my 4AM silent hour to grieve Cliff, I find myself finishing an audiobook from Irvin Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life, reading about how he learned something too in his pain. He would reminisce in his book to former patients in grief, and think how he would do such better therapy if he knew then what he felt now.
The thing is, he already knew everything about grief. But… he didn’t get it. It. That wordless, indescribable… thing of experience.
Ben, I don’t get it. If I would be sure of anything, it is that I know I don’t get it. I truly believe there is no possible way that I could get it. Because if I got the blessings of love and life that you did, then yes, I would get the profound suffering entailed by its endings.
I don’t get it. I wasn’t blessed with that yet. I didn’t have such the privilege to love like you did, to be enriched by life as you did, I haven’t lived that love yet, or at least not to the same fuller arc as you have, so of course, I don’t get the pain tied in requisite.
And that is just the way that it is supposed to be. Because that is your gift, not mine… at least yet. It is your duty to hold that red hot ball of tungsten in your bare hands. It is your duty to feel it.
Because this is what it means to grieve. Ben I say to you:
Don’t look away. Do not look away from the loved portrait of bitter sweet memories, no matter how much it tears your soul apart. It is your duty of love to face the grief in tears of its prices. And so you face that portrait with honor. You do not kill yourself. You do not lose yourself. You look pain in the eyes, and say through disgusting snot and sobs and shattered character and indescribable absolutely impossible levels of fear:
This Is What It Means To Love
This Is What It Means To Love
This Is What It Means To Love,
And So I Will Bear Witness.
Ben, I know I don’t get it. That is not yet my badge to wear. Your heart is on your chest. I know you will wear it with pride. Because after how much I’ve written to you, trained myself for you, looked up to you, put every bit of faith I had in you… That every damn time I said at the end of my reflections, I Love You Ben, I Promise, I Will Make You Proud, that every one of those days I lived with that intention, was so that you could be the brave soul that would face his drowned soul without flinch. That the culmination of all my trust and faith, all of my pride, has come down to this future Ben, to this moment. And so I trust and hold faith in my pride. My indomitable will that this loss is something I can face, without fear but with the courage to hold it. That I can look at the portrait picture of the loved in grief, and through streaming tears and rolling sobs, chose that I will not look away from that love that so hurts me. That I’ll die before it kills my will to hold it, even if it holds like red hot tungsten on bare skin hands.
And so you say with pride: I will not look away from your portrait.
And so you seek out the “suffering”- that synonymous with “sacred”- you were so blessed with in your life.
And so you face that portrait with honor,
And so you wear that badge with Pride.
And it doesn’t matter if it breaks everything else Ben,
It will not break your posture.
It will not break your stare.
It will not break you or your tone when you say:
This Is What It Means To Love
This Is What It Means To Love
This Is What It Means To Love,
And So I WILL Bear Witness.
I love you Ben, I Promise, I will make you Proud.
