It's interesting. My mom has two "adult children" (descendants? creations? idk 😅) but she never got an empty nest, as she moved with me to another country with me when my sister chose to stay behind with our grandparents (she was 17 so was awarded a choice). And after I moved out of my stepdad's house that marriage ended, too, so she moved yet again. I'm sure the feeling of loss was still there but she never got to reclaim her space, because she never had any. Instead she had to move into a tiny rental that never quite became a home. Ah 😕
Empty? I think it depends upon what you fill it with. Nests don’t have to dry up and evaporate. They can be tea by tools and places of nurturing that make ‘goodness thrive’ in the life thereafter.
I think it’s definitely a NEST. One that has been filled with several babies , for me...big and small wise and not so wise...cultured and promising& yet awesome reflections of my/our tutelage- over the years. A nest that didn’t even produce some of the ones that yet belonged to me. I still could appreciate the memories, the laughter and the love left behind to make me realize the enormous role we play with parenting ‘little’ to big souls.
I wrote the following a couple of years ago, the day after my oldest graduated high school. Sorry it's a little long, but perhaps it offers some language?
"I have said before and I will say again that if I had known what being a mother would require of me I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have believed myself capable.
My chest aches this morning. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say it echoes, like a vast, empty space in which the slightest footstep reverberates.
When my children were inside me I was a closed vessel. The Mystery of them was entirely contained within me, but it still felt like the task was just to put one foot in front of the other. Carefully, mind you, like someone in a race with a raw egg on a spoon. But still-- feet, ground, one foot, another.
Birthing them did not put them on the "outside" as much as it made of me an open boat, which is an infinitely more vulnerable vessel. A boat literally carved out of my body, heart a rudder, working constantly to keep us all safe and steady and on course with no definitive map or training.
As we have all grown together I have had to carve an ever wider and deeper space, had to expand myself more than I ever imagined possible, to hold us well enough to survive this journey.
We do not honor properly the Divine Feminine as Great Mother, the Soul and Spirit labor required to literally fashion of yourself a vessel to contain and carry the vulnerable and cherished. If we give it any attention we focus on the physical work of mothering, maybe we acknowledge the emotional labor of it all. But we rarely, if ever, name the enormity of the task to birth and carry Life, to make of yourself the sacred vessel that holds and nurtures all the potentials and actualities of an entire family. The vastness of Soul required to be a strong, loving, safe container not just for forty weeks, but for years and years.
This morning I am feeling the enormity of the space in me that had until recently been almost entirely filled up getting Otto out of high school alive and emotionally well, daily nurturing a family of six, carrying all of us safe and protected within the vessel of me. I feel hollowed out. There's a weird, echoey amount of space in here.
It feels both empty and holy, like a cathedral without congregants."
I'm busy these days taking care of my parents, so lets add "sandwich generation" into the mix of terms that should be changed. While "empty nest" doesn't bother me really, I became very aware this past summer that my youngest was now 18 and headed to college and... wow. What I noticed was that I'd approached parenting as a job for the rest of my life. From my 20's, everyone older than me was just "old" so I wasn't differentiating. But this summer I saw it so differently and realized that I'd had a chapter to grow myself, then a chapter to grow children, and dang the past seemed short when I looked forward. Assuming I have a good bit of time left, those were just the first two chapters. I'm not sure how to label the next chapters, or even how many there are. I'm aware that my parents went from "old" to "elderly" recently and that's a new chapter for them. But they've had me and my sister to parent for 30 years "out of the nest" and those years aren't a monolith either. I'm rambling, but wondering if only rear view mirrors allow us the opportunity to label what we've now finished.
I not only find the empty nest metaphor a little… lackluster, I guess, but also… more and more of us don’t end up actually having that “emptying” for a lot longer. My 23-year-old is still living at home, and I find myself vacillating between “how am I still doing this much parenting??” and “… when was the last time that I saw them…?” No one prepared me for this, and I am hardly alone in this weird suspended parenting space.
My oldest has lived in a different state for years and just got engaged (!!!), yet when I mentioned maybe cleaning out her room for good the next time she moves, she was aghast that it wouldn’t be “her room” forever. She realized it was silly, but also really was horrified to think that it wouldn’t just be a museum of her childhood forever.
“No one prepared me for this” should be the tagline of this stage. Why does our culture do such a bad job of giving us some hint of range of our experiences?
Also, ENGAGED!! Talk about a whole new world: welcoming a new family member who’s already grown up!
"No one prepared me for this" is the tagline of everything. "Everything you need to know about being pregnant" nope, "about young children" nope... I think talking to our parents about their experience might come close, but times change so not even that. Then, turn it around. Do you think that your experience with toddlers, 18 years ago, will be particularly useful to a parent in that now? I think every generation is pretty much reinventing the wheel.
That's assuming anyone can remember 18 years ago. I remember wanting some kind of counsel from my mom about dealing with babies after my first was born and she only had vague memories to offer me. ("I don't know, Asha! You were a very good baby. You never cried, and you always happily stayed where I left you.") Nothing concrete or specific or useful, and I found this mind-boggling. How could you not remember your one and only infant?!? (Both my older brothers were adopted, when they were 3 and 1, respectively.)
Now I can empathize. I can't remember so much of my own children's babyhood, and they were both less than 20 years ago. I was asking my mom to remember details more than 30 years old!
This is something I have been wondering about. With remote work becoming so pervasive and so much socializing happening online, it seems that much of what once triggered young people to move out may be softened.
I don't think I can add anything to the discussion, Asha, at least not as far as new terminology goes.
The books and blogs about the joys of "empty nesting" don't particularly resonate with me. The lower grocery and utility bills, the end of helping with school and other issues, activities, the quiet, freedom to do whatever--I don't know how much those issues figure into my equation. I loved being a dad, loved th time with children, with my family. Yes, it was sometimes hectic and I did my share of muttering and grumbling racing from my daughter's gymnastics to picking my son up from his aftershcool activities and so forth, but I knew it was all part of the deal. Even in the bustle (sometimes chaos) I found little isalnds where, for example, my son and I would dash from dropping his sister at the gym to Starbucks. We had 90 minutes before we had to rush to the next thing, so we would grab two large comfy leather chairs, order up chocolate milk and a decaf Americano, and when my son was finsihed with his homework we would play chess on a portable set I kept in the car, or talk, or read something together. When he was at his activities I would do the same thing with my daughter. Whether out and about or at home, I tried to maximize the time because I knew, as soon as I held my newborn daughter, that this was all going to go by so fast, too fast, and that I would be heartbroken when it was over and transitioned to the next phase or episode.
And I was right.
No sooner had I finsihed singing my girl to sleep, holding her close in the big rockingchair I'd bought and set close to her crib . . . We all know where that goes, right? Up, up and away.
It's more than likely my own attitudes about the "empty nest" were significantly impacted by the sudden back-to-back-to-back losses of my dad, wife and mother. I have loss trauma that I am still wrestling with. And I feel its negative influences when I now celebrate the many accomplishments of my children, the accolades my son receives, prepare myself for the any-day-now announcement that my daughter's boyfriend has popped the question, and so forth. I feel it profoundly, concurrently and sometimes larger than the the pride and satisfaction and happiness I feel for them, i.e., I often experience grief and sense of loss.
The "empty nest" is for me a lonely place, not at all liberating or a time when I feel like spreading my arms and wondering where I shall now go, free and unfettered. Being a dad and husband was probably the largest part of my self-concept and identity. I have done some cool things in my life and had a few interesting experiences, but nothing I have done or ever can do will be as wonderful or great as my children.
I miss them all the time, some days more than others. But I always cheer them on and feel their victories -- and the occasional loss.
That my daughter appears prepared to accept marriage in the near future and my son's achievements and his rock-solid comfort with who he is, are testaments to the fact that their mother and I did do some things right. I do wish I saw them a bit more or that they would call more often, but they are who they are and becoming who they are going to be, and neither is knocking off banks or stepping on others to get ahead, so that's something.
The "empty nest" can be, I think, quite nuanced, an admixture filled with contradictions -- suffocation and liberation; joy and sorrow, something new with an overlay of something familiar, universal yet as individual as we are. And it comes with a profound sense of the passage of time, how much has gone and how much is left. The wheel has turned, and as another wrote, we are now occupying the place once held by our grandparents or parents, "sandwiched." Are we ever really unsandwiched or do we always feel--even when we are the last generation, existing only between grandchildren and eternity--that somehow we are still in process, in between, in flux?
When my children were younger I had most of the time I needed to do most of the things I wanted. I had all the time in the world. Not as much as when I was their age, but I certainly felt there was a long road ahead with plenty of adventures. These days, I'm more aware than ever of my own mortality, that there is not an endless succession of sunrises and deep breaths and morning rituals or nighttime reading, writing or ruminating.
All of this, all of it, I sensed or guessed at or felt vibrating in the lives of others around me while growing up; parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great- and great-great aunts and uncles, the parents of friends, and eventually, after I became a parent, felt it in some other parents, too.
Jill wrote "nothing prepared me for this." Agreed. Nothing and no one really could have. Yet, here we are. Where do we go from here? All will answer differently, but certainly we can, as parents or Senior Parents or Parents Emeriti or whatever this period of life is called, take some comfort in the fact that we aren't alone, no matter where our children are or how far they go.
Your eloquence and openness is a gift, Greg. The grief of this moment is undeniable, whether or not our kids’ departures come with other losses and traumas. Holding grief and joy together is something I’m still learning to do. Along with handling a new awareness of finitude.
Aside: Have you listened to Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief called All There Is? I just finished listening to it (and intend to write more about it here). It was unbelievably moving and important for me.
I have heard the introductory/trailer for that podcast, and the first 33-minute segment, but was not able to listen to more, at least not right now. I am glad--and a little envious--that you are learning to hold grief and joy together. That is something I have not yet been able to do . . .
Well, Greg, it's a day-by-day thing for me. "Holding grief and joy together" is the ideal, but the daily reality is more volatile. That grief is on its own timeline is so frustrating, and it can be lonely too. Not unlike the loneliness I sometimes felt during early parenting.
I do know that my baseline is more melancholy than it used to be. (The cheerful high school optimist you knew is still here, but more subdued, for sure.) I'm not yet sure if that's temporary or permanent. Maybe I'm traveling a long arc here. The pandemic has complicated things. One thing I believe: we (not you and me; the general "we") should not pathologize sadness. We shouldn't glorify it either, but ... I don't know. I'm still learning to understand my relationship to sadness... how much of it is a problem to be fixed, and how much is a passage to be accepted.
Re: Anderson Cooper's podcast. When my Dad died we did not have a memorial due to the pandemic. I also did not participate in any kind of grief group. In some ways listening to this pod may have functioned like that for me, letting me witness other peoples' experiences of grief. This was deeply healing for me. I only share this for what it's worth, not suggesting you listen before you're ready.
I agree that's day-by-day, and no two people are going to move through it the same. My own journeys through grief --unfortunately-- tend to be more lateral. You're right that grief has its own timeline. Absolutely.
After my dad and wife died, I have to say I was hurt and became really resentful of the fact that Amy's folks --being different from me-- came quite close to scolding and shaming me for my grief, and at one point, in so many words, suggested I was wallowing . . . and that was only about six weeks after she died. I was still in ever-cringe terror, grief, disbelief and shock. I could hardly get up in the mornings, save for my children who, I have to say, had a lot to do with pulling me through.
My late wife's parents are the kind of people who are already naturally reserved and don't really discuss emotions or the interior life. They moreover get ahead of their grief by staying busy and cracking jokes. They're definitely "doers," always busy, occupied, and that's wonderful tat it works for them. My operating system is very different. When it comes to loss, I've always been a slow healer. I couldn't say exactly why. but I have always been that way. It takes a long time, often decades before I can think of someone and smile and the memories of the good times finally outweigh the tears and bitterness of missing them.
Psychologists often treat grief and depression as if they are things that must be gotten over within a certain time frame (or it's "prolonged grief syndrome" and a problem), medicated away, meditated away, and so on. I've always found that offensive. Some people come back from, say, a war, and are able to "get on with it" while others silently suffer with PTSD; still others engage in substance abuse, and worse. I think our responses are highly individual and I resent those who suggest protracted grief is self-indulgent or, worse, a character flaw or moral failing. Rubbish.
The pandemic definitely complicated all of the aforementioned (and more) for me. I really tumbled many steps back during the height of it and am still clawing my way back. Others are "more resilient" --and there's a word that some other people seem to love trotting out and waving in the faces of those they perceive as lagging or languishing. "Why can't you be more resilient?" "It's been a while; pull yourself together," and so forth.
After my dad and wife were gone, both within just ten days, my mother followed not long after, and I just thought, "Well, except for the death of one of my children, or my own death, it's hard to imagine feeling much worse than this. This is too much all at one time, and there's nothing for it."
My sister nagged me about attending grief support groups. I went to several. I was, in every case, the youngest person there --often much younger. The people in each group, who are all very nice and so vulnerable, all had stories that touched me and could break any heart not made of stone. However, whenever my turn rolled around, I would share and people would shift uncomfortably in their chairs and look down; no one seemed to ever know what to say. Several people did remark they'd never heard anything like it "except in wartime when you hear about an entire family getting bombed out or shot." It was an extremely lonely experience that made me feel even more self-conscious, conspicuous. Most of the folks there were in their late 60s and older, and afterward they'd go to Denny's for pie and coffee and such, and I just was not a part of their group, if that makes sense?
I certainly could sympathize and, I think, empathize to a large extent with those dear people. I just didn't feel connected to them in the ay I wanted to. Sooooooo, I think that is to say that other stories of grief I have found interesting and evocative of many things, but never comforting.
My mother once said, near the very end, "I'm sick of people sharing their cancer stories with me, as if it's supposed to buck me up or let me know that 'I'm not alone.' But I am alone. No one one but me is looking at the end of *this* road. This is my life, and I am facing the end of it and I can't do a g*ddamned thing about it. It's not like you can pay a stunt double to step in and get you out of it. No one is going to emerge from behind the curtain and say, 'OK, bad joke --we were only kidding.' You can be surrounded by people who love you, but this is a solitary journey." That was her experience, anyway. She was damned unhappy, very afraid and felt cheated on a grand scale.
I dunno whether Anderson Cooper's experience will soothe or heal me in any way. Certainly it can enlarge and broaden. I have listened to a bit more, but not a lot.
It makes me happy to know that your experience with it was positive, functioned like a grief group. That's good for you, very healthy and needed.
We all have our arcs and our overlaps, that's a fact.
I can only hope that wherever Jagdish is --if he is anywhere at all-- continues to strengthen you and love you as you embrace his memory and reach into the heart of yourself and draw on the things he gave you that helped you grow and become the woman you are, Asha. Nothing a walk can't take care of, as you have written.
It's interesting. My mom has two "adult children" (descendants? creations? idk 😅) but she never got an empty nest, as she moved with me to another country with me when my sister chose to stay behind with our grandparents (she was 17 so was awarded a choice). And after I moved out of my stepdad's house that marriage ended, too, so she moved yet again. I'm sure the feeling of loss was still there but she never got to reclaim her space, because she never had any. Instead she had to move into a tiny rental that never quite became a home. Ah 😕
A fascinating story. Thank you for sharing it, Anastasia.
Empty? I think it depends upon what you fill it with. Nests don’t have to dry up and evaporate. They can be tea by tools and places of nurturing that make ‘goodness thrive’ in the life thereafter.
I think it’s definitely a NEST. One that has been filled with several babies , for me...big and small wise and not so wise...cultured and promising& yet awesome reflections of my/our tutelage- over the years. A nest that didn’t even produce some of the ones that yet belonged to me. I still could appreciate the memories, the laughter and the love left behind to make me realize the enormous role we play with parenting ‘little’ to big souls.
I wrote the following a couple of years ago, the day after my oldest graduated high school. Sorry it's a little long, but perhaps it offers some language?
"I have said before and I will say again that if I had known what being a mother would require of me I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have believed myself capable.
My chest aches this morning. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say it echoes, like a vast, empty space in which the slightest footstep reverberates.
When my children were inside me I was a closed vessel. The Mystery of them was entirely contained within me, but it still felt like the task was just to put one foot in front of the other. Carefully, mind you, like someone in a race with a raw egg on a spoon. But still-- feet, ground, one foot, another.
Birthing them did not put them on the "outside" as much as it made of me an open boat, which is an infinitely more vulnerable vessel. A boat literally carved out of my body, heart a rudder, working constantly to keep us all safe and steady and on course with no definitive map or training.
As we have all grown together I have had to carve an ever wider and deeper space, had to expand myself more than I ever imagined possible, to hold us well enough to survive this journey.
We do not honor properly the Divine Feminine as Great Mother, the Soul and Spirit labor required to literally fashion of yourself a vessel to contain and carry the vulnerable and cherished. If we give it any attention we focus on the physical work of mothering, maybe we acknowledge the emotional labor of it all. But we rarely, if ever, name the enormity of the task to birth and carry Life, to make of yourself the sacred vessel that holds and nurtures all the potentials and actualities of an entire family. The vastness of Soul required to be a strong, loving, safe container not just for forty weeks, but for years and years.
This morning I am feeling the enormity of the space in me that had until recently been almost entirely filled up getting Otto out of high school alive and emotionally well, daily nurturing a family of six, carrying all of us safe and protected within the vessel of me. I feel hollowed out. There's a weird, echoey amount of space in here.
It feels both empty and holy, like a cathedral without congregants."
beautiful
This is magnificent, Asha. I need to sit with this and re-read.
Beautiful.
My word. This is gorgeous.
Thank you. It's good to be reminded of it.
I'm busy these days taking care of my parents, so lets add "sandwich generation" into the mix of terms that should be changed. While "empty nest" doesn't bother me really, I became very aware this past summer that my youngest was now 18 and headed to college and... wow. What I noticed was that I'd approached parenting as a job for the rest of my life. From my 20's, everyone older than me was just "old" so I wasn't differentiating. But this summer I saw it so differently and realized that I'd had a chapter to grow myself, then a chapter to grow children, and dang the past seemed short when I looked forward. Assuming I have a good bit of time left, those were just the first two chapters. I'm not sure how to label the next chapters, or even how many there are. I'm aware that my parents went from "old" to "elderly" recently and that's a new chapter for them. But they've had me and my sister to parent for 30 years "out of the nest" and those years aren't a monolith either. I'm rambling, but wondering if only rear view mirrors allow us the opportunity to label what we've now finished.
Thank you for articulating this so beautifully. I’ve never been more aware of my place in the generational flow. 
I not only find the empty nest metaphor a little… lackluster, I guess, but also… more and more of us don’t end up actually having that “emptying” for a lot longer. My 23-year-old is still living at home, and I find myself vacillating between “how am I still doing this much parenting??” and “… when was the last time that I saw them…?” No one prepared me for this, and I am hardly alone in this weird suspended parenting space.
My oldest has lived in a different state for years and just got engaged (!!!), yet when I mentioned maybe cleaning out her room for good the next time she moves, she was aghast that it wouldn’t be “her room” forever. She realized it was silly, but also really was horrified to think that it wouldn’t just be a museum of her childhood forever.
“No one prepared me for this” should be the tagline of this stage. Why does our culture do such a bad job of giving us some hint of range of our experiences?
Also, ENGAGED!! Talk about a whole new world: welcoming a new family member who’s already grown up!
"No one prepared me for this" is the tagline of everything. "Everything you need to know about being pregnant" nope, "about young children" nope... I think talking to our parents about their experience might come close, but times change so not even that. Then, turn it around. Do you think that your experience with toddlers, 18 years ago, will be particularly useful to a parent in that now? I think every generation is pretty much reinventing the wheel.
That's assuming anyone can remember 18 years ago. I remember wanting some kind of counsel from my mom about dealing with babies after my first was born and she only had vague memories to offer me. ("I don't know, Asha! You were a very good baby. You never cried, and you always happily stayed where I left you.") Nothing concrete or specific or useful, and I found this mind-boggling. How could you not remember your one and only infant?!? (Both my older brothers were adopted, when they were 3 and 1, respectively.)
Now I can empathize. I can't remember so much of my own children's babyhood, and they were both less than 20 years ago. I was asking my mom to remember details more than 30 years old!
This is something I have been wondering about. With remote work becoming so pervasive and so much socializing happening online, it seems that much of what once triggered young people to move out may be softened.
Now that’s fascinating. Reminds me about how many young people aren’t as motivated to learn to drive as they used to be.
I don't think I can add anything to the discussion, Asha, at least not as far as new terminology goes.
The books and blogs about the joys of "empty nesting" don't particularly resonate with me. The lower grocery and utility bills, the end of helping with school and other issues, activities, the quiet, freedom to do whatever--I don't know how much those issues figure into my equation. I loved being a dad, loved th time with children, with my family. Yes, it was sometimes hectic and I did my share of muttering and grumbling racing from my daughter's gymnastics to picking my son up from his aftershcool activities and so forth, but I knew it was all part of the deal. Even in the bustle (sometimes chaos) I found little isalnds where, for example, my son and I would dash from dropping his sister at the gym to Starbucks. We had 90 minutes before we had to rush to the next thing, so we would grab two large comfy leather chairs, order up chocolate milk and a decaf Americano, and when my son was finsihed with his homework we would play chess on a portable set I kept in the car, or talk, or read something together. When he was at his activities I would do the same thing with my daughter. Whether out and about or at home, I tried to maximize the time because I knew, as soon as I held my newborn daughter, that this was all going to go by so fast, too fast, and that I would be heartbroken when it was over and transitioned to the next phase or episode.
And I was right.
No sooner had I finsihed singing my girl to sleep, holding her close in the big rockingchair I'd bought and set close to her crib . . . We all know where that goes, right? Up, up and away.
It's more than likely my own attitudes about the "empty nest" were significantly impacted by the sudden back-to-back-to-back losses of my dad, wife and mother. I have loss trauma that I am still wrestling with. And I feel its negative influences when I now celebrate the many accomplishments of my children, the accolades my son receives, prepare myself for the any-day-now announcement that my daughter's boyfriend has popped the question, and so forth. I feel it profoundly, concurrently and sometimes larger than the the pride and satisfaction and happiness I feel for them, i.e., I often experience grief and sense of loss.
The "empty nest" is for me a lonely place, not at all liberating or a time when I feel like spreading my arms and wondering where I shall now go, free and unfettered. Being a dad and husband was probably the largest part of my self-concept and identity. I have done some cool things in my life and had a few interesting experiences, but nothing I have done or ever can do will be as wonderful or great as my children.
I miss them all the time, some days more than others. But I always cheer them on and feel their victories -- and the occasional loss.
That my daughter appears prepared to accept marriage in the near future and my son's achievements and his rock-solid comfort with who he is, are testaments to the fact that their mother and I did do some things right. I do wish I saw them a bit more or that they would call more often, but they are who they are and becoming who they are going to be, and neither is knocking off banks or stepping on others to get ahead, so that's something.
The "empty nest" can be, I think, quite nuanced, an admixture filled with contradictions -- suffocation and liberation; joy and sorrow, something new with an overlay of something familiar, universal yet as individual as we are. And it comes with a profound sense of the passage of time, how much has gone and how much is left. The wheel has turned, and as another wrote, we are now occupying the place once held by our grandparents or parents, "sandwiched." Are we ever really unsandwiched or do we always feel--even when we are the last generation, existing only between grandchildren and eternity--that somehow we are still in process, in between, in flux?
When my children were younger I had most of the time I needed to do most of the things I wanted. I had all the time in the world. Not as much as when I was their age, but I certainly felt there was a long road ahead with plenty of adventures. These days, I'm more aware than ever of my own mortality, that there is not an endless succession of sunrises and deep breaths and morning rituals or nighttime reading, writing or ruminating.
All of this, all of it, I sensed or guessed at or felt vibrating in the lives of others around me while growing up; parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great- and great-great aunts and uncles, the parents of friends, and eventually, after I became a parent, felt it in some other parents, too.
Jill wrote "nothing prepared me for this." Agreed. Nothing and no one really could have. Yet, here we are. Where do we go from here? All will answer differently, but certainly we can, as parents or Senior Parents or Parents Emeriti or whatever this period of life is called, take some comfort in the fact that we aren't alone, no matter where our children are or how far they go.
We have one another.
Your eloquence and openness is a gift, Greg. The grief of this moment is undeniable, whether or not our kids’ departures come with other losses and traumas. Holding grief and joy together is something I’m still learning to do. Along with handling a new awareness of finitude.
Aside: Have you listened to Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief called All There Is? I just finished listening to it (and intend to write more about it here). It was unbelievably moving and important for me.
I have heard the introductory/trailer for that podcast, and the first 33-minute segment, but was not able to listen to more, at least not right now. I am glad--and a little envious--that you are learning to hold grief and joy together. That is something I have not yet been able to do . . .
Well, Greg, it's a day-by-day thing for me. "Holding grief and joy together" is the ideal, but the daily reality is more volatile. That grief is on its own timeline is so frustrating, and it can be lonely too. Not unlike the loneliness I sometimes felt during early parenting.
I do know that my baseline is more melancholy than it used to be. (The cheerful high school optimist you knew is still here, but more subdued, for sure.) I'm not yet sure if that's temporary or permanent. Maybe I'm traveling a long arc here. The pandemic has complicated things. One thing I believe: we (not you and me; the general "we") should not pathologize sadness. We shouldn't glorify it either, but ... I don't know. I'm still learning to understand my relationship to sadness... how much of it is a problem to be fixed, and how much is a passage to be accepted.
Re: Anderson Cooper's podcast. When my Dad died we did not have a memorial due to the pandemic. I also did not participate in any kind of grief group. In some ways listening to this pod may have functioned like that for me, letting me witness other peoples' experiences of grief. This was deeply healing for me. I only share this for what it's worth, not suggesting you listen before you're ready.
I agree that's day-by-day, and no two people are going to move through it the same. My own journeys through grief --unfortunately-- tend to be more lateral. You're right that grief has its own timeline. Absolutely.
After my dad and wife died, I have to say I was hurt and became really resentful of the fact that Amy's folks --being different from me-- came quite close to scolding and shaming me for my grief, and at one point, in so many words, suggested I was wallowing . . . and that was only about six weeks after she died. I was still in ever-cringe terror, grief, disbelief and shock. I could hardly get up in the mornings, save for my children who, I have to say, had a lot to do with pulling me through.
My late wife's parents are the kind of people who are already naturally reserved and don't really discuss emotions or the interior life. They moreover get ahead of their grief by staying busy and cracking jokes. They're definitely "doers," always busy, occupied, and that's wonderful tat it works for them. My operating system is very different. When it comes to loss, I've always been a slow healer. I couldn't say exactly why. but I have always been that way. It takes a long time, often decades before I can think of someone and smile and the memories of the good times finally outweigh the tears and bitterness of missing them.
Psychologists often treat grief and depression as if they are things that must be gotten over within a certain time frame (or it's "prolonged grief syndrome" and a problem), medicated away, meditated away, and so on. I've always found that offensive. Some people come back from, say, a war, and are able to "get on with it" while others silently suffer with PTSD; still others engage in substance abuse, and worse. I think our responses are highly individual and I resent those who suggest protracted grief is self-indulgent or, worse, a character flaw or moral failing. Rubbish.
The pandemic definitely complicated all of the aforementioned (and more) for me. I really tumbled many steps back during the height of it and am still clawing my way back. Others are "more resilient" --and there's a word that some other people seem to love trotting out and waving in the faces of those they perceive as lagging or languishing. "Why can't you be more resilient?" "It's been a while; pull yourself together," and so forth.
After my dad and wife were gone, both within just ten days, my mother followed not long after, and I just thought, "Well, except for the death of one of my children, or my own death, it's hard to imagine feeling much worse than this. This is too much all at one time, and there's nothing for it."
My sister nagged me about attending grief support groups. I went to several. I was, in every case, the youngest person there --often much younger. The people in each group, who are all very nice and so vulnerable, all had stories that touched me and could break any heart not made of stone. However, whenever my turn rolled around, I would share and people would shift uncomfortably in their chairs and look down; no one seemed to ever know what to say. Several people did remark they'd never heard anything like it "except in wartime when you hear about an entire family getting bombed out or shot." It was an extremely lonely experience that made me feel even more self-conscious, conspicuous. Most of the folks there were in their late 60s and older, and afterward they'd go to Denny's for pie and coffee and such, and I just was not a part of their group, if that makes sense?
I certainly could sympathize and, I think, empathize to a large extent with those dear people. I just didn't feel connected to them in the ay I wanted to. Sooooooo, I think that is to say that other stories of grief I have found interesting and evocative of many things, but never comforting.
My mother once said, near the very end, "I'm sick of people sharing their cancer stories with me, as if it's supposed to buck me up or let me know that 'I'm not alone.' But I am alone. No one one but me is looking at the end of *this* road. This is my life, and I am facing the end of it and I can't do a g*ddamned thing about it. It's not like you can pay a stunt double to step in and get you out of it. No one is going to emerge from behind the curtain and say, 'OK, bad joke --we were only kidding.' You can be surrounded by people who love you, but this is a solitary journey." That was her experience, anyway. She was damned unhappy, very afraid and felt cheated on a grand scale.
I dunno whether Anderson Cooper's experience will soothe or heal me in any way. Certainly it can enlarge and broaden. I have listened to a bit more, but not a lot.
It makes me happy to know that your experience with it was positive, functioned like a grief group. That's good for you, very healthy and needed.
We all have our arcs and our overlaps, that's a fact.
I can only hope that wherever Jagdish is --if he is anywhere at all-- continues to strengthen you and love you as you embrace his memory and reach into the heart of yourself and draw on the things he gave you that helped you grow and become the woman you are, Asha. Nothing a walk can't take care of, as you have written.
Thank you for sharing this, Greg. 🩵