#104: Integrating loss into life.
#104: Integrating loss into life.
The subtle ways loss defines our lives, and the surprising moments when it shifts.
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“Where is that damn book!?!”
Head tilted at an angle, I stood on the back of my office couch, sliding my fingers across book spines, scanning the titles sideways.
My beloved bookshelf is my brain’s external hard drive. I use it for inspiration, reflection, and research. On this particular day I was in search of a fact from The End of Trauma by Dr. George A. Bonanno for my Do Loss book outline — “x number of those grieving feel better in y years”. And I couldn’t find the tome anywhere.
“Didn’t I read that in 2022, before his other book, The Other Side of Sadness? Oh hell, I can't remember now.”
This left me standing on the couch scanning and scanning and scanning. And it really pissed me off.
“Ok, this system is no longer working. Time for a reboot.” I scowled.
In the New York Times ‘By the Book’ column, authors are regularly asked, “How do you arrange your books?”
The most frequent answers are “not very well” or “all over the place”.
What??? I mean, how can you find a beloved book if they are not dewey-decimal-ed into submission using your personal OCD system?
If I were to be interviewed for this column (one can always hope!), here’s my answer: by year read. Beginning in 2017, the year after my husband died.
I know exactly where to find my books, because I remember exactly where I was in my grieving process when I read them. (Until last weekend, but we’re getting there.)
2017 was the year of the classic grief memoirs — A Grief Observed; The Year of Magical Thinking. Interspersed were also books by psychics and mystics and anyone who talked about the possibility of life after death. Mainlining stories of widows, widowers, and ghost whisperers helped me believe that I would survive this. Because the memoirs gave me hope of my life post Mike’s loss, and the mystics gave me hope that Mike might still exist in some form. Hope was the name of the game.
2018 came with a branching out to more esoteric loss memoirs, lots of reading about nature, and sparks of curiosity about the science of grief and memory — Mary Oliver’s Upstream, Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting. Plus a few fiction books by favorite authors Pat Barker and Michael Ondaatje to get me out of my head.
As the years unfolded and my ability to think about anything besides loss returned, my reading selections evolved further. Architecture books popped up in 2019, the year Treehouse planning began. Books on race proliferated in 2020. Books on war and the Founding Fathers showed up as I sought to better understand the warfighters and nation I was serving at work. Books about death gave way to books about life — how to live well and get the most out of our short time on earth. The shelves of the 2020’s were filled with Montaigne, the Stoics, Seneca. Memoirs by famous creatives. Fiction books that explored the human experience.
My bookshelf ended up being a timeline of my healing, then my growth, and finally my evolution of the thinker and writer typing this for you right now.
But when I could not find the Bonanno book, I had a major realization.
Mike’s death-iversary is no longer the blackhole around which my entire experience orbits.
My timeline now involves a new marker of my transformation: the day I stopped mentally organizing my existence around November 15, 2016.
So I emptied my shelves.
EVERY. SINGLE. BOOK.
I put them in piles around my office by genre — fiction, memoirs by famous people, memoirs by non-famous people, grief-specific memoirs, personal growth, science, race, war, poetry, graphic novels. Then I dusted everything down and re-shelved.
I now can see all my fiction books (top shelf!), all my memoirs (second and third), then my books about living and life. In four hours, I aligned my external brain to who I am today.
No longer someone solely defined by the worst day of their life. Instead, someone who has faced challenges, been transformed by the pressure and heat, and — while not necessarily ‘grateful’ for crawling through that dumpster fire — is moving forward empowered.
The timeline has been left behind and replaced with… knowing.
The knowing that Mike has been integrated into every facet of me and the kids’ lives. We’re no longer constantly thinking about how far we are from the day he took his last breath. Instead, we’re living with him inside of us, beside us, around us. Maybe he’s become more of a feeling than a human being, but he’s still a force of love, support, and inspiration. We know what kind of life he’d want for us, and we unabashedly live it. He influences us every day.
In other words, our focus is no longer on what we lost when he left, but on what we had before his heart stopped.
It’s corny to say but it feels so real — he lives on through us. It doesn’t matter how long its been, nothing can separate us from him now.
When finishing a new book, I still write the year on the inside cover.
So even though my “book years” are intertwined now like sleeping puppies in a box, I can still pick up a book and reminisce about my state of mind when I read it, placing it in time. Placing ME in time.
Not because I want to look back with woe — “Oh gosh, its been so long since I last hugged Mike…” — but because it’s amazing to see my progress! Time passing is no longer a bad thing, it’s a measuring stick for my evolution. I get to open a book from my shelf, see 2022 written in the top right corner, and feel a rush of pride and awe. Look how far I’ve come in just two years… I can’t wait to see where I go next!
November 15 will always be a moody, messy day. I can’t forget that it’s the anniversary of the white hot line that divided my life into ‘before’ and ‘after’. But that line no longer defines every day.
It feels good to know that eventually loss becomes just a part of life, rather than a lurking boogeyman you organize your life around.
Already buying more books,
Thanks for sharing so personally. Wow, great to hear how you’ve found your way forward. Beautifully expressed.