I have reached an age where reading the obituaries has become a routine activity. According to statistics, about 50% of Americans born in my birth year are still alive. So reading the obituaries is also a math exercise addressing the question of how many people eulogized today were younger than I am, and how many were older? Oddly, the answer is often about 50-50.
I feel blessed to have made it this far relatively intact. I don’t come from a family of long-lived people, so I am somewhat surprised to still be here. There are so many upsides to my life, but there is one significant downside — repeatedly grieving those who have been removed from me through death.
Sometimes, usually late at night, I Google names from my long-distant past, looking for traces of people I used to know. My generation does not have a particularly large internet presence so finding any information can be challenging.
I have found the kindly Ohio oboe teacher who shared silly jokes during my lessons, the Connecticut neighbor with eight daughters who doted on my two young sons and the California nurse I shared shifts, lunches and gripes with in the 1970s. These memories are bittersweet, but there is also comfort in revisiting them.
A few months ago, an obituary popped up online, bringing with it painful and unexpected feelings of grief and loss. Working through that experience has been different from all the others, and different as well from losses suffered up close in real time. I needed to discover how and why in order to deal with my profound sadness.
The man I’ll call Harold was, for two years, my high school boyfriend. On the day he died, we’d had no contact for 55 years. I found a lengthy obituary with a photograph on Legacy.com.
It was not difficult to unearth the teenage boy hidden among the folds and wrinkles of the completely bald old man I was viewing. I saw the little scar on his left cheek that had resulted from an elbow to the face during a varsity football game. I noted the half-smile that looked a great deal like an expression I remembered.
So, what was I grieving for? Through the years, I’d thought about Harold many times, always with fondness and always wishing him well. I harbored a fantasy that someday we would see each other again — at least once more before we died. Was the grief for the death of that fantasy or for my lost youth? If so, I felt rather silly.
In 1989, Dr. Kenneth Doka created the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe a loss that is not “openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned.” This covers relationships that are not generally viewed as significant or valuable by others. The loss is not seen as worthy of grief, nor is the grief-stricken person recognized as a legitimate griever. Thus, I found myself in a position of being reluctant to discuss my feelings of loss with others.
Doka recommends finding a personally meaningful way to memorialize the deceased, and I took his advice. A few weeks ago, I changed the passcode on my phone to reflect the letters of Harold’s name — 427653. Now, every time I open my phone, I think of him briefly, and I smile. The sadness has finally drifted away.
I wrote half of last month’s column in an airport, trying to get to my grandmother before it was too late. Neither of us made it; she was gone before I even boarded. When I was done ugly crying – on the phone to my cousin as he broke the news, then again in front of the alarmed workers of the airport Costa – I wanted to metaphorically tear up everything I’d written and start on this instead, even if I didn’t have a clear idea of what this was yet, beyond something about rosemary’s tie to memory and a roast lamb no one would ever make for me again.
But it was the Winter Solstice coming up, and my first entry in a column on the place where food and magic intersect; and, crucially, it was too close to that moment of raw grief to pull it together into something coherent, something worthwhile. So I finished that piece on tea and mead and spices and the interwoven debts that we owe each other, and I’m bringing this to you now instead.
Rosemary is the herb of memory. I miss my grandmother.
When dealing with traditional herbal correspondences it can be hard to separate the magical from the mundane. Partly because our ancestors didn’t make that distinction themselves, seeing magic, faith, and physical medicine as part of a single whole in a world entirely imbued with the sacred. But also because, as traditional herbcraft has faded out of practice, attributions which were once meant to be understood literally can seem like metaphor or mysticism, only to then surprise us when we rediscover their physical nature. Rosemary, and the impact it has on memory, is one such example.
When Ophelia includes the herb in her list of accusatory flowers, it’s easy to assume her famous quote, “rosemary, that’s for remembrance” is as metaphorical as the rest. But rosemary has long been a herb associated with funerary rites, with death, and with remembrance of the departed, traditionally being placed on the biers of the dead. Its strong smell, which lingers in the room like a memory, would have helped to cover the beginnings of decay, as well as indelibly tying itself to that moment of grief and loss in the mourner’s neurology. Scent is one of the key triggers of memory, even with substances that don’t specifically effect cognition – how much more powerful rosemary’s impact then, with the discovery that it does.
Rosemary has other folkloric ties to memory outside of the funeral parlour – with Ancient Greek students supposedly using it as a study aid, and Sir Thomas Moore declaring the herb sacred to friendship because it provokes remembrance of the living, not just the dead.
As modern medical research examines herblore to see if there are effective treatments that have been overlooked, or that can be made effective with modern scientific techniques, rosemary has had its turn in the laboratory. Studies indicate that ingesting rosemary enhances recall speed as well as improves episodic and working memory, and may even have a positive impact on Alzheimers, though more research needs to be done to understand why.
Even inhaling the scent of rosemary seems beneficial, though the impact is smaller, and works best if the subject is exposed to the scent both during the learning process and then again when asked to recall things later on – scent as a memory trigger, enhanced by the effects of rosemary’s unique chemical composition on the brain.
A bouquet of herbs, including rosemary, in a bowl
This puts us in a position where rosemary is uniquely suited to remember and honour the beloved dead. Symbolically linked to the dead through religious rites and burial practices, tied to love and the transition from one life stage to another (it is worn at weddings as well as funerals), rosemary also helps us to remember in a literal, physical way. Eaten regularly, it may help preserve the memories of those departed, as well as prompting us to remember meals shared or time spent cooking together when the familiar scents reach us and work their neurological magic.
To combine the spiritual with the physical is a very powerful thing, grounding us in both realms at once, and binding them together in us. That which is gone is never really gone.
Garlic and Rosemary Lamb
Growing up, my grandmother was the only person who could cook a roast lamb I actually enjoyed eating. I don’t know how she did it, and she was a cooking by instinct sort of person so there are no recipes left behind. I still don’t eat lamb that much, though it’s appeared more often in my house since I married a New Zealander, but I knew it was exactly what I wanted to make for this column, and my grandmother. I hope you like it.
Lamb with rosemary and peppers
Lamb shoulder (900g)
Fresh rosemary (2 – 3 tablespoons, chopped)
3 bulbs of garlic
500g baby potatoes
125 ml red wine
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Flour
Start by setting the oven to pre-heat at 240 C (220 C fan, ~450 F). While that’s heating up, mix four tablespoons of olive oil with eight cloves of crushed garlic, the rosemary, and the salt and pepper. When thoroughly mixed rub it all over the lamb shoulder. Halve the remaining garlic bulbs and place them with the potatoes in a roasting tray, drizzle with olive oil, crack salt and pepper over them, and then place the lamb on top. Finally, pour the wine over it all and cover with a tinfoil tent before placing it into the oven.
Let the lamb roast for fifty minutes and then remove the tinfoil for the final ten minutes to let it crisp up nicely. Once it’s done let the lamb rest for fifteen minutes. While the meat is resting, remove the garlic and potatoes from the tray so you can turn the drippings into a gravy by whisking in flour over a low heat until it reaches your preferred consistency.
— For those entering 2024 without a loved one, one bereaved writer offers her wisdom
By Lotte Bowser
A few days into January 2021, I lay on the bathroom floor in the foetal position, sobbing.
For non-grieving folk, the start of a new year can prompt a dogged determination. Perhaps they set goals and resolutions, run a marathon, quit smoking – that sort of thing. But for me, the striking of the clock hand at midnight on New Year’s Eve triggered a horrifying realisation. My fiancé, Ben, was dead. And, no matter how much I kicked, screamed and dug my heels in in protest, time would keep moving forwards without him.
Six weeks earlier, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, my beautiful Ben took his final breath with the aid of a mechanical ventilator in an intensive care unit. He died from complications attributed to the virus, compounded by stage four soft tissue cancer. He was 36-years-old.<
‘There were many mornings in the early aftermath of his death when I woke up and wished I hadn’t’
There were many mornings in the early aftermath of his death when I woke up and wished I hadn’t. His absence catalysed an existential crisis, leaving no corner of my life untouched. Everything changed, from the way I went to sleep at night in an empty bed, to how I made my coffee in the morning for one instead of two.
And yet, despite the monumental sense of loss, there was a hastiness in the way others met me in my grief. They insisted that I meditated, that I stayed positive, that Ben wouldn’t have wanted me to be sad.
My GP regurgitated something about the six stages of grief, before handing me a prescription for antidepressants. The celebrant at Ben’s funeral in mid-December invited us to say our goodbyes.
‘My GP regurgitated something about the six stages of grief’
I quickly learned that bereavement support falls woefully short of what’s needed. We tend to pathologise grief. We condense the grieving process into clear-cut stages with a beginning and an end. We impose arbitrary timelines.
We hold another’s grief at arm’s length, or better yet, turn the other way. I suspect it’s because grief is a reminder of everything we stand to lose. Why would we contemplate our mortality when it causes so much fear and pain?
‘I knew that thinking happy thoughts or waving sticks of sage in the air wouldn’t make my grief disappear’
I knew that thinking happy thoughts or waving sticks of sage in the air wouldn’t make my grief disappear. I understood that while it was possible for my grief to give rise to mental illness, it was not a mental illness in itself. Nor was my grief a problem to be fixed – because try as I might, I couldn’t bring Ben back from the dead. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him either, and nor should I have; I loved him then, and I love him still.
Rather, my grief was a normal response to loss that demanded my patience and compassion. It was part and parcel of my humanness, something that would accompany me through life. It made sense then, to find a way to not merely tolerate my grief, or to overcome it like others had suggested, but to honour it. To grant it all the time it needed to metabolise.
‘If leaving them behind in 2023 feels counterintuitive, it’s because it is’
There is no such thing as ‘letting go’ or ‘moving on’, either. There is only moving forwards. When you form an intimate bond with another person, you create new neural connections that change your wiring. Your person is – quite literally – encoded into you. This coding is the physical manifestation of your bond. Your love. If leaving them behind in 2023 feels counterintuitive, it’s because it is. Take them with you instead.
You might have heard of the six stages of grief by now: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and meaning. Perhaps you question whether you’re ‘doing grief right’, like I did. Perhaps you think you ought to be doing better than you are. But the stages of grief model was created to describe the experiences of those facing death themselves, not of those left behind. In grief, our emotions often coil together, overlap or reoccur in unpredictable ways, rather than progressing neatly.
One moment you think you’re fine, and the next you’re crying into a bowl of porridge. Some days you’re making progress, and others you’ve taken ten steps back. We all grieve in our own time and in our own way.
I urge you to meet yourself, wherever you are, with radical compassion. Recovery from loss is not easy. And it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. It happens bit by bit, in the baby steps, in the small actions taken over time. Think of a ball inside a box for a moment. The ball represents your grief. At first, the ball takes up all the space inside the box.
As time passes, the box grows bigger, creating more space around the ball. It’s not that your grief necessarily diminishes in size – it’s that the space around it expands. Eventually, those baby steps will grow bigger, becoming strides and leaps until one day you look back in awe of how far you’ve come.
Entering the fourth year without Ben feels far easier than the first. My grief, once agonising, is softer now, like a dull ache. I’ve learned that no feeling is final, and that in-between the bad bits in life, there will be good and gorgeous bits, too. Whether it’s a gentle nudge or a thread of hope, let it pull you forwards. Reach for what gives you purpose and meaning, and hold on with both hands.
Purpose does not have to mean transmuting your pain into something big and radical, like running a marathon or climbing a mountain. It can be found in the small, everyday ways you show up for yourself, and in the ways you honour your person. Meaning does not mean finding meaning in their death.
It can be found in what you do from here on out; in saying ‘yes’ to life again, in choosing joy in spite of your grief.
From my grieving heart to yours, here are some practical tips for navigating the start of 2024 without your loved one.
Feel free to take what resonates, and leave behind what doesn’t.
A portrait of Marc (Daniel Levy) and his friend Thomas (Himesh Patel), “painted” by Marc in ‘Good Grief.’ Kris Knight was the shadow painter on the film.
Art is the linchpin of Good Grief, a warm dramedy set in the heart of winter, out in theaters on Dec. 29 before coming to Netflix on Jan. 5. It’s a film that feels like snowfall: a gradual accumulation of a blanket of muted comfort. Dan Levy, who wrote, directed, and stars in the film, plays Marc, who is guided through grief by his best friends, Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Thomas (Himesh Patel) in the wake of his husband Oliver’s (Luke Evans) death. An artist who used to paint, Marc finds his way back to the canvas as he heals.
The Marc we meet at the beginning of Good Grief is diminished—he stopped painting after his mom’s death, finding it too painful. Before Oliver died, Marc still made art, illustrating his husband’s books. But he shrank himself to magnify his husband. Now, he’s lost his partner. The people around him encourage him to pick up the paintbrush again.
We learn over the course of the film that Marc and Oliver’s marriage was far from perfect; Marc holds his complex emotions about Oliver’s death at arm’s length, watching them circle the drain, but never quite emptying the bath water. First Thomas, and then a lover, Theo (Arnaud Valois), nudge him toward art to help him heal.
“If you have the ability to write or to paint, sometimes that’s all you can do,” Levy says in an interview. “It might not look like the sobbing, fall-down-the-wall, on-the-floor hysteria that we’ve come to equate with grief or with loss. And that’s OK.”
Daniel Levy directs on the set of ‘Good Grief,’ with a painting by Kris Knight behind him.
Levy himself is not a painter. When he got the green light for the film, his first move was to solicit the help of one of his favorite artists, Kris Knight. Levy called Knight, whose work he’d been collecting for a decade, and asked him to be a shadow painter for his character.
Just a week before Levy’s call, Knight had a conversation about the 1998 Alfonso Cuarón movie Great Expectations, in which the Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clementepainted for Ethan Hawke’s character, Finn. Knight was 18 when Great Expectations came out, and it inspired him to pursue art. Now it was his turn to paint the art that we see onscreen.
“It was important that the art stand out, that the portraits have a very distinct point of view,” Levy says. “The work had to reflect that emotionality, so that the audience can understand why he took a break from it and why he then would return to it.”
Knight’s work slots neatly into Marc’s character, interlocking like one had a notch carved for the other. Like Marc, Knight has illustrated book covers. (Most recently the forthcoming Henry Henry by Allen Bratton, a queer reimagining of Shakespeare’s Henriad.) “His romantic paintings and portraits are simultaneously intimate as they are remote,” reads Knight’s website. “Halcyon queer moments have impact without being sensationalized.”
A portrait of Theo (Arnaud Valois) “painted” by Marc (Daniel Levy) in ‘Good Grief.’ Kris Knight was the shadow painter on the film.
Knight tries to paint different modes of masculinity that he connects with, he says. He likes softness and darkness, and he loves humor and history. Melancholy seeps onto the canvas, as does most of what he absorbs, consciously or otherwise. Something similar happens for Marc in the film: He leaves the suffocating comfort of his home in London, where he lived with Oliver, to paint in the sharper, starker seaside of Kent.
“With my art, it comes from a queer lens, and I can’t do anything about that, just because that’s who I am,” Knight says. He interviews those who sit for his portraits, usually other queer creatives, and one of his main questions is about their coming out experience. It binds them together over generations and social and economic backgrounds.
Knight estimates that he made 15 to 17 pieces for the film, many of which are on display in a final, cathartic gallery scene.
A portrait of Oliver (Luke Evans) “painted” by Marc (Daniel Levy) in ‘Good Grief.’ Kris Knight was the shadow painter on the film.
“I connected with this story in terms of it being basically a new look on grief, and it’s a queer lensing of grief,” Knight says. “And that’s something I haven’t seen in film before. Especially with the character dynamic of Oliver and Marc: I see that in straight film, and I see that in straight couples, where one partner kind of lives for the other.”
Knight and Levy both lost grandparents during the pandemic, a window of time that even further distorted our already slippery understanding of grief. For Levy, that grief spawned an onslaught of questions: “Is there an appropriate way to grieve? Why was I not feeling what I thought that I should feel? Was it enough?”
Good Grief airs those questions out loud, though it doesn’t necessarily answer them. “If it’s not saying explicitly what you should do, I think it’s a cautionary tale of what maybe you shouldn’t,” Levy says. “To write Marc as an avoidant, it felt important, because I know so many people that choose the distraction over the confrontation.”
Good Grief is also, above all, a love letter to found family, to the friends who “help [detangle] that knot of feelings,” as Levy wrote in his director’s statement. In the movie, Thomas and Sophie buoy Marc with quiet acts of care, keeping him afloat. In Levy’s own life, he came out as gay to his friends first, unsure how the news would change the dynamic of his relationships with his family.
Terrance (Jamael Westman), Thomas (Himesh Patel), Sophie (Ruth Negga), and Marc (Daniel Levy) pile onto the couch at a Christmas party.
“My friendships are the great loves of my life,” Levy says. “And the idea of telling a story where the romance was the friendship felt really important to me.”
Toward the end of the movie comes a monologue from beloved British icon Celia Imrie, who plays Marc’s lawyer, Imelda. She’s helping Marc parse through Oliver’s will and offers him advice that, as he was writing the script, Levy felt was like an epiphany of sorts, a potential answer to his many questions.
“Physiology has a clever way of protecting us from what we perceive to be a threat to our bodies,” Imelda tells Marc, “which is why the more we close ourselves off, the less we feel.”
“And you can survive that way, until the usualness of it all starts creeping in, and the new life you’d built as a refuge begins to feel like a void,” she continues. “Because, as it turns out, to avoid sadness is also to avoid love.”
When I tell my “how I got here” story, the usual responses are sad looks and a weird sigh that most seem to think fits responding to loss. You know that experience, especially if your partner has died. It’s one the grievers I work with learn to loathe.
It’s confusing when you smile in response. You are supposed to be sad, perhaps a bit hopeless, and, very possibly, needy. You have a role to play. And while we may be sad at times, we need to smile and feel capable just like everyone else.
Like the cemetery scene in the movie ‘Steel Magnolias,’ research shows that families experiencing terminal illness need humor in those around them.
You can insist that you are treated as a couple, not a caregiver and patient.
After the losses I’ve experienced on the ‘bingo card’ of life, my take on how to do illness, dying and grief is a bit different.
Working in hospice as a social worker and administrator added to that shift, and quite possibly to my sense of humor in talking about it. Hospice staff have a bit of a twisted sense of humor simply to survive, but we don’t take it out to share in public. We should. Research shows that families experiencing terminal illness need humor in those around them. Remember the cemetery scene in the movie “Steel Magnolias?”
A Need to Take Control
They also need a sense of control. Dying is not like the movies; it takes work, but there can be some magic in the end. It needs to be actively managed, not something that takes control of your life: the couple should make the decisions, with education, great hospice care and setting boundaries to preserve their roles.
You can insist that you are treated as a couple, not a caregiver and patient. You should be allowed to use your anticipatory grief together to finish your relationship, and to say goodbye in a way that works for you.
Terminal illness can be sneaky. You cope with the disease process and adapt, over and over. And suddenly that ongoing disease is now going to be terminal.
My first wife, Linda, survived metastatic breast cancer — but died of pulmonary fibrosis a decade later from chemo. My second wife, Casper, (yes, she was named after a friendly ghost) died of Lewy Body Dementia. Think Robin Williams, but not the funny part. That started with a weird assortment of symptoms that were repeatedly misdiagnosed. Her final diagnosis was months before she died, and only after I asked if that was what we were dealing with.
It was managing their illnesses and symptoms that allowed control over some of the craziness that is today’s medical system. (That, and being an outspoken wife who is also a social worker, much to their dismay at times.) I am not alone in that experience.
Steps to Take to Manage a Loved One’s Illness
So how do we manage facing ongoing illnesses that have the potential for becoming life shortening?
Document! I know, it takes time, and it feels unending. It’s hard to look at the words. Do it anyway. What are the symptoms throughout the day? What level is the pain? What works? What doesn’t? Who have you talked to? What have you been told? Take a medical notebook with you to every appointment.
Write a summary for doctor’s visits. Use bullet points for easy reading. Write down what you need from the visit. Expect care that meets your needs and follow-up.
Find an online community of caregivers/patients. They get it, where others will not. And they share survival humor.
Get your advanced directives done. Get paperwork in order: A POLST (Physician’s Order Regarding Life Sustaining Treatment), trust or will, caregiving plan, end of life plan, memorial plans. Consider hiring a private end of life doula. There are some great books out now (“I’m Dead, Now What?” is popular). The National Funeral Directors Association has some helpful resources about having hard conversations. Unfinished plans and paperwork make things harder, and take away your control when others step in to do them for you.
What happens when the illness gets worse? It would be nice if doctors would tell us that our loved one is now considered terminally ill, but the reality is many will not. Many physicians do not tell families or patients when an illness is no longer treatable. Some will mention palliative care to open the conversation, but won’t say hospice.
The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization offers information about hospice care; hospice can extend life because a good care team reduces stress, and the support provided allows the patient and family to use their energy on quality of life, not battling insurance companies, pharmacies and unrealistic expectations of one another.
— Although a joyous time, the holiday season can be difficult for those who’ve experienced immense loss. Learn how to cope with grief and support others who are going through a challenging period.
The holidays can be notoriously challenging for anyone who has lost a loved one in their lifetime. Those who are processing grief after a close one’s death are probably dreading the holidays, as it’s usually a joyous time reserved for spending time with family members and friends. The holidays can also bring up painful feelings of longing and regret for those grieving, and witnessing other’s happiness may cause anger, resentment, sadness, and pain – as well as feelings of isolation and loneliness, especially if you typically enjoy indulging in holiday traditions. However, there are ways to cope with the holiday grief and to feel supported, uplifted, and cherished through the holiday season. Here are some low-lift ways to cope with the complex feeling of loss during the holiday season.
For those who are experiencing grief this holiday season:
Think about seeking a grief support group: Joining a support group with others who have experienced grief can be a great way to connect with others who understand what you’re going through.
Acknowledge your feelings: Sitting with your grief can be a complicated process, but it’s necessary to confront your pain with the hope of taking steps in your healing process.
Speak to a therapist: If you’re struggling to cope, talking to a professional can be very helpful.
Spend time with supportive family and friends. Surround yourself with people who will make you feel loved, supported, and not judged.
Get involved in your community: Volunteering or other activities, helping others in need, can help take your mind off your grief and make you feel good.
Keep your loved ones’ spirit alive during the holidays: Decorate in their favorite colors or decorations. You can also play their favorite holiday songs, prepare their beloved dishes, look at old photos of them, and listen to recordings.
Here’s how to interact with someone who is grieving loved ones:
Acknowledge their loss. It’s perfectly fine to say something to them about what happened. Avoid phrases like “at least,” “it was for the best,” or “they are at peace now.”
Be an active listener. Let them talk about their loved ones and their grief. Avoid giving advice or telling them how they should feel.
Sit in their grief with them: Sometimes, it’s best not to do or say anything when a person is grieving. Allow them to feel their feelings.
Don’t tell them how to feel: Try not to dictate their feelings by telling them how they should feel. Instead, offer them a safe and soft space to land.
Offer actionable help: Instead of saying, “Let me know what you need help with,” roll up your sleeves and offer practical support, like running an errand, cooking a meal, cleaning up, providing an Uber Eats gift card, or inviting them out for a drink. These small but actionable acts of service will make their lives easier, as most of their thoughts are consumed with grief and balancing their lives outside of their loss.
Be patient and understanding: Grief is a lifelong process that doesn’t magically disappear overnight, as the person in your life who is grieving needs gentleness, understanding, and grace. It’s best to extend compassion and don’t judge their behavior or how they move through the grieving process.
Grieving parents like me are told to gird themselves for anniversaries and holidays, for birthdays and religious events. We’re advised to plan for days associated with joy. We consider exit strategies. We talk about how the markers of civil religion and religious observance are harder for us, now that we no longer exist exactly inside society, but run alongside it, observing. Each holiday centered on family is now barbed.
So, all that’s to say, I have been approaching Thanksgiving this year with trepidation.
I love a holiday focused on gratitude and gathering, of food and camaraderie. I tend to cook when I’m sad or worried, and I’ve been both, a lot, of late. I bake challah and cakes and cookies. I prepare salads and mains and sides. I sauté and stir and sweat and focus. On any given Friday afternoon, my kitchen looks as though I’m expecting a crowd. But no matter how many I’ve invited, it is never the fullness of our table I see, but the absence of a place setting.
And yet, as much as holidays and calendar markers are as hard as promised, in this first half year of bereavement since our daughter Orli, 14, died from the complications of metastasized liver cancer, it is her daily absence that is the cruelest blow. It is making a pot of Orli’s favorite black beans knowing she will never sit down to eat them; it is adding back chocolate into the recipes I had removed it from, for she, unfathomably, loathed it; it is setting the table again and again for three instead of four; it is the expansiveness of the back seat of the car. It is in this quotidian drama that our family has to work to find levity as well as management, joy and, yes, exit strategies — especially as, in so many of these moments, we find ourselves alone in the noticing.
The notes and text messages slow and stop, the absence drones on. Living in loss is heavy; it is made all the more so by a world overflowing with grief, and parental pain. I see myself in all these newly minted members of my terrible club.
It’s also a remarkable amount of work, a second (or third) job. My partner, Ian, and I have sat down with groups and met with counselors. We have joined Zoom sessions, read the words of those who have come before us. Together with our surviving daughter, Hana, 10, we recently traveled to a conference at Boston Children’s Hospital to process our grief and try to face the absence at our table with other similarly reeling families.
Such experiences aren’t in search of solace or solution, but of place. It is powerful to be around people who recognize the insistency of loss, its daily presence, the continued impact of which so easily slips past others, unseen, as everyone else returns to the business of living. It has made me recognize how many people walk around concealing pain.
As a family, we have weathered a batch of life markers since Orli’s death. Hana had a birthday in June, Ian in October. We have had Passover and Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and Sukkot, each of which was — the counselors were not wrong!— by turns meaningful and excruciating. Families arrived in synagogue, or at the holiday table, dressed and smiling, their children growing ever older, while Orli remains the age at which we parted.
Quietly, we mark our elder daughter missing, and wait on others to do the same. On Passover my father proposed adding a cup (“cos,” in Hebrew) for Orli, the way we leave a cup for Elijah, noting that absence is woven into our observance. In late summer we even, ill advisedly, attended a wedding. It was too soon. We were not ready to be surrounded by unadulterated joy; we did not know how to hold ourselves, and our pain, without dulling the bride and groom’s shine. We fled during cocktail hour.
But I have also found I relish the occasional dark humor of other parents who have lost children, who recognize the macabre place we all live, how comically awful it is to run into people who still don’t know. “How’s the family?” a writer I ran into asked me the other day. I wanted to say, “So Hana started volleyball, and, well, Orli’s dead.” Orli would have laughed. Instead I changed the subject.
I’ve been in awe of the strength and cheek of Hana, who decided to pen a letter to the writers of a children’s television program to tell them what real drama looks like (her sister’s seizure! Her miserable, hospitalized 14th birthday! The morning of her sister’s death, when she said a final goodbye); of Ian, who gets up daily and throws himself into parenting as though the world hadn’t ended in March.
This first Thanksgiving without Orli will also be the first time a group of friends and family that had traditionally gathered this time of year will be together since before Covid and cancer. The last time we assembled for the holiday the children ran freely in the hallways of our friends’ apartment building, careening along beige walls and dragging their sticky hands, making a hilariously loud ruckus near the elevators. I can see Orli, her hair still long, untouched by the ravages of cancer treatment, by turns serious and silly, chasing her sister and cousins, healthy, red-cheeked, unaware of what was to come. I have a photo of her there as a toddler, in a dress from my childhood, a red-checkered pinafore, years away from the abyss.
I already long had a mixed relationship with Thanksgiving, partly because it always lands on or around my birthday. I loathed, as a child, that friends would be away, that school cupcakes almost never arrived on the actual day. As an adult the holiday neutralized — even, briefly, got happier.
Then Orli had her first biopsy on my birthday, a few days before Thanksgiving, in 2019. My relationship to the holiday tilted once more. As we waited in pre-op, she worried she had ruined my birthday; I promised her there was no place I’d rather be. That first cancer Thanksgiving Orli was in terrible pain, pale and wan and yet, unbelievably, smiling in the few photos I took that week. Chemotherapy had not yet begun; her diagnosis, let alone prognosis, was still elusive.
We rushed to assemble a home-based holiday with as much cheer as we could muster. She told us she felt like she was in a movie; we wished it were so. One night, as she lay in the bath, she implored me not to cry in front of her; it scared her. So I didn’t. Instead we watched “The Greatest Showman” on repeat, and sang and cooked for many more people than we had on hand. For all the Thanksgivings that came after, I drew courage just being together.
We have tried to keep Orli with us, even as we feel ourselves slipping further away. These days I look for traces in how she approached holidays, and every day. I find myself seeking comfort in Orli’s journal notes of how proud she was of Hana for creating Ian’s birthday party one year ago (a Formula One theme), and her joy last holiday season in receiving tickets to “Wicked.” I love to hear the way Orli stories reach people, and receiving notes from her peers who let me in on things I might not have known: her favorite flower, a moment in which she extended a kindness, or was bolder than they felt they could be. I love hearing that her face is still on someone’s home screen, or that a friend took her with them, in spirit, to a concert she would have loved. Not long after she died I stumbled across a note she’d tucked into my desk drawer, written on a handmade cut-out heart, that said, “I love you Ima, no matter what.” It sits now in a lucite frame, next to me. I see her beloved foxes everywhere.
It is these chispas (“sparks” in English), as you might say in Spanish, that let me face each small daily indignity of grief: when I am asked at a restaurant “How many will you be?” and I find myself searching for the right number, when I feel my heart seize each time I see siblings together and watch Hana watching them, when I hear the opening beats of “Anti-Hero” and think of Orli, asking for Taylor Swift, in yet another operating room.
We are fundamentally rewired as a family, as humans. We face the world differently, holding loss, in both rage and sadness. This holiday season, this year, countless others have joined us in this awful place. In this time of mass bereavement, as so many will be wondering how to set their tables, or if they will even be able to gather at all, I keep wondering if the key to seeing each other’s humanity is in somehow recognizing how universal the terrible ongoing nature of loss is, how human it makes us, how frail, how essential each day is, when none of us has any idea about the next.
I wonder how we might all move forward, not just as each holiday comes, but as each day passes, not better, but altered. Meanwhile, the gratitude I’ll have this Thanksgiving will still come: from having had the chance to know this love, even in its pain.
