Grief

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Glitch. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

In the muddled cascade of significant dates from March 2020, Friday the 13^th—three years ago, as I write this—is my big one. My office had closed just a day or two earlier, and my boyfriend, whom I loved effortlessly in spite of great differences, sat me down between Zoom meetings to explain that he no longer had feelings for me; that the prospect of being confined together was inadmissible; that he would be flying home to England in a day or two. I have never pleaded for anything as I did then, almost deranged by this nightmare fusion of loss and fear, for him to reconsider.

I remember that he paused his hasty packing the next morning—stuffing his motley accumulation from several years of living a little bit in lots of places into a hideous dollar-store reusable plastic bag, which he intended to put in storage—long enough to get on a FaceTime call with our therapist. It lasted two hours and left the three of us in tears. We put a breakup in abeyance, but he still decided to go to London and take up alone in an Airbnb. The next months passed more weird than sad, the two of us baking and watching movies with our laptops open to each other as he became ever more desperate for a haircut. On Memorial Day weekend I suggested that maybe I could travel to him soon for us to end the limbo, one way or another, and sent him a jolly video of myself biking through an empty graveyard toward the beach. Those were some of our last communications. The next day he called to tell me it was over. In June I finished his packing and shipped off four cardboard boxes.

My attempts to improve the terms of our parting never succeeded, and for two solid years all of this was wrenching, loudly and then quietly; and since then he has come to seem a ghost.

Over the weekend I re-watched “One More Time With Feeling,” the startling film portrait of the musician Nick Cave in the aftermath of his 15-year-old son’s accidental death. “We’re attached to this event,” he explains, “and … we move away, and we’re like on a rubber band, and life can go on and on and on, but eventually it just keeps coming back to that thing.” A tricky feature of grief is that it trails the loss of a pet as surely as it does that of a child; a breakup as surely as a layoff. It is, in other words, a mode experienced in wildly different magnitudes. Yet any real grief I have passed into has followed the pattern of the rubber band: Its elasticity may wane, permitting us a greater range of movement with fewer returns, while still it loops around some part of us memorably, unmissably, and for a long time.

I wrote at the start of last year:

The grief is still big enough that nothing else can contain it, which means the grief is the container. The tyranny of this would be too much were it not for what else turns out to be true: that the container is just a container. It is possible to build within the space of grief without much limitation. In its shadow but also in its capacious protection, like a stand of old trees, and with the knowledge that every little triumph here is its defeat—that it will participate in its own unmaking, in the slow decease of its relevance.

Within the container, an athlete and writer and even a lover have emerged with what seem like only faint precedents from before. In the last few months, one instance of love in my life has pierced to its core—a thing I hesitate even to speak about, the old scar still pulsing. Isn’t it a job of grief to teach us caution? Yes. And so that is a way that love repairs grief—by waiving this hard-won protection, and making it possible to be foolish again; to be soft.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.