You Are Here: A Roadmap For Those Recovering From Loss

For me, 2012 was the year of multiple losses. These are some things I learned along the way—the map I made as I went. Yours will be different, of course, but I hope this one helps.

All (our) miseries derive
from not being able to sit
in a quiet room alone.

            —Blaise  Pascal

Nobody said it would be fun. If you’re like most of us, nobody said anything, really, about how it feels when someone you love is gone—whether their time has come or there is simply an absence followed, sometimes at once and sometimes later, by a letter. Or maybe it’s the house. A bum limb. An illness that changes everything.

And here you are, though you’d swear you’re not. This isn’t you, it can’t be happening, things must go back the way they were. Maybe you wail at the top of your lungs. Maybe you wake up crying. Maybe you sit for just a moment and then it’s dark. Where did the time go?

The life review—you know that one. What turns you can see now, that you could have made, he could have made, she could have made, and everything would have been different, your life would have still made sense, it would have been intact.

Fat chance. We all have the same cards, really. Loss, illness, death—just part of the price of being alive, loving, and being human, blood and bones that wear out one day.

Maybe it’s the first time. It takes your breath away, Still, you’re sure that it’ll be nothing; you’ll be fine in no time. Or you’re sure that you’ll never, ever recover.

Either way, you’re wrong. It’s something. It can’t be wished away. No matter how many good thoughts you think, sometimes it’ll ambush you. And yet you will recover. If someone was cruel, eventually your heart will heal. If someone drew the cancer card, eventually you will think less of the lost years and more of the ones you shared. The house you loved won’t be your last. And even the brutality of serious injury and illness—eventually, your spirit will carry you through it.

What do you do in the meantime? When I quit smoking many years ago I did so by using a book my friend Paul had that was called, simply, How to Stop Smoking. It worked for me, and I was the kind of smoker who started and ended the day with a cigarette. When I played piano, when I had a drink, when I talked on the phone—everything started with a stick of tobacco and a match.

One of the great things about the book was that, starting with Day One, it said, “You may experience ______.” Everything mentioned in the book didn’t happen, but many of the feelings did, and when they did, I was ready for them.

Let’s do that. Here’s what might happen after a major loss.

1.  Your skin may thin.

Someone looks at you funny, someone doesn’t return a call, someone yells at you or just yells.  The music is jarring. A bell or a buzzer or just the telephone—something rings, and you jump.

Time for soft music.  Time for flowers.  Time for putting on that favorite shirt or sweater, running your hands over the fabric or following the weave with your finger. Time for running a hot bath. Time for a walk around your favorite landscape, or entering the world of a beloved book again. Time for a massage. Time to call a friend. And maybe time for a good cry.

And there’s the other side: just as the colors stand out when it rains, a small kindness from someone will fill your heart. Be careful not to misread things. If you’re single, try to avoid dating for a little while; you might think you’ve found love when you’re just hurting and it feels good to hold someone close.

2. Something Old, Something New: The Life of an Explorer.

Your mind will want to tell the story of your loved one’s illness, or his/her exit (whether you saw it coming or even discussed it or, like a friend of mine, you and your son awoke one day and she was gone), the accident, the diagnosis. Write it down. Talk it out. (A grief group can be a great help.) Do as much of that as you need to. Then stop. When you want to start again, resist. Tell yourself your own story hasn’t ended, and it deserves your attention.

Who am I? you ask yourself again and again. I used to know who I was. One minute, you’re bopping around, doing ordinary things; the next, you can feel as though you don’t know your way around your own life. I’m a stranger, you say to yourself.

Don’t panic. Tell yourself, Okay, I’m not the same. So who am I?

Get interested, passionately interested, in who you are now. What kinds of things do you like? Try some new foods. Cook. (If you don’t know how and want to learn—and laugh along the way—start here: http://cookwithlaynie.blogspot.com/.) If you can, go away for
the weekend.

Go to a concert or a lecture. Go to a museum and sit and spend time just looking at paintings, photographs, sculpture. See what you connect with. If you love the mountains or ocean—whatever makes your heart and soul sing—go there.

Reach out to new people. Be careful, especially if your loss was one of being left by someone, or if your loved one, in the throes of an illness, lashed out at you. You’ll be tempted to find the old closeness with someone brand new—unfair to him or her, and unkind to yourself. Let life be new. Let people be new. Let yourself be new.

3. Connecting and Disconnecting

Meeting new people is vital. New relationships, out in the world or online, can help you reassure yourself that life really does continue. Some of the people I have met online have been an enormous help in recovering from big losses, every bit as much as some I’ve met offline.

But don’t go overboard. When you’re grieving, a certain amount of loneliness comes with the territory. Out of those feelings, or just a sense of dislocation in your life, it’s easy to want to immerse yourself in activities in the community or discussions online. Soon your life might start to feel out of control, because you’ve been AWOL. Set some parameters. Remember to strike a balance between external and internal time. Give yourself time to do absolutely nothing but absorb what has just happened in your world. My friend Peter says, “Sometimes you have to just let the wind whistle through the hole in your heart.” Assume Pascal was right: for now, give yourself time each day to “sit in a quiet room alone.”

4. Albert Knows Best, or The Company You Keep

“The only people who are truly happy,” said Albert Schweitzer, “are those who have sought and found a way to serve.” 

As soon as you start getting back on your feet, look online or in the paper for food banks and other places that provide services to people in need. Ask how you can be help. If you belong to a church or synagogue or mosque, they probably have groups that prepare food for homeless people or people who are going through a rough patch. Don’t shy away. You’ll be amazed how quickly you start to feel better.

If you’ve been calling some of your friends a lot for support, ask if you can take them to lunch or dinner, or just out for coffee—and spend the time asking about what’s going on with them. You may be tempted to talk about your loss again. You’ve probably both gotten in the habit of talking about it—it’s almost like an old shoe. Resist. There will be other times. For now, you’re training yourself to get out of your head, out of your grief, and back in the world again. Enjoy your friend’s company.

If new people have reached out to you, perhaps sent you an email or called you, wanting to get together, and you couldn’t bring yourself to respond, maybe now’s the time. Remind yourself you’re not looking for a new best friend or lover, just letting yourself know there are lots of interesting people out there, and your job is to meet some.

As you take these steps and others of your own design, you’ll find yourself healing. Keep going.

Resources:

1.     Counseling and Spiritual Support: In addition to therapy, grief groups can be extremely helpful. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Hospice by the Bay offers grief counseling and grief support groups. I found their grief support group invaluable when my father died many years ago. http://www.hospicebythebay.org.  As mentioned above, if you are affiliated with a church or synagogue or mosque, it probably provides support services to those dealing with loss: such groups are often called something like “caring community.”

2.     Books:  Judy Tatelbaum’s You Don’t Have to Suffer: A Handbook for Moving Beyond Life’s Crises has been a great help in times of loss. For women, Jennifer Louden’s The Woman’s Comfort Book is beautiful and useful.  And I love Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance. If you’re moved to create art, or just want to think about living a more creative life, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is wonderful. (For help exploring how to use creativity in your own life, visit Ideas Made Real at www.ideasmadereal.com.)

3.     Online resources: Spirit Rock has a website called “Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas.” You don’t have to be Buddhist to watch the videos, and they provide support in staying focused; they often talk about how to do so when times are tough.

©2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Laynie Tzena.

This Magic Moment

A friend of mine shared a link to a meditation a little while ago. It’s a busy time of year, so I thought, “Great!” And I took a moment to do that.

Afterward I saw that one of my friends had posted at 12:12 p.m. 

Immediately, I thought: “I missed it! Once in a lifetime, it was 12:12 on 12/12/12*, and I wasn’t paying attention!”

Then I laughed.  Because, you see, I had been paying attention. Close attention. To my breath. The means by which I stay alive.

Ever do this?  Tell yourself that whatever you’re doing, or have been doing, is wrong?

Join the club. And here’s a way out of that trap.  Why not reframe self-doubt as entertaining doubt, as questioning ourselves?

Sometimes it’s appropriate to ask.,“Is X a good idea, in fact?”Or, “Is Y in the best interest of my business (or career)?” “Will Z really help my customer?” “Am I spending too much time on this?” “Should I invest in that?”

Think about it. If we’re certain we’re right, at every moment, we’ve got blinders on. (It also makes us tiring company, but that’s another matter.)

So it’s not the questioning that’s problematic. It’s the assumption that whatever you do, it’s wrong. We don’t think that consciously, most of us. But it can be operating under the surface, nonetheless.

The way out? Give yourself the gift of attention, starting with your breath. Starting with this moment, which doesn’t have a fancy label—it’s just 2:01. But it has its own magic. Don't miss it.

*Also, if it makes you happy, 13:12 (as in 1:12 a.m.) on 12/13 also happens only once, and you don’t even have to go outside to see it.

©2012, 2013 Laynie Tzena.

Who's Liking Who? Notes on Jessica Valenti's "She Who Dies With the Most 'Likes,' Wins" (_The Nation_, 11/29/12)

Note:  Rather than reprising the Valenti article, which I think is solid and really worth reading, I'm going to provide a link and then talk about issues raised in the article. 

So here’s the link.  http://www.thenation.com/blog/171520/she-who-dies-most-likes-wins 

Please read it before you read what appears below. (And yes, some of you might not like that request :>.)

This is a sticky wicket.  On the one hand, the double standard is ridiculous, and it's not new: Serbin and O'Leary published "How Nursery Girls Teach Girls to Shut Up" back in 1975. It was in the reading for a class I took a few years later with Fern Johnson on "Women and Interpersonal Communication."  (I found the subject matter so fascinating that I read all the required stuff in the first two weeks, and spent the rest of the term plowing through the recommended reading.)

I see two issues in the article (at least).  I'll use the old-fashioned term for the first one: sexism. What else does it mean when there are different standards for women that the ones that obtain for men?

But we already knew that was a problem. Still a lot of work to be done, to be sure, but it's been named and discussed a lot.  And we've seen some progress, not the least of which is that when the roster of House committee chair appointment nominees was just circulated, people noticed the absence of female faces (they were all white, too. One might ask how that corresponds to the people the Speaker sees on his way to and from the Capitol each day--unless it's like the bar code scanner Former President Bush just never noticed.).

The other issue I see is more interesting to me, at the moment. It's the question of likeability. Some would use what Valenti says (not that she would) as license to behave any which way because who cares what other people think?  Just be yourself, be strong, and let the chips fall where they may. No shortage of evidence that some folks have drawn this conclusion.

But I think we do want to be liked, and I don’t think that’s pathological, as a rule. We sure are ambivalent about that desire, though. Remember what happened when Sally Field said, on receiving the Oscar for Places in the Heart, “You like me.  You really like me!”?

She was roundly ridiculed for that. But I never saw it that way.  Does Field, like most human beings walking around, have some insecurity? Sure. But she was talking about a performance, and I have yet to meet someone who does creative work and shows it in the marketplace that doesn’t have some concern for how it is received—and isn’t sure about how it will be. One of my favorite songwriters says he doesn’t know how well he performed at a show until he gets in the car afterward and his wife tells him.

I have the same goal today as I did when I first started doing creative work:  to communicate with others. (Why do you think I’m writing to you?)  It’s the contemporary equivalent of sending a note out in a bottle. What Sally Field was saying, as I saw it, was, “Wow! Message received? Great!” 

So we want to be liked, and sometimes, for a variety of reasons, we think the only way to do so is to diminish ourselves. The good news is that it’s not true.  

My preferred path out of this mess is as follows: Be clear about your standards as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior--for yourself.  (You could call them “values,” but that word is carrying a lot of freight these days. Let’s go for “ethics.”)  Then put 'em into practice. With your leftover time, go to work on the sins of others. (This doesn't mean become apolitical, just don't use the misbehavior of other people as a rationale for avoiding your own mishegas.)  I find Mussar study extremely helpful in this pursuit. 

And guess what? Turns out Sally Field had more to say than what made the news. Here’s what she actually said in her acceptance speech: 

"I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” 

She was expressing appreciation for the connection between her hard work and its reception, not some free-floating need for approval. (We might want to ask why people were so quick to latch onto that small part of what she said, and make fun of her: the long shadow of Gidget, perhaps?)

The last word, from this corner, comes from my late, great friend David West. When David complained about someone’s behavior, a friend said to him, “David, at this very moment there are (naming a figure) ---holes in the city of San Francisco. Your job, just for today, is to make sure that you are not one of them.”

©2012, 2013, 2015 Laynie Tzena.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I remember calling my friend Bob, all excited about an insight I'd had.

"Yeah," he said, "You told me that before."

Another time I told my friend John about an "Aha!"

"It's not about the "Aha!", he said.   

What?  It's not about the epiphany?

Right.

We all love those moments when things seem to crystallize.  Everything suddenly makes sense.

But I realized this morning that there's a way in which the notion of epiphany outside of religion or science, epiphany as applied to daily life, is very 20th century.  Or even older—it comes from Christianity, though many of us first were introduced to it in the writings of James Joyce.  It is static.  The problem with epiphany is a bit like the problem with memory:  it's based on how you're seeing things at a certain moment.  You're allowing some things into your field of vision, and pushing away others.  

So we're not supposed to have insight?  Great.  Thanks.

No.  Insight is fine.  Just enjoy it without attachment.

John, like most of my friends, actually had more to say.

"It's not the "Aha!" that counts.  It's the shift that happens in the moment before the "Aha.”  

Good news:  there are a lot more of those moments.

Making sense of things is important.  Would you want a completely random life, a life without reflection?  Probably not.  Socrates was onto something: "An unexamined life is not worth living."

So we do need to take stock.  And maybe that's a good way to think about it.  Taking stock, or taking inventory, is about looking at available goods, what's on hand now.  The concurrent assumption, which I guarantee will never fail you, is that things will change. 

In the phrase, “Now I understand!", the operative word is “Now.”

©2012, 2013 Laynie Tzena.