Grief is My Muse

I’ve tried to make the best of it.

I’ve spent much of my life thinking about the way that grief breaks us wide open and allows our hearts to grow. I grew up in a mining town, filled with loss and tragedy. And, although I wasn’t around for many of the great tragedies, the effects of loss and trauma filtered into my generation and the generations before and after.

I lost my best male friend when I was sixteen to a motor vehicle accident. Both of my grandfathers had died by then, but they were older, and although it was sad, we expect older people to pass on. They’ve lived long lives. It’s the natural way of things. This was different. My friend was eighteen. The possibility of a long life had been snatched away from him. I didn’t understand what it was to have someone close to me one minute and gone the next. And I didn’t know how to talk about it. Neither did anyone else in my family. Consequently, I didn’t talk about losing him. Instead, I watched tv, lots of tv, which isn’t a great life for a sixteen-year-old.

Real devastation hit my family when I was in my twenties. My brother’s wife had twins and one of them died. My brother, Mark, two years younger than me, spent many days at the hospital with the twin who lived. The following year Mark died in a tragic motorcycle accident. The next year, the other twin died. I used to think that everything bad that can happen to a family happened to mine. It turns out not to be true. There are worse things that can happen, like murder, suicide, losing multiple family members at a time in an accident or natural catastrophe, or war.

Still, the loss of my brother and two of his children devastated our lives in unimaginable ways, ways that reverberated through the years. The week before Mark died, I was talking to a friend, Philip, whose brother had died in an accident. I remember saying, “I don’t know how you do that. I couldn’t get through losing one of my brothers,” never dreaming that the loss of one of them was just around the corner.

I was tending bar in Missoula, Montana at the time, and it took two weeks after Mark’s funeral for me to return to work. In a sort of daze, I walked back behind the bar. My friend, Philip, came in and sat at the end of the bar. He didn’t say much. He just sat there. His presence was the one thing that kept me grounded that night, and the nights that followed.

Did he know I would take such comfort in his presence? I think he must have known, in the same way that I’ve known how to be with people in their instances of death and grief, in ways that I didn’t know, couldn’t have known, how to be with people before Mark died. That kind of loss is something you can’t understand until it happens. Once you’ve experienced it, you can’t ever not know it.

Death and grief break our hearts wide open, allowing compassion to flood in, filling a void that is unimaginably huge. This is that abyss I have spent my whole adult life trying to understand. Grief has been my muse, my writer friend, my life friend, my guide to working with and caring for others. Hand in hand, grief has led me through both visible and invisible worlds. Would I trade it to have seen Mark watch his children grow up? Absolutely. But that choice wasn’t mine.

The choices for compassion, for demonstrating my love in genuine ways, for understanding and kindness, for continuing to explore this world that tragedy leaves behind and for the good hearts that I’ve found there, those choices are mine. And I try to make the best of them, in my writing and in my life.