Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  You could tell she thought this was all her fault, and that Elizabeth agreed. I stared out my car window and watched houses going by at a steady clip, refusing to let the sound coming from Jinn get from my ears to my brain. Soon enough we were at the door of the emergency room, and the two females in the front seat got out and went in, Jinn with one hand on her back and one clamped to her mouth, Doris looking frazzled and unprepared. I got dropped off at my house and Elizabeth and her stepdad went home to theirs. “Well, I just saw somebody having a baby,” I reported to my mother. “Right at the picnic.” She finds this news highly interesting but I don’t have much more to say. My older sister follows me upstairs and I tell her everything. “The entire back of her dress was soaked,” I say. I shudder. “She was in agony, screaming , but don’t tell Mom.” Our mother isn’t keen on extremes of any sort, or on foreigners. For that matter, she doesn’t care much for Elizabeth’s family, because she thinks they’re different from us. The only difference I can see is that the dad isn’t an alcoholic, but I don’t mention that to her. She’s known for getting in bad moods and grounding people for no reason. In the particular case of my older sister who has a mouth on her, my mother is prone to face slaps at odd moments. My sister takes it standing up, sometimes saying “That didn’t hurt” before stomping upstairs and throwing my clothes all over the place. Later in the evening Elizabeth telephones. “I can’t talk,” she says, “because we might get a call from the hospital.” Nevertheless, we spend forty minutes on a review of the afternoon, the boys in the rowboat getting as much airtime as the pregnant lady in the car. The next morning Elizabeth shows up at the usual time to walk to school with me. I see her coming up the back walk with her head down, yellow hair covering her face. She looks mad. I ask her if the baby got born. She pushes past me and goes into the living room, sits on the couch and presses her face into the back of it. She starts crying loudly and can’t stop. “It died,” she says furiously, “and it was a girl.” At this she begins afresh, with her hands over her cheeks and her mouth a grimace. My mother is in the kitchen eating oatmeal before work, my dad is shaving using the mirror hanging on the kitchen door. He stops whistling and takes himself upstairs, my mother comes in the living room and looks at Elizabeth. “Oh Liz, that’s awful,” she says. She feels truly bad, I can tell, but she also figures it was to be expected, I can tell that too.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Ralph was always grouchy and harsh, with big fingers that he pointed at everyone while he talked. As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, my mother would look at my father and say, “That old sonuvabitch, I’d like to kill him.” I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked, I whistled while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house. I felt bereft and didn’t know what to do with my lips if I couldn’t whistle. I would blow gently, without making a sound, while helping my grandmother get dinner. She must have felt sorry for me because she said once, kindly, “Honey, you can whistle when you’re outside.” But that was no comfort to me. Part of the joy of whistling was knowing that it was always available, you carried the equipment right on your own face. If I couldn’t whistle at all times , then I didn’t care to whistle outdoors. I couldn’t wait to get home, where no one could make me do anything. Grandma and Ralph both worked, so when I went to visit I had hours and hours each day to occupy myself. Grandma took care of senior citizens, some of them younger than she was, shut-ins and disabled folk who needed company and assistance with some of the necessities — cooking, talking. She was a volunteer. Ralph was a butcher and a sheepshearer. He drove a panel truck out to people’s farms and killed their cattle for them. Eyes like pebbles, tanned face pulled into a knotty smile, bald head glinting in the sun, a foot-long knife blade aimed at unsuspecting furred throats. Afterward he would use a garden hose to spray out the back of his truck. White walls and floor, pools and spatters of brilliant red. I glimpsed it once, without knowing what I was looking at. I remember thinking, “That looks like blood .” It never occurred to me it was blood. The sheep, after being sheared, stood stunned, in masses, their sides heaving, long cuts and gashes on their pink, exposed skin. The wool stank like crazy and lay in mounds everywhere, gray and filthy. I was taken along on his sprees, sent off to play with complete strangers, farm children, while he went to work with his long knife, his buzzing clippers. I was known for being sensitive to the plight of farm animals and bunnies killed on the road, but I steadfastly refused to acknowledge what was taking place on those visits. I never figured out what was going on around me, even when it was written on the walls in red. I went along with Grandma sometimes, too.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “My husband was caught fondling one of our grandchildren. It’s not the first time something like this has happened. We have lost a relationship with two of our other children because their children said grandpa did the same to them. My husband had a really bad childhood. His mom died when he was young and his dad became ill and had to be hospitalized until he died when my husband was thirteen years old. From that time forward, he was on his own. “I didn’t grow up with much myself. My dad was a drunk and lost several businesses his well-to-do family gave him during the depression. Finally, they just gave up on him and he became the black sheep of the family. I grew up going to church, and I just thought if my husband and I went to church every week and prayed then everything would be okay. I still think it will be, but the judge who put my husband on probation said he had to participate in a court-mandated group—said I also had to attend a group, so here I am.” Stunned, the women didn’t know what to say. Finally, Holly asked, “Betty, do you really believe going to church is going to be enough to heal your grandchildren and children from what has happened?” Betty shrugged her shoulders and didn’t answer. Another woman, Emily, had tears in her eyes, so Olivia asked if she would like to share with the group what she was experiencing. Her childlike eyes searched the women’s faces in the group to see if she was safe to share her secret. “I was sexually abused by my grandfather.” A tear slid down her cheek, and then another and another. The two women on either side of her instinctively reached out to soothe her. Olivia encouraged them to ask before they touched her. She nodded her approval and one of the ladies put her hand on her shoulder and the other lady next to her gently held her hand. Her tears continued, as her petite body shook from the sobbing. When her tears were mostly spent, Kaycie offered, “I’m so sorry, Emily. You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. That was a horrible thing for your grandfather to do to you, and I hurt with you. Thank you for telling us. I can only speak for myself, but I want to be here for you so you aren’t alone anymore.” The other women nodded in agreement. Olivia returned her focus to Betty and asked her how it felt to see the pain sexual abuse from a grandfather had caused Emily. “Does it help you understand your own grandchildren better?”

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “Jody, you go check on him,” she tells me. “And I’ll be back here as soon as we get your dad taken care of.” She disappears again and there’s a series of muffled cries as they ease him through the door and down the back steps. Linda and I each take our arms back and sit quietly, side by side on the sofa. Finally I have to speak. “What was in his mouth?” I ask her. “Everything but teeth,” she replies. His teeth are gone! His beautiful teeth that he smiles with. The kitchen has to be cleaned up. There are bloody towels all over the floor and the oven is still blasting out heat. Linda will do that while I go upstairs to find Brad. She stands up wearily and doesn’t move until I give her a push from behind. The steps go on and on forever until I’m finally at the top. The only light on upstairs is in the bathroom. Brad is in there, throwing up. I listen for a moment, until it’s silent, and then push the door open. He’s sitting on the floor next to the toilet, a dripping washcloth in his hand. I take it from him and wring it out. All around the toilet are chewed cornflakes and old Spaghettios. “I can’t find Charcoal!” he tells me. “He saw Dad and runned away!” I give the washcloth back and tell him to stay there, I’ll go look for Charcoal. I close the door behind me and stand for a moment in the dark upstairs hallway. I can hear Linda in the kitchen, moving things around, running water in the sink. In the morning, down at the slough, we’ll watch them lift our gold Impala, dripping, from the icy water. By then we’ll know that four of his ribs were broken on impact, and my mother will show us the terrible gouges on the steering wheel where his front teeth hit and were driven up into his head, behind his nose, perilously close to his brain. She’ll tell us how the surgeon had to go in with a scalpel and remove them, one by one, while he thrashed, too drunk to be put under. His anesthesiologists were named Jack and Bud, she’ll say grimly, drawing on her cigarette. Jack Daniel’s and Budweiser. I wait in the dark hall, counting to twenty, and then to fifty. I push the door open and go back in the bathroom. “I found good old Charcoal,” I say. Brad looks up at me from his spot on the floor. He’s been rubbing the washcloth across his brow and his hair is standing up in front. He stares at the air next to my shoulder for a moment, searching. Suddenly relief floods across his face. “Hi,” he says. Waiting [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] H e places himself in the gentle curve of the kidney-shaped desk. It is reddish mahogany, gleaming with Pledge and elbow grease.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level. As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war. That night I promised myself I’d never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So began my career as our family’s official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours. When you worked for a year at the clock factory, I called your boss and said, in my most polite diction, that my mother would like her hours reduced. Why? Because she was exhausted, because she was falling asleep in the bathtub after she came home from work, and that I was afraid she would drown. A week later your hours were cut. Or the times, so many times, I would call the Victoria’s Secret catalog, ordering you bras, underwear, leggings. How the call ladies, after confusion from the prepubescent voice on the other end, relished in a boy buying lingerie for his mother. They awww’d into the phone, often throwing in free shipping. And they would ask me about school, cartoons I was watching, they would tell me about their own sons, that you, my mother, must be so happy. I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked. — Back in the apartment, we had no oxtail. But we did have three mood rings, one glinting on each of our fingers. You were lying facedown on a blanket spread on the floor with Lan straddled across your back, kneading the knots and stiff cords from your shoulders. The greenish TV light made us all seem underwater. Lan was mumbling another monologue from one of her lives, each sentence a remix of the last, and interrupted herself only to ask you where it hurt. Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung 10 Beware the Fragile Ego The Law of Envy We humans are naturally compelled to compare ourselves with one another. We are continually measuring people’s status, the levels of respect and attention they receive, and noticing any differences between what we have and what they have. For some of us, this need to compare serves as a spur to excel through our work. For others, it can turn into deep envy—feelings of inferiority and frustration that lead to covert attacks and sabotage. Nobody admits to acting out of envy. You must recognize the early warning signs— praise and bids for friendship that seem effusive and out of proportion; subtle digs at you under the guise of good-natured humor; apparent uneasiness with your success. It is most likely to crop up among friends or your peers in the same profession. Learn to deflect envy by drawing attention away from yourself. Develop your sense of self-worth from internal standards and not incessant comparisons. Fatal Friends In late 1820, Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of the novel Frankenstein , and her twenty-eight-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, moved to Pisa, Italy, after having spent several years traveling through the country. Mary had had a rough time of it lately. Her two young children had both died from fevers while in Italy. Mary had been particularly close to her son William, and his death had pushed her into a profound depression. She had recently given birth to another child, a boy named Percy, but she felt continually anxious about his health. The guilt and gloom she felt surrounding the death of her children had finally caused some friction between her and her husband. They had been so close, had experienced so much together, that they could almost read each other’s thoughts and moods. Now her husband was drifting away, interested in other women. She was hoping that in Pisa they could finally settle down, reconnect, and do some serious writing. In early 1821, a young English couple named Jane and Edward Williams arrived in Pisa, and their first stop in town was to visit the Shelleys. They were close friends with one of Percy Shelley’s cousins. They were thinking of living in Pisa, and they were clearly starstruck at meeting the famous couple. Mary was used to these kinds of visitors; she and her husband were so notorious that curious bohemians from all over Europe would come to gawk at them and try to make their acquaintance. Certainly the Williamses, like all the other visitors, would have known about the Shelleys’ past. They would have known that Mary had two of the most illustrious intellectual parents in all of England. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was perhaps the first great feminist writer in history, renowned for her books and

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Linda wants to know how it’s going, how she’s doing, but the eyes might open again unexpectedly. We tiptoe out. “I stopped at home and went through her closet,” Linda tells me. Nowadays she and I speak of the house where we grew up as home, we forget for long hours the places we live now, which have cupboards with our spices and canned peas, dressers with our clothes. When an aunt or our brother relieves us at the hospital we drive over there for some empty time, some quiet, and sit at her kitchen table with the carvings of childhood forks in its surface, stand drinking coffee right on the worn spot where she stood to stuff chickens, weave the crusts on pies. Home, we say to each other, drawing those dented walls around us like a wool blanket, two little girls in matching nightgowns, pinching and elbowing, acting hateful, getting yelled at. She was browsing, trying to find something to bury her in. I stretch and yawn, shake it off, tell her about Barnelle’s Santa. “Gawd,” she drawls. “Did he let on when or anything?” She squints when she asks this, afraid to know, afraid not to. Barnelle has predicted two days, which will land us right smack on Christmas. We have told each other ironically, Why not? and marvel at how the universe is dribbling us like a basketball and then shooting us into the air. “He couldn’t,” I tell her, “because she was alert. And I couldn’t follow him out because she already got on me about leaving with you this morning. She wanted to know where we went.” We both shiver at that and then in turn begin crying, the ugly kind, where you turn your clenched face to the wall until it passes. A nurse comes forward, silent, and touches our shoulders. This nurse told me yesterday she hadn’t finished her shopping, still had crowds and the hectic traffic at the mall to contend with. Last week, when she could sit upright and talk a little, my mother had given me her wedding ring for Christmas. There is slush and cold air all up and down the hall. When I go back in to get my coat her eyes are open, talking even though no one can hear. You girls left me again . Linda is behind me, getting her needlepoint out, untangling skeins of bright yarn. I pull on my gloves slowly, pushing each finger down meticulously, getting my keys ready for the cold, avoiding her eyes. Behind me Linda says, Hey, remembering something. She digs around in her coat pocket. “Look, Ma,” she says softly, moving toward the bed. I step backward into the doorway, halfway gone. Linda holds a sprig of plastic mistletoe in the air above my mother’s head. She whispers something I can’t hear and bends down. I’m gone. Suddenly I have this notion that she needs to wear flannel against her skin.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  This formerly broken man now had touched into the grounded embodiment and resilient self- compassion enough to begin grieving and thus initiate a movement back into life. I did not want to expose (and most certainly flood) him with the shock of seeing his son hanging in the bathroom. My main consideration, at this point, was to coax his nervous system out of the shutdown caused by the shock and to begin establishing a base of resilience and self-regulation. I’d like to invite you, the reader, to ponder the following considerations. Were Paulo’s inconsolable screaming episodes beginning at age four and his choice of hanging himself mere coincidences? (Remember, Adam’s wife reported that her husband would also scream and cry during the night, just as his son had done). Or were these incidents some deep transgenerational reenactment of his father’s unfelt experiences and unprocessed emotions? Such possibilities are among the mysteries of trauma and of the human spirit. Certain authors discussing the Holocaust, such as Yael Danieli 103 and Robert Lifton, 104 have written groundbreaking analyses of the victims who lived through this horrific massacre. In working with Adam and a few other survivors of this kind of experience, I am personally confronted not only with the terrible knowledge of the cruelty that human beings are capable of, but also of the remarkable process by which the body is somehow able to compartmentalize the effects of this cruelty and go on with life. It maintains its tenuous hold, that is, until something is added to the unsustainable containment of their burden. Yet still, the smoldering flame of the deep self can miraculously reignite, given the right opportunity and carefully calibrated support. Epilogue After our session, Adam returned to the Polish town where he was born in search of any knowledge about his real mother, who had died during his birth. The Nazis had not destroyed the tombstone, and Adam replaced it with a new memorial stone because his heart “was so touched by knowing about her existence.” Vince: A Frozen Shoulder The collision between the two contrary processes, one of excitation and the other of inhibition, which were difficult to accommodate simultaneously, or too unusual in duration or intensity, or both, causes a breakdown of equilibrium. —Ivan Pavlov It is not uncommon, particularly for a fireman, to be reluctant to see a psychotherapist—a “mind doctor.” This is especially true for a problem that is “obviously” physical. Vince was seeing a physical therapist for a frozen right shoulder. This disability was making it impossible for him to function in his job as a fireman. Treatment was not going well: after several sessions he was still barely able to move his arm from his trunk by more than a few inches. The consulting orthopedist had advised surgery: an operation in which the arm is “manipulated” (yanked violently) under general anesthesia in an attempt to free it.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Although it covers both their faces, the blood belongs to the tall boy, the one with eyes the dark grey of a river beneath somebody’s shadow. What’s left of November seeps through their jeans, their thin knit sweaters. If you were god, you’d notice that they’re staring up at you. They’re clapping and singing “This Little Light of Mine,” the Ralph Stanley version they’d listened to earlier in the afternoon on the tall boy’s stereo. It was his old man’s favorite song, the tall boy had said. And so now their heads sway side to side as their teeth glow between the notes, and the caked blood crumbles from their jaws, flecking their pale throats as the song leaves them in fistfuls of smoke. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. . . . All in my house, I’m gonna let it shine.” The pine needles spin and sputter around them in the minuscule wind made by their moving limbs. The cut under the tall boy’s eye has reopened from his singing, and a black-red line now runs down his left ear, curving at his neck and vanishing in the ground. The small boy glances at his friend, the terrible bulb of an eye, and tries to forget. If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god. You’re a woman. A mother, and your son is lying under the pines while you sit at a kitchen table across town, waiting again. You have just reheated, for the third time, the pan of fried flat noodles and scallions. Your breath fogs the glass as you stare out the window, waiting for the boy’s orange New York Knicks sweater to flash by, as he must be running, it being so late. But your son is still under the trees beside the boy you will never meet. They are yards from the closed overpass, where a plastic bag thrashes against the chain link surrounded by hundreds of one-shot liquor bottles. The boys begin to shiver, their claps slow, nearly inaudible. Their voices subdued as the wind swarms hugely above them—needles clicking down like the hands of smashed watches.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me. Mostly we have those kinds of conversations around the office, but today he’s caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart back inside my chest. I decide to be cavalier. “I wish my dog was out tearing up the town and my husband was home peeing on a blanket,” I say. Chris thinks the dog thing has gone far enough. “Why are you letting this go on?” he asks solemnly. “I’m not letting it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere and he has all the pens over on his side of the room. “It just is , is all. Throw me a pen.” He does, I miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying. You have control over this, he explains in his professor voice. You can decide how long she suffers. This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want. For her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world. “Exactly,” he says. I have an ex—beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long red hair and a smile that can stop trucks. I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told her on the phone that a family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house and there’s nothing I can do about it. “They’re making a monkey out of me,” I said. So Caroline climbs in her car and drives across half the state, pulls up in front of my house, and gets out carrying zucchinis, cigarettes, and a pair of big leather gloves. I’m sitting outside with my sweet old dog, who lurches to her feet, staggers three steps, sits down, and falls over. Caroline starts crying. “Don’t try to give me zucchini,” I tell her. We sit companionably on the front stoop for a while, staring at the dog and smoking cigarettes. One time I went to Caroline’s house and she was nursing a dead cat that was still breathing. At some point that afternoon I saw her spoon baby food into its mouth and as soon as she turned away the whole pureed mess plopped back out. A day later she took it to the vet and had it euthanized. I remind her of this. “You’ll do it when you do it,” she says firmly. I pick the collie up like a fifty-pound bag of sticks and feathers, stagger inside, place her on the damp blankets, and put the other two nutcases in the backyard. From upstairs comes a crash and a shriek. Caroline stares up at the ceiling. “It’s like having the Wallendas stay at your house,” I say cheerfully.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The second necessary element: “marrying a stranger.” Strangers, feminist film theorist Diane Waldman points out, because during the 1940s—the heyday of gothic romance films like Rebecca and Dragonwyck and Suspicion—men were returning from war, no longer familiar to the people they’d left behind. “The rash of hasty pre-war marriages (and the subsequent all-time high divorce rate of 1946), the increase in early marriages in the 40s,” Waldman writes, “and the process of wartime separation and reunion [gave the] motif of the Gothics a specific historical resonance.” “The Gothic heroine,” film scholar Tania Modleski says, “tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him.” There is, of course, a major problem with the gothic: it is by nature heteronormative. A notable exception is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with its powerful queer undertones between the innocent protagonist and the sinister, titular vampire. (“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish,” Carmilla tells Laura. “How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.”) We were not married; she was not a dark and brooding man. It was hardly a crumbling ancestral manor; just a single-family home, built at the beginning of the Great Depression. No moors, just a golf course. But it was “woman plus habitation,” and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know.19 Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 19. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T11, Falling in love with person never seen.Dream House as IdiomI always thought the expression “safe as houses” meant that houses were safe places. It’s a beautiful idea; like running home with a late-summer thunderstorm huffing down your neck. There’s the house, waiting for you; a barrier from nature, from scrutiny, from other people. Standing on the other side of the glass, watching the sky playfully pummel the earth like a sibling. But house idioms and their variants, in fact, often signify the opposite of safety and security. If something is a house of cards it is precarious, easily disrupted. If the writing is on the wall we can see the end of something long before it arrives. If we do not throw stones in glass houses, it is because the house is constructed of hypocrisy, readily shattered. All expressions of weakness, of the inevitability of failure.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Our healing begins when we participate in the suffering of God. When we don’t avoid it but enter into it, and in the process enter into the life of God. When we see our pain not as separating us from but connecting us to our maker. And in this connection, there’s always the chance we’ll find a reason to risk again. If God can continue to risk, then maybe we can too. Perhaps you have had your heart broken by somebody. You risked and extended and offered yourself, and they rejected and turned away and didn’t return your love. There is something divine in your suffering. Somebody divine in your pain. You know how God feels. Really good, loving people get hurt. It’s how things are. Maybe you’re living in the wake of a relationship that fell apart. You have to dig those moments up. The parts that hurt and the awkward conversations and the anger and the failure and the misunderstanding and the betrayal. You have to dig them up and acknowledge them before you are ever going to heal. The danger is that you will decide it isn’t worth it. Why risk if it’s going to hurt like this? The tragedy would be for you to shut down, to allow a wall to be built around your heart, and for something within you to die. A decision not to risk again is a decision not to love again. They go together. Why is it those we love the most are the ones capable of hurting us the most? Our greatest wounds rarely come from strangers. They probably come from an ex-fiancé, a former friend, a roommate, a sister, a business partner. Even in healthy relationships, an offhanded comment or a rolling of the eyes can cripple us for days or years or even a lifetime. This is because the more we open ourselves up, the more vulnerable we are. The more exposed we are, the more it hurts. The more we let someone in, the greater the risk. Surprise, anger, shock, betrayal, helplessness—it all gets mixed in together. There’s a phrase that I have heard used to explain how God loves everybody equally. People say that “the ground at the foot of the cross is level.” The idea is that God has no favorites, that no matter where you’re coming from and what you’ve done and who you’ve been with and how badly you’ve screwed it up, the cross is the place where God looks past it all and forgives and accepts and wipes the slate clean. It’s a beautiful idea, really. So the statement works as a truth about God’s power. God’s power to liberate and cleanse and forgive and grant new life, new hope, new mercy. God’s power to take something that appears hopeless and redeem it. But the statement could also be seen in a totally different light. The ground at the foot of the cross is level for God too.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  What really matters is maximizing your expected value across all the things you start, across all of your mental accounts. If you’re investing in a number of stocks, some are going to win and some are going to lose. What matters is whether you’re winning across your whole portfolio not whether any one investment is up or down. But that’s not how we naturally think. We don’t think about the whole portfolio of stocks we own. Each is associated with its own mental account that we don’t want to close out unless we are in the gains. What’s true for one stock or one hand of poker is just as true for an individual decision or a project, or climbing a mountain, or opening a discount store in a converted chicken coop. When we start any of these things, we open a mental account. When things start going poorly, we don’t want to quit because we don’t like to close accounts in the losses. This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well. The Hardest Cost to BearThe greater the sunk costs, the harder it becomes to quit. And the greatest cost is, of course, the loss of human life. That makes decisions about whether or when to exit a war heartbreakingly difficult. Retired four-star general Tony Thomas, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), served in Afghanistan on missions between 2001 and 2013 (except for a year when he served in the Iraq War). He attended many military funerals and gave an American flag to many gold star families. He described to me those humbling experiences and how those tragic losses amplify the types of sunk cost problems we all face, making it particularly difficult for a country to extricate itself from a war once it has started to incur those losses. On one occasion, a gold star mother, having just lost her son, gripped his hand and said, “Stay on this and finish it.” The general’s knees almost buckled. At that moment, he wanted to run through a wall for her. The unspoken message, never expressed at these funerals but which he felt was on the minds of all those grieving parents, was, “Tell me my child didn’t die in vain.” It’s understandable why a gold star parent would say, “Keep going so my child didn’t die in vain,” and it’s impossible not to be moved by such an emotional request. We all feel some of that weight, whether we are involved in deciding policy going forward or just members of the public for whom those soldiers and their loved ones made that sacrifice. You can’t be a person with feelings without being sensitive to that.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  In fact, in contrast to their behavior during visits ending in a big loss, they significantly decreased their level of risk-taking when they next played at the casino. THE HARDEST COST TO BEARGeneral Thomas told me this story during a conversation about sunk cost and other issues related to this book. See also Arkes and Blumer, 126 (use of past casualties in the Vietnam War to justify continuation of the war); Teger, 1 (Vietnam); Barry Schwartz, “The Sunk-Cost Fallacy: Bush Falls Victim to a Bad New Argument for the Iraq War,” Slate , September 9, 2005, slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/09/bush-is-a-sucker-for-the-sunk-cost-fallacy.html (quoting an August 2005 speech by then president George W. Bush justifying staying the course in Iraq by saying, “We owe [the two thousand soldiers who had already died] something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for.”); Van Putten, Zeelenberg, and Van Dijk, “Who Throws Good Money after Bad?,” 2010, 33 (“one of the most important reasons to continue the way in Iraq was to prevent acknowledging that soldiers who fell in battle died in vain”). THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING AND DOINGThe facts in this story are from a conversation with Don Moore, who also wrote an account of it in Perfectly Confident, 131–32, as well as Rubin’s obituary by Wolfgang Saxon, “Jeffrey Z. Rubin, 54, an Expert on Negotiation,” New York Times , June 9, 1995, nytimes.com/1995/06/09/obituaries/jeffrey-z-rubin-54-an-expert-on-negotiation.html . General background about one hundred highest peaks in New England is from Lindsey Gordon, “A Quick Guide to the New England 100 Highest,” March 27, 2019, TheTrek , thetrek.co/quick-guide-new-england-100-highest . YOU CAN’T JEDI MIND TRICK BEING FRESH TO A DECISIONSee Simonson and Staw, “Deescalation Strategies,” 1992. Chapter 6The facts and descriptions about Astro Teller’s leadership at X, X’s mission and culture, particular projects at X, monkeys and pedestals, and kill criteria are from conversations and correspondence with Astro Teller and Libby Leahy, head of communications at X, and the following additional sources: x.com pany; Astro Teller, “Failure, Innovation, and Engineering Culture,” video recorded at re: Work with Google event, May 24, 2016, youtube.com/watch?v=3SsnY2BvzeA ; Astro Teller, “A Peek Inside the Moonshot Factory Operating Manual,” X (blog), July 23, 2016, blog.x.company/a-peek-inside-the-moonshot-factory-operating-manual-f5c33c9ab4d7; Adele Peters, “Why Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory Killed Off a Brilliant, Carbon-Neutral Fuel,” Fast Company , October 13, 2016, fastcompany.com/3064457/why-alphabets-moonshot-factory-killed-off-a-brilliant-carbon-neutral-fuel ; Astro Teller, “Tackle the Monkey First,” X (blog), December 7, 2016, blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d; Kathy Hannun, “Three Things I Learned from Turning Seawater into Fuel,” X (blog), December 7, 2016, blog.x.company/three-things-i-learned-from-turning-seawater-into-fuel-66aeec36cfaa; Derek Thompson, “Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity,” The Atlantic , November 2017, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google-moonshot-factory/540648 ; Alex Davies, “Inside X, the Moonshot Factory Racing to Build the Next Google, Wired , July 11, 2018, wired.com/story/alphabet-google-x-innovation-loon-wing-graduation ; “The Gimbal V2.0 ,” July 2018, storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/the_x_gimbal_v2.10_web.pdf (“a guide to X’s moonshot factory culture”); Astro Teller, “Tips for Unleashing Radical Creativity,” X (blog), February 12, 2020, blog.x.company/tips-for-unleashing-radical-creativity-f4ba55602e17; Astro Teller, “Loon’s Final Flight,” X (blog), January 21, 2021, blog.x.company/loons-final-flight-e9d699123a96.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  practical joke (1971) Travis, just back from Vietnam, is renovating the house next door. The war’s an unending muddle. My mother bakes a blueberry pie, puts it in the window to cool, invites him over for a piece. Thirty-one, divorced ten years now, she makes a good pie. Travis is twenty-one and still looks like a Marine—his USMC tattoo, his fatigues—albeit freaky, bright-eyed, his hair going wild. Not a hippie, but drifting toward hippiedom. Trigger-hippie, you might call him, as he’s armed to the teeth, having smuggled out his M-16 and various sidearms. They begin seeing each other and, as per usual, he begins renovating our house. My mother likes a man who’s good with his hands. Skipping school one day, I’m lingering around the house alone when he pulls into the driveway, lets himself in to work on a dead outlet. I hide in my closet, hear him talk to my dog as he works, and what he says sounds insane. He tells my dog that in ’Nam he ate better-looking dogs, that over there a dog would never get so fat, that all dogs knew enough to run the other way from him instead of rolling on their backs, waiting for the knife to slip in. He tells my dog about the villages he burned and the people he killed and that not all of them were soldiers. About bulldozing a tunnel and later finding out it was filled with kids. Through the cracked closet door I can see him holding my dog’s ears and crying and I don’t dare breathe. A few months later my mother stands me in the kitchen to tell me she’s going to marry him. That’s a mistake , I say. She nods that she knows but says she’ll marry him just the same, and she does, and they’re happy, for a while. He’s fun to have around, in a frenzied sort of way. If we want to go fishing he takes us down to the Harbor, tells us to wait on the loading dock and goes off to hot-wire someone else’s boat. We go out for the afternoon, catch a few fish, and he drops us off again. We knew the boat was stolen, even though he said it was a friend’s. We knew there’d be trouble if we were caught but we went anyway. His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time. When he decides to put an addition on our house he takes me down to the lumberyard and I see how he pays for a couple sheets of plywood and a few two-by-fours, how he takes the slip out to the yard and backs up to a stack of plywood and has me get on the other side of it so we can load the whole pile onto his truck, until the springs sag.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In this, her most vulnerable moment, he had apparently lost all sympathy for her, and she could not figure out why. This only added to her misery. Certainly he must know how deeply she had loved her husband and the depth of her mourning? She was not one to show her emotions as openly as Jane, but deep inside she suffered more than anyone. Other former friends were now acting cold as well. Only Lord Byron stood by her, and they grew closer. Soon it became apparent that Shelley’s parents, who had been shocked by their son’s libertine ways, would not recognize Percy as their grandson, certainly as long as he was in the care of Mary. There would be no money for her. She thought the only answer was to return to London. Perhaps if the Shelley family met Percy and saw what a devoted mother she was, they might change their minds. She wrote to Jane and to Hogg for their advice. The two of them had now become close friends. Hogg seemed to think she should wait before returning; his letter was remarkably cold. Here was yet another person who had suddenly become distant. But it was the response of Jane that most surprised her. She advised giving up Percy and not coming to England. As Mary tried to explain how impossible that would be for her emotionally, Jane became even more adamant in her opinion. She expressed this in practical terms—Mary would not be welcomed in London, the Shelley family would turn against her even more—but it seemed so unsympathetic. In the months together in Italy after the deaths of their husbands, they had grown quite close. Jane was the last real link to Mary’s husband left in her life. She had forgiven Jane for any indiscretions with her husband. Losing Jane’s friendship would be like experiencing another death. She decided she would in fact return to London with her son and rekindle the friendship with Jane. Mary returned to London in August of 1823, only to find that she had become quite a celebrity. Frankenstein had been turned into a play that emphasized the horror elements in the book. And it was quite a sensation. The story and the name “Frankenstein” now had seeped into popular culture. Mary’s father, who had become a bookseller and publisher, came out with a new edition of Frankenstein , with Mary clearly identified as the author.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  As the days grow shorter we discover a gap in the hull you can put your fist through, along the chine, that line where the freeboard meets the hull. Somehow in going over the boat we’d missed it. The owner of the boatyard tell us, without great optimism, what we might try. He lends us four hydraulic jacks and we line them up along the chine, using a plank to distribute the pressure, then slowly crank them up until we can eyeball the line of the hull back into shape. Most days I find myself working alone, as Phil held on to his job, perhaps not as desperate to see her float again, perhaps not feeling quite so homeless. Eating oatmeal for breakfast, skipping lunch, smoking more and more dope, I’m determined to get her in the water before mid-December, the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death. Many friends come down for a day or two to help. Emily puts in hour upon heroic hour. We find some wooden letters from an old fruit stand and spell out the word EVOL on the stern—the title of a Sonic Youth album and “love” spelled backward. By early December she’s ready. We put rollers under the cradle, inch the cradle onto a train track, the track leading down an incline to the lip of the river, a steel cable connecting the cradle to a pulley. Once at the water’s edge we have an hour to wait for the tide to float her free. We know that after eight years the seams will weep for days, that she will have to be closely watched until the planks swell tight. As soon as river water touches the dry wood it finds its way into the bilge, weighing her down. At flood high tide there isn’t enough water to lift her, and tomorrow the flood tide will be a foot lower. We stand on the cradle trying to rock her, but she’s already too full of water. A nail is sticking up from the cradle, I press my sneaker into it, to bend it over, to make it safe, and instead drive it deep into my heel. The steel cable’s holding us tight, and as the tide begins to recede the owner of the boatyard gets an axe and cuts it. My sock fills with blood as EVOL drifts free. three

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Houston, Texas, Howard Hughes Jr. (1905–1976) was a rather shy and awkward boy. His mother had nearly died giving birth to him and consequently could not have other children, so she completely doted on her son. Continually anxious that he might catch some illness, she watched his every move and did all she could to protect him. The boy seemed in awe of his father, Howard Sr., who in 1909 had started the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company, which would soon make the family a fortune. His father was not home much, always traveling for business, so Howard spent a great deal of time with his mother. To the relatives he could seem nervous and hypersensitive, but as he got older he became a remarkably polite, soft-spoken young man, completely devoted to his parents. Then in 1922 his mother, at the age of thirty-nine, suddenly died. His father never quite recovered from her early death and passed away two years later. Now, at the age of nineteen, young Howard was alone in the world, having lost the two people who had been his closest companions and who had directed every phase of his life. His relatives decided they would have to fill the void and give the young man the guidance he needed. But in the months after the death of his father, they suddenly had to confront a Howard Hughes Jr. they had never seen before or suspected. The soft-spoken young man suddenly became rather abusive. The obedient boy was now the complete rebel. He would not continue college as they advised. He would not follow any of their recommendations. The more they insisted, the more belligerent he became. Inheriting the family wealth, young Howard could now become completely independent, and he meant to take this as far as he could. He immediately went to work to buy out all of the shares in the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company that his relatives possessed and to gain complete control of the highly lucrative business. Under Texas law he could petition the courts to declare him an adult, if he could prove himself competent enough to assume the role. Hughes befriended a local judge and soon got the declaration he wanted. Now he could run his own life and the tool company with no interference. His relatives were shocked by all of this, and soon both sides would cut off almost all contact with each other for the rest of their lives. What had changed the sweet boy they had known into this hyperaggressive, rebellious young man? It was a mystery they would never solve. Shortly after declaring his independence, Howard settled in Los Angeles, where he was determined to follow his two newest passions—filmmaking and piloting airplanes. He had the money to indulge himself in both of these interests, and in 1927 he decided to combine them, producing an epic, high-budget film about airmen

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  257Lecture 26—The Rival Gods of the Cold War õWithin this bloc, the experience of Christians varied from nation to nation. This lecture will focus on just one of the Soviet satellite states: Poland. By looking at Poland, we can see how religious faith—in this case, Catholicism—served as a powerful counter-force against the collectivist and atheist ideology of 20 th -century Communist regimes. õKarol Wojtyla—who as Pope John Paul II would become the first pope from the Slavic world—was born in 1920 in a town about 30 miles southwest of Kraków. His father was a retired military officer. His mother, a schoolteacher who was chronically ill, died when he was a boy. So did his older brother, a doctor who caught scarlet fever from his patients. õWojtyla was a good student, and in 1938 went to university to study philosophy and Polish language. He also dabbled in theater and was known for his acting talent. But then World War II intervened, and the Germans marched into Poland. Wojtyla was shipped off to manual labor in a quarry and, later, a chemical factory. Most of his professors died in a concentration camp. His father died of a heart attack in 1941. õDuring these years, when he was basically alone in the world and just trying to survive the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla felt himself called to the priesthood. And though the Nazis had tried to shut down all religious schools, in 1942 he enrolled in an underground seminary. õBy the time Wojtyla was ordained in 1946, he was an orphan who had worked as essentially a slave laborer under a totalitarian regime. At seminary he threw himself into the study of philosophy, so even as a young priest he was equipped to understand the existential clash of the Cold War both at an intellectual level and, more importantly, with deep human empathy. õThe Catholic Church sent him to Rome to earn a doctorate at a pontifical university. In the years that followed he served as a parish priest in various Polish towns and taught ethics at Jagiellonian University. He worked his way up the ranks of the hierarchy, was appointed bishop in 1958, and played a major part in Vatican II.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, the young protagonist, Franck, witnesses an older man, Michel, drowning his boyfriend in a lake that serves as a local cruising spot. Shortly thereafter, he begins an affair with Michel. After the boyfriend’s body is found, the gay community that exists along the shore is shaken, thrown into emotional turmoil while simultaneously maintaining its collective routines. As an enterprising inspector begins to sniff around for answers, Franck finds himself lying for his new lover and trying to get closer to him. Franck’s decision to stay with the handsome, magnetic murderer is only a few notches exaggerated from a pretty relatable problem: an inability to find logical footing when you’re being knocked around by waves of lust, love, loneliness. Michel does not have the campy fabulousness of so many queer villains, and is in many ways far more sinister. He is attractive, charismatic, and morally empty. We are given almost no clues about his backstory, his murderous motivations. There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen, their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter. As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough. Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake, the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him. Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation.13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says.