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 Blue Nights (2011)

  The codes. The crash cart. This was never supposed to happen to her. It must have been the ICU at UCLA. Only at UCLA was she off the ventilator long enough to have had this conversation. You have your wonderful memories. I do, but they blur. They fade into one another. They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, “all mudgy.” I tried to tell her: I too have trouble remembering. Languages mingle: do I need an abogado or do I need an avocat? Names vanish. The names for example of California counties, once so familiar that I recited them in alphabetized order (Alameda and Alpine and Amador, Calaveras and Colusa and Contra Costa, Madera and Marin and Mariposa) now elude me. The name of one county I do remember. The name of this single county I always remember. I had my own Broken Man. I had my own stories about which I had to know. Trinity. The name of the county in which Stephanie Bryan had been found buried in the shallow grave was Trinity. The name of the test site at Alamogordo that had led to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also Trinity. “W 19 hat we need here is a montage, music over. How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx— “xx,” he said. “xxx,” she said. “How she: “How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx— “How he, and also she—” The above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted. I offer them as a representation of how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than “xxx,” or “xxxx,” symbols that meant “copy tk,” or “copy to come,” but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single “x” differed from a double “xx,” “xxx” from “xxxx.” The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning. The same passage, rewritten, which is to say “written” in any real sense at all, became more detailed: “What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  He showed us a greater capacity for love. And he reminded us that all beings deserve a chance to live the one life they’ve been given. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. Little bundles of joy, big furry hound dogs, and scrappy beautiful mutts. GRIEF IS GRIEF The bond between animals and their humans is real, so when an animal dies and their daily dose of unconditional love becomes a memory, it’s brutal. After Buddy died, Brian and I were devastated. Our boy was gone. The porch had no mayor. The air in our house was thick with sadness. Lola sat by the front door, waiting for Buddy to come home. He wasn’t coming, though. As with all grief, the only way out was through. Unfortunately, a lot of the grief literature and resources out there often overlook pet loss, or pay minimal lip service to it. But our furry, feathered, and scaly babies deserve better. And so do we. I recently read a book that lists an actual “hierarchy of grief,” as if the excruciating ache of loss can be simplified into neat categories of “importance.” The fur mama in me was not having it when I saw animals listed on a lower rung (parents, too . . . really?). I gotta be honest, though, as upset as I was—I know how deeply my heart ached after Buddy died—I also felt a little shame as I briefly internalized this hierarchy, considering this guideline for what and who I should (and should not) be grieving, and to what extent. So I decided to do some digging—did others feel the same? Quite the contrary, I found plenty of folks who felt just like me: alienated. Many bristled at the idea that the loss of a pet (or grandparent) was somehow lesser. One woman shared how the loss of her dog brought up other, old grief, too. The grief train. These sentiments were upsetting but also validating. When Buddy died, I wanted people to bring us lasagna; thankfully I have friends and family who did. In fact, my mother brought all the Italian food in the state of Connecticut. But people don’t always think to do that when a pet dies. The loss isn’t considered grief-y enough to warrant comforting Italian dishes. As any devoted pet parent knows, losing a pet can be just as painful as losing a person. Losing a parent can be just as devastating as losing a partner. It doesn’t matter that they may have “lived a long life.” The same is true for a grandparent.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  in many different colors I look in my own faces as Eshu’s daughter crying if we do not stop killing the other in ourselves the self that we hate in others soon we shall all lie in the same direction and Eshidale’s priests will be very busy they who alone can bury all those who seek their own death by jumping up from the ground and landing upon their heads. from Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982) TO FRANCES LOUISE CLAYTON our footsteps hold this place together our decisions make the possible whole. The Evening News First rule of the road: attend quiet victims first. I am kneading my bread Winnie Mandela while children who sing in the streets of Soweto are jailed for inciting to riot the moon in Soweto is mad is bleeding my sister into the earth is mixing her seed with the vultures’ greeks reap her like olives out of the trees she is skimmed like salt from the skin of a hungry desert while the Ganvie fisherwomen with milk-large breasts hide a fish with the face of a small girl in the prow of their boats. Winnie Mandela I am feeling your face with pain of my crippled fingers our children are escaping their births in the streets of Soweto and Brooklyn (what does it mean our wars being fought by our children?) Winnie Mandela our names are like olives, salt, sand the opal, amber, obsidian that hide their shape well. We have never touched shaven foreheads together yet how many of our sisters’ and daughters’ bones whiten in secret whose names we have not yet spoken whose names we have never spoken I have never heard their names spoken. Second rule of the road: any wound will stop bleeding if you press down hard enough. Afterimages I However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve wild for life, relentless and acquisitive learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson recalled in me forever like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep etched into my visions food for dragonfish that learn to live upon whatever they must eat fused images beneath my pain. II The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson A Mississippi summer televised. Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney now awash tearless and no longer young, she holds a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms. In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain a microphone thrust up against her flat bewildered words “we jest come from the bank yestiddy borrowing money to pay the income tax now everything’s gone. I never knew it could be so hard.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The printing alone I cannot forget. The printing alone breaks my heart. Another moment, not, on examination, dissimilar: I remember very clearly the Christmas night at her grandmother’s house in West Hartford when John and I came in from a movie to find her huddled alone on the stairs to the second floor. The Christmas lights were off, her grandmother was asleep, everyone in the house was asleep, and she was patiently waiting for us to come home and address what she called “the new problem.” We asked what the new problem was. “I just noticed I have cancer,” she said, and pulled back her hair to show us what she had construed to be a growth on her scalp. In fact it was chicken pox, obviously contracted before she left nursery school in Malibu and just now surfacing, but had it been cancer, she had prepared her mind to be ready for cancer. A question occurs to me: Did she emphasize “new” when she mentioned “the new problem”? Was she suggesting that there were also “old” problems, undetailed, problems with which she was for the moment opting not to burden us ? A third example: I remember very clearly the doll’s house she constructed on the bookshelves of her bedroom at the beach. She had worked on it for several days, after studying a similar improvisation in an old copy of House & Garden (“Muffet Hemingway’s doll’s house” was how she identified the prototype, taking her cue from the House & Garden headline), but this was its first unveiling. Here was the living room, she explained, and here was the dining room, and here was the kitchen, and here was the bedroom. I asked about an undecorated and apparently unallocated shelf. That, she said, would be the projection room. The projection room. I tried to assimilate this. Some people we knew in Los Angeles did in fact live in houses with projection rooms but to the best of my knowledge she had never seen one. These people who lived in houses with projection rooms belonged to our “working” life. She, I had imagined, belonged to our “private” life. Our “private” life, I had also imagined, was separate, sweet, inviolate. I set this distinction to one side and asked how she planned to furnish the projection room.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In the third of the boxes I find skein after skein of needlepoint yarn, saved in the eventuality that remedial stitches might ever be required on a canvas completed and given away in 2001. In the chest of drawers I find papers written by Quintana when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls: the research study on stress, the analysis of Angel Clare’s role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles . I find her Westlake summer uniforms, I find her navy-blue gym shorts. I find the blue-and-white pinafore she wore for volunteering at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I find the black wool challis dress I bought her when she was four at Bendel’s on West Fifty-seventh Street. When I bought that black wool challis dress Bendel’s was still on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was that long ago. Bendel’s became after Geraldine Stutz stopped running it just another store but when it was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and I bought that dress it was special, it was everything I wanted either one of us to wear, it was all Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two. Other objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution. I continue opening boxes. I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see. I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married. I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see. 9 O n this question of fear. When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. The ways in which for example we write novels “just to show” each other. The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear. The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other. As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se , at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death. This fear.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  As I consider the word “unwilling” my lagging cognition kicks in. The familiar phrase “need to know” surfaces. The phrase “need to know” has been the problem all along. Only one person needs to know. She is of course the one person who needs to know. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. I imagine telling her. I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her. Hello, Mommies. The same way I still see her weeding the clay court on Franklin Avenue. The same way I still see her sitting on the bare floor crooning back to the eight-track. Do you wanna dance. I wanna dance. The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the same way I still see the plumeria tattoo through her veil. The same way I still see the bright-red soles on her shoes as she kneels at the altar. The same way I still see her, in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, inventing the unforeseen uptick in Bunny Rabbit’s fortunes. I know that I can no longer reach her. I know that, should I try to reach her—should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in—she will fade from my touch. Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORJoan Didion was born in California and lives in New York. She is the author of five novels, eight previous books of nonfiction, and a play. [image file=image_rsrc1GP.jpg] aaknopf.com [image "Penguin Random House Next Reads logo" file=image_rsrc1GR.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it. O n the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season. This routine seemed for a while to bring luck. It was a period when the doctors in the ICU did not seem uniformly discouraging. It was a period when improvement seemed possible. There was even mention of a step-down unit, although the step-down unit never exactly materialized. Then one night, leaving the ICU and pausing as usual by the AIG portraits, I realized: there would be no step-down unit. The light outside had already changed. The light outside was no longer blue. She had so far since entering this ICU undergone five surgical interventions. She had remained ventilated and sedated throughout. The original surgical incision had never been closed. I had asked her surgeon how long he could continue doing this. He had mentioned a surgeon at Cornell who had done eighteen such interventions on a single patient. “And that patient lived,” the surgeon had said. In what condition, I had asked. “Your daughter wasn’t in great condition when she arrived here,” the surgeon had said. So that was where we were. The light outside was already darkening. The summer was already ending and she was still upstairs in the ICU overlooking the river and the surgeon was saying she wasn’t in great condition when they put her there. In other words she was dying. I now knew she was dying. There was now no way to avoid knowing it. There would now be no way to believe the doctors when they tried not to seem discouraging.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  It occurred to me as I walked home that I had seen too many people for the last time in one or another ICU. 13 F or everything there is a season . Ecclesiastes, yes, but I think first of The Byrds, “Turn Turn Turn.” I think first of Quintana Roo sitting on the bare hardwood floors of the house on Franklin Avenue and the waxed terra-cotta tiles of the house in Malibu listening to The Byrds on eight-track. The Byrds and The Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Wanna Dance?” “I wanna dance,” she would croon back to the eight-track. For everything there is a season. I’d miss having the seasons , people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons: it has for example “fire season” or “the season when the fire comes,” and it also has “the season when the rain comes,” but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York—the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves—suggest only death. For my having a child there was a season. That season passed. I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I wanna dance . The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil. Something else I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles. You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar. 14 B efore she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon. We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed. Including, suddenly, a baby.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  In some ways, coming home to the area he and my mom lived in for over 30 years makes me feel closer to him. I remember him in the restaurants, stores, flea market, walks, drives, and all the other nooks and crannies we used to inhabit together. He shows up in my thoughts and memories and the occasional spot-on sign. I love this, and it guts me. I’m excited about this next chapter, and I’m depressed. I’m grateful, and I’m grieving. I’m energized, and I’m exhausted. I feel closer to Dad and yet so far away. I call this surreal duality the both/and place. The joyful moments always have a tinge of sadness; the higher the high, the more prominent the awareness of my loss. Coming to grips with this is important because this both/and feeling never goes away. For example, it was thrilling to finish the first draft of this book. Then came the sadness as I remembered that I couldn’t call and tell him about it. But maybe the both/and is a more normal and realistic place—truer to a dynamic, three-dimensional life. I’m healthy, and I have cancer. I’m a life-loving person, and I have a lot of anxiety. I’m bighearted and closed off. I’m successful and unsuccessful (at a whole lot of things). Both/and. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how we can hold opposite feelings and realities at the same time, but two things can be true at once, and our hearts are wise enough to hold the contradiction. In the months (and years) after Dad died, I felt guilty for even allowing myself to feel positive. Though parts of my life were awesome, it felt wrong to acknowledge anything other than the awful experience of Dad’s physical absence. Staying in the pain made me feel like I was staying connected to him. I wanted to be like those Italian ladies who wear long black dresses for the rest of their lives, because I unconsciously equated being happy with abandoning Dad. But the more space I gave myself to explore the subterranean world of emotions inside me, the more capable I was of embracing and holding the duality. The grief train and the celebrations. Joy isn’t exclusive to the good times; it can exist in the hard times, too. I learned this with my own diagnosis. In the beginning, getting sick helped me recalibrate—and that felt really good and useful. I learned how to take care of myself for the first time, and as I’ve shared, the results paid off. Though I was technically sick, I’d never felt better. My wake-up call woke up other parts of me, too.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  One is called Baby Animals and Their Mothers, and is just that, black-and-white photographs of baby animals and their mothers: mostly comforting favorites (not unlike Bunny Rabbit), lambs and ewes, foals and mares, but also less common baby animals and their mothers: hedgehogs, koala bears, llamas. Stuck in the pages of Baby Animals and Their Mothers I find a French postcard showing a baby polar bear and its mother. “Colin sur la banquise,” the caption reads in French, and then, in English: “Cuddling on the ice floe.” “Just a few things I found on my travels that reminded me of you,” the note on the card reads, in printing less careful than it once was but still recognizable. Still hers. Beneath Baby Animals and Their Mothers is Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an account, by a former editor in chief of French Elle, of what it had felt like to have a cerebrovascular accident on a date he knew to have been the eighth of December and next wake at the end of January, unable to speak, able to move only by blinking one eyelid: the condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” (Did anyone use the word “syncope”? Did anyone use the words “pre-syncope symptoms”? Can we find any clues here? Any clue to Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation? Any clue to my own?) For reasons that I did not at the time entirely understand and have not since wanted to explore, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly had been when it was published extremely meaningful to Quintana, so markedly so that I never told her that I did not much like it, or for that matter even entirely believe it. Only later, when she was for most purposes locked into her own condition, confined to a wheelchair and afflicted by the detritus of a bleed into her brain and the subsequent neurosurgery, did I begin to see its point. Beginning to see its point was when I stopped wanting to explore the reasons why it might have been so markedly meaningful to Quintana. Just let me be in the ground. Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep. I return The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to the table in my office. I align it with Baby Animals and Their Mothers. Colin sur la banquise. This business of the ice floes is familiar to me. I did not need Baby Animals and Their Mothers to bring the image of the ice floes alive. In the first year of Quintana’s hospitalizations I had watched ice floes from her hospital windows: ice floes on the East River from her windows at Beth Israel North, ice floes on the Hudson from her windows at Columbia Presbyterian. I think now of those ice floes and imagine having seen, floating past on one or another slab of breaking ice, a baby polar bear and its mother, heading for the Hell Gate Bridge.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  You know your experience of grief, but you don’t know mine.) There are other fish in the sea . . . (I don’t want fish. I want my person.) It didn’t happen to you, it happened for you . . . (I just barfed in my mouth again.) Why aren’t you crying? (Why are you judging me for how I grieve?) It was only a dog; why are you so sad? (Because my dog is my child to me.) You’re so strong . . . (True. But it’s exhausting to feel like I have to be.) Well, I’ve been through worse . . . (This isn’t a competition, cookie.) Let me know what you need . . . (I’m already in decision fatigue. Just drop off a damn casserole.) Scanning this list, you can see how attempts to connect with someone in their grief can unintentionally create more distance between you. Building on what we already know about grief illiteracy, let’s break down some of these common missteps even further. Denial. Another way we unconsciously screw things up is by putting our heads in the sand and pretending grief doesn’t exist. La, la, la, I can’t hear you. Nope. Take your fingers out of your ears, grief’s still there. To be fair, maybe we’re afraid to bring up whatever happened because we don’t want the person to be reminded of their sorrow. Basically, we’re worried we’ll get it wrong, so we freeze. Unfortunately, the person needing support doesn’t always know how to interpret our absence; all they experience is more loss and isolation. Plus, those in grief or life shit pickles are all too reminded of their sorrow. We remember who and what we lost and when. Naming what has happened can potentially help the person struggling, especially when that acknowledgment is made with tenderness. Centering ourselves. This happens when we hijack the conversation, center our own stories of grief, and shut the other person down: “Well, when my mom died . . . I lost my job . . . My ex-husband started dating our neighbor (I never trusted that sneaky woman) . . .” All of this causes the person who is grieving to feel unimportant and invisible. Your story matters, too. But their story matters more right now. In the early days of my illness, I often found myself comforting friends who were having a tough time processing my difficult news. One person literally burst into tears when I told her the diagnosis. “Life is so unfair! And OMG, if this could happen to you, it could happen to me, too!” Oy vey. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. The teachable moment.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  This seemed to be offered as encouraging news, and I accepted it as such. At that instant in April 2009 I realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die, afraid that I might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living. Had there been an instant when Tasha was afraid not to die? Had there been an instant when Quintana was afraid not to die? Toward the very end, say, for example on the August morning when I walked into the ICU overlooking the river at New York-Cornell and one of what must have been twenty doctors in the unit happened to mention (a point of interest, a teachable moment, Grand Rounds for two students, the husband and the mother of the patient) that they were doing hand compression because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the ventilator? Only he did not say “the ventilator,” he said “the vent”? And I asked dutifully (the attentive student, up on the vernacular) how long it had been since the patient could get enough oxygen through the vent? And the doctor said it had been at least an hour? Did I get this all wrong? Did I misunderstand a key point? Could they have actually let an hour go by without mentioning to me that her brain had already been damaged by insufficient oxygen? Put the question another way: what if the attentive student had never asked? Would they have mentioned it at all? One further turn of the screw: if I had never asked would she still be alive? Warehoused somewhere? No longer sentient but alive, not dead? What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead? Was there an instant when she knew what was in store for her that August morning in the ICU overlooking the river at New York– Cornell? Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying? Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was? “W 4 hen Quintana was a little girl, we moved to Malibu, to a house overlooking the Pacific.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Most astonishingly, at seventeen, Tasha was undertaking the induction into adult life not only of her sisters Joely and Katharine but of two Los Angeles eighth-graders, one of them Quintana, the other Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s daughter Roxana, both avid to grow up, each determined to misbehave. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got to the correct spot on the beach at Saint-Tropez every afternoon, that summer’s correct spot of choice being the Aqua Club. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got a proper introduction to the Italian boys who trailed them on the beach, a “proper introduction” for Tasha entailing a meal at the long tables under the lime trees at Le Nid du Duc. Tasha came up from the Aqua Club and Tasha did a perfect beurre blanc for the fish Tony had bought that morning and Tasha watched Quintana and Roxana mesmerize the Italian boys into believing that they were dealing not with fourteen-year- olds last seen in the pastel cotton uniforms of the Westlake and Marlborough Schools for Girls in Los Angeles but with preternaturally sophisticated undergraduates from UCLA. And never ever, not once, not ever, did I hear Tasha blow the whistle on that or on any other of the summer’s romantic fables. Au contraire. Tasha devised the fables, Tasha wrote the romance. The last time I ever saw her was a few nights after she fell on the bunny slope outside Quebec, in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, lying as if about to wake. She was not about to wake. She had been flown down from Montreal while her family met in New York. When I left the hospital after seeing her there were photographers outside, waiting for clear camera lines on the family. I circled around them onto Park Avenue and walked on home. Her first marriage, to the producer Robert Fox, had taken place in my apartment. She had filled the rooms with quince blossoms for the ceremony. The blossoms had eventually fallen but the branches had remained, brittle and dusty, twigs breaking off, nonetheless still passing as decorative elements in the living room. When I walked in from Lenox Hill that night the apartment seemed full of photographs of Tasha and of her father and mother. Her father on location for The Border, riding a Panavision camera. Her father on location in Spain, wearing a red windbreaker, directing Melanie Griffith and James Woods on an HBO project he and John and I did together. Her mother backstage at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, the year she and I did a play together. Tasha herself, talking to John at one of the long tables she had arranged outside for the wedding dinner on her farm in Millbrook when she was married a second time, this time to Liam Neeson.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  L’heure bleue. The gloaming. Not even yet evident when that year’s darkening gave its first notices. The initial such notice was sudden, the ringing telephone you wish you had never answered, the news no one wants to get: someone to whom I had been close since her childhood, Natasha Richardson, had fallen on a ski slope outside Quebec (spring break, a family vacation, a bunny slope, this was never supposed to happen to her) and by the time she noticed that she did not feel entirely well she was dying, the victim of an epidural hematoma, a traumatic brain injury. She was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, who was one of our closest friends in Los Angeles. The first time I ever saw her she had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, not yet entirely comfortable in her own skin, an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings. She had come from London to visit her father at his house on Kings Road in Hollywood, an eccentrically leveled structure that had belonged to Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. Tony had bought the house and proceeded to fill it with light and parrots and whippets. When Tasha arrived from London he had brought her to dinner with us at La Scala. The dinner had not been planned as a party for her arrival but there had happened to be many people her father and we knew at La Scala that night and her father had made it feel like one. She had been pleased. A few years later Quintana had been at the same uncertain age and Tasha, by then seventeen, was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc, the village her father had invented, an entertainment of his own, a director’s conceit, in the hills of the Var above Saint-Tropez. To say that Tasha was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc fails to adequately suggest the situation. In fact, by the time John and I arrived in France that summer, Tasha was running Le Nid du Duc, the seventeen-year-old chatelaine of what amounted to a summer-long house party for a floating thirty people. Tasha was managing the provisioning of the several houses that made up the compound. Tasha was cooking and serving, entirely unaided, three meals a day for the basic thirty as well as for anyone else who happened up the hill and had a drink and waited for the long tables under the lime trees to be set—not only cooking and serving but, as Tony noted in his memoir The Long-Distance Runner, “completely unfazed when told that there’d be an extra twenty for lunch.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I’m here. Dad’s not. He’s not here to be thankful that I’m here. He’s not here to see all the changes I will make in the coming years, many guided by his advice, and his voice, which I continually hear in my heart. He’s not here to see me fall and get back up again. And yet, maybe he is . . . guiding me in a new way, I thought. In contemplating his continued presence, I found myself more open than I’d ever been to having faith in that which is unseen. As we walked out farther, arriving at the place where nothing but our grief existed, I saw it. “Oh my God, Mom. Look straight ahead!” There in the distance were two longstem red roses standing at attention in the sand. One for each of us. Instantly, I started to cry. Mom did, too. We hugged, then held hands as we marveled over these beautiful signs from above, staying there for what seemed like hours. He’s still here, I thought. He’s still here. Eventually, we made our way back to the parking lot, roses in hand. As we were getting into the car, I happened to glance into the first-floor apartment next to where we were parked. There I saw a man in his living room, hunkering down in his La-Z-Boy to watch a show on his TV. The title credits read “Surviving Death.” I got so many chills I thought I should take a COVID test. Hi, Dad. Thanks for letting me know what’s doin’. But wait, this story gets wilder. As we drove home, I remembered something. That very morning, Brian had been struggling with whether or not to get my mom red roses, like he’d done for me. “Is it weird to give them to her? What should I write on the card? Will it make her miss him even more? . . . I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Babe, if you’re so conflicted about it, then they’re not yours to give. It’s OK. Let’s just spend time with her,” I replied. Recalling our conversation and looking at the roses, I smiled. As it turned out, Dad already had it covered. Even when we have experiences like this and are filled with comfort, it’s normal to have second thoughts. Personally, I’m a thinker. I like to analyze, and I love data. So my mind often drifted to wondering: Were the roses in the sand just a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. What about the TV show? It’s not like Dad could send me a notarized letter in the mail: Yes, Kristin, that was me. Apparently, I’m not alone in noticing coincidences. Many people have observed coincidences in their lives. A study conducted by Dr. Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and founder of The Coincidence Project, in 2009, found that about one-third of the general population also notices coincidences.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I do remember, however, with heartbreaking vividness, a certain evening in the summer of 1917 when, after a winter of incomprehensible separation, I chanced to meet Tamara on a suburban train. For a few minutes between two stops, in the vestibule of a rocking and rasping car, we stood next to each other, I in a state of intense embarrassment, of crushing regret, she consuming a bar of chocolate, methodically breaking off small, hard bits of the stuff, and talking of the office where she worked. On one side of the tracks, above bluish bogs, the dark smoke of burning peat was mingling with the smoldering wreck of a huge, amber sunset. It can be proved, I think, by published records that Alexander Blok was even then noting in his diary the very peat smoke I saw, and the wrecked sky. There was later a period in my life when I might have found this relevant to my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into the jasmin-scented, cricket-mad dusk of a small station; but today no alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I made her put the money away and promise me she wouldn’t spend a cent of her money while we were together and then I told her how I wished to dress her when we got to Denver, for I wanted to stop there for a couple of days to see Smith who had written approving of everything I did and adding, to my heart’s joy, that he was much better. On the Monday morning Sophy and I started westwards: she had had the tact to go to the depot first so that no one in Lawrence ever coupled our names. Sommerfeld and Judge Bassett saw me off at the depot and wished me “all luck!” And so the second stage of my life came to an end. Sophy was a lively sweet companion; after leaving Topeka, she came boldly into my compartment and did not leave me again. May I confess it? I’d rather she had stayed in Lawrence; I wanted the adventure of being alone and there was a girl in the train whose long eyes held mine as I passed her seat, and I passed it often: I’d have spoken to her if Sophy had not been with me. When we got to Denver, I called on Smith, leaving Sophy in the hotel. I found him better, but divined that the cursed disease was only taking breath, so to speak, before the final assault. He came back with me to my hotel and as soon as he saw Sophy, he declared I must go back with him, he had forgotten to give me something I must have. I smiled at Sophy to whom Smith was very courteous-kind and accompanied him. As soon as we were in the street, Smith began in horror: “Frank, she’s a colored girl: you must leave her at once or you’ll make dreadful trouble for yourself later.” “How did you know she was colored?” I asked. “Look at her nails!” he cried, “and her eyes: no Southerner would be in doubt for a moment. You must leave her at once, please!” “We are going to part at Frisco”, I said. And when he pressed me to send her back at once, I refused. I would not put such shame upon her and even now I’m sure I was right in that resolve. Smith was sorry but kind to me and so we parted forever. He had done more for me than any other man and now after fifty years I can only confess my incommensurable debt to him and the hot tears come into my eyes now as they came when our hands met for the last time: he was the dearest, sweetest, noblest spirit of a man I have met in this earthly pilgrimage. Ave atque vale.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Tucker was able to confirm that 55 of Hammons’s claims matched the real-life experiences of Marty Martyn, a Hollywood agent who died in 1964. Christopher Kerr, M.D., Ph.D., palliative care physician, end-of-life researcher, and author of Death Is But a Dream, teaches us that end-of-life experiences represent a continuity between and across lives. Through his research with dying patients, he discovered that in their final hours, many people experience peaceful visions. Dr. Kerr tells the story of a patient named Mary: “One day, she starts cradling a baby that nobody can see.” Mary’s first child was stillborn. Mary had confided in her sister about the baby but no one else. Her grief was so powerful, she had to bury it. “Mary, like so many dying patients, had physical wounds that could not be cured, yet her spiritual wounds were tended to. Often these visions—vividly real to the person experiencing them—are of people who have died before them, and they provide a great sense of comfort, peace and even joy.” While it may be hard to understand what’s happening in these moments, Dr. Kerr encourages us to not dismiss them just because we don’t have enough data or tools to explain them. “There’s this assumption that people have these visions because their brains are changing, becoming deoxygenated, or they are medicated and confused, but that’s not the case. We know that by looking at the brain; it’s not changing biologically or functionally. I think people are changing very much spiritually,” he says. When I considered Dr. Kerr’s words, I was comforted. I may not be able to objectively prove that Dad had changed spiritually, but that was what I felt. And when I thought about it, I realized that I was changing spiritually, too. SIGNS & SYNCHRONICITY Two days after Dad died, my mom and I went for a walk on the beach. It was Valentine’s Day, my 18-year cancerversary, and her first Hallmark holiday without him. Dad would have called me and said, “Hey, love, how’s my valentine today?” I miss those words so much. As our feet sank into the warm sand, I secretly searched for signs. Not dramatic thunderbolt kinds of signs . . . just affirming indications of Dad’s continued love. In grief, we often focus on what (or who) is no longer there in front of us. We naturally notice the absence of the person we love. A bed or chair they no longer occupy. Clothes that still hold their scent but hang empty day after day. Special moments like holidays or birthdays, where their nearness is so deeply missed. My eyes can still find those places, years later, by simply observing the absence of Dad and, if I’m not careful, telling my heart he’s just gone. But that’s not what I want to believe. So I ask my eyes to see his presence, instead of just his absence. After walking in silence for a while, Mom asked how I was feeling. “Bittersweet,” I said.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  For everything there is a season. I’d miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons: it has for example “fire season” or “the season when the fire comes,” and it also has “the season when the rain comes,” but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York—the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves—suggest only death. For my having a child there was a season. That season passed. I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track. I wanna dance. The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil. Something else I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles. You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar. 14Before she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon. We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed. Including, suddenly, a baby. That year, 1966, during which the American military presence in Vietnam would reach four hundred thousand and American B-52s had begun bombing the North, was not widely considered an ideal year to take an infant to Southeast Asia, yet it never occurred to me to abandon or even adjust the plan. I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif. In the end this trip to Saigon did not take place, although its cancellation was by no means based on what might have seemed the obvious reason—we canceled, it turned out, because John had to finish the book he had contracted to write about César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association and the DiGiorgio grape strike in Delano—and I mention Saigon at all only by way of suggesting the extent of my misconceptions about what having a child, let alone adopting one, might actually entail. How could I not have had misconceptions?

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  While there are certainly different degrees of complicated grief and tragic outcomes, one thing is clear: you do you. What other people think of your grief is none of your business; what matters is what you think. Whatever your heart is feeling matters. As any pet owner who has mourned their beloved Fluffy heading over the rainbow bridge knows, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who get it and those who don’t. I was reminded of this when my dog Buddy died in 2016, just weeks before my dad was diagnosed with cancer. Buddy’s loss felt as real as anything . . . because it was. Pain is pain. With that in mind, this chapter is for anyone who’s ever felt sheepish about grieving something deemed “not significant.” IN DOGS WE TRUST While my great-great-grandfather put his bet on God, I choose dogs. Dogs (or any pets, for that matter) are our chosen family. They don’t have the baggage that comes with actually being related to you. They don’t ask you to drive them places and give them money. They don’t marry deadbeats or leave their dirty underwear on the floor. And when you want to binge-watch Judge Judy, they’re more than happy to join you—no complaints. To them, you are Christmas morning. They’re always ecstatic to be with you. Whether you’ve been gone for a week or you’re just returning from changing a load of laundry, it’s like, OMG, you’re back! It’s sooo good to see you! Truth be told, sometimes I love animals more than people. Maybe it’s because as a child, I had more fourlegged friends than two-legged ones. Much to my mother’s dismay, I was always rescuing critters. I even made outfits for my “guests” by cutting tail holes in my baby clothes—the ones my mom had meticulously saved for my own children. Furry friends helped me through my tumultuous college years, painful breakups, job changes, and, of course, my diagnosis. My cat Crystal was the first “person” I uttered the “c word” to. (“It’s cancer. What are we going to do, Crystal?”) Knowing that animals and nature would be a necessary part of healing my body, I left New York City after my diagnosis and moved to the mountains, where I dreamed of recovering and rescuing abandoned creatures in my spare time. Creatures who needed stable, loving homes—just like I once had. But my attachment to my animals ramped up several notches when it became clear postdiagnosis that being a pet mommy was much safer than being a human mommy. If I wanted to mother a biological child, I might be putting my life at risk. My oncologist described it like this: “Picture your disease like a rock balancing on top of a mountain. Right now, that rock is stable, not causing you any harm. If something (like the hormones from pregnancy) were to change that, your rock may start tumbling down the mountain.