Grief Is for Gratitude

For Mooch, on her birthday

I was planning to write about two nights watching Yankees games with my mother, primarily about the judgy, catty assholes we are while intermittently paying attention. Who wouldn’t want to learn details of me belittling folks unwilling to create their personalities and instead settle for hashtaggable honorifics? You likely know them as #GirlDads, #DogMoms, and/or #InsipidCunts.

Sloane Crosley’s latest book got in the way. Having previously enjoyed her three essay collections, I read Grief Is for People in four hours, fond as usual of her prose and perspective, although a bit disappointed that the intermittent Joan Didion references reduced her work in part to being a generational sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking, the Didion book being the first book I read after Sue died last fall, one that didn’t strike me the same way it seemingly did every other person craving catharsis from its unrelenting tragedy.

There aren’t too many original ways to say how awful it is to continue living without the person you lived for most. One friend stated that he couldn’t understand how I dealt with Sue’s absence so well, and upon considering it, I offered one of my favorite things: a list, the way I order my thoughts. Included on it were savoring time with valued friends (some of them old ones whose reacquaintance was spawned by the disclosure of Sue’s absence), loving things that I loved independent from Sue (my record collection), imperative introspection (a daily chore already), and being grossly self-indulgent when necessary to rid myself of mournful feelings.

During the final winter of her life, Sue was secretly working to create a TikTok page where she celebrated her prized mantra: brain tricks. When I transferred photos from her phone onto my laptop, several videos appeared in the mix, a huge surprise from a woman who never let me record a single video of her. Forever a pro in front of a “camera,” here was a former television (and Internet television) personality attempting to figure out the best angle, lighting, and medium to implement when sharing her uncompromising belief that happiness is a choice, the presentation a logical and much faster-paced sequel to her labor of love-and-hate website One Big Happy World (supreme brain tricks were mastered to combat a litany of WordPress struggles). Whenever I miss her most, I play the same video, a catalyst to crying, laughing, and cry-laughing.

Filmed on the afternoon of January 25th, 2023, she sat bundled up in her car because her furnace, a furnace she’d befriended and named, had recently died, Sue accentuating the positive as she worked to find a way to have it replaced. With bleached blonde hair accented by some coruscating tinsel strands, and bundled in her bright pink parka, she speaks into the delicately positioned iPhone behind her rainbow-patterned steering wheel cover for the most vivid forty-five seconds we will spend together thousands of times for the rest of my life:

Oops. That’s not what I wanna do-oooo, ahh-haaa. But here we are! Okay, the phone is situated…that way. Um, so you can see my steering wheel. Yeah, we’re hoping that it’s gonna stay situated and not fall apart. And I’m doing my thing from here. Let’s not forget that when we get inside, we can zoom in, zoom out, do all of those fun editing things that I’ve been learning, and I’m excited about that. Anyway, just trying to see what this looks like. There’s a lot of car being shown right now, and not a lot of me. Is that a good thing? Probably. Cuz then you can see a lot of me here — “Heyyy!” — and we don’t like that. Well, we might. So, la la la la la… And here’s my steering wheel. And my nails. And my rings. Anyway! Sooo…we’ll go inside and see what this looks like. Yeah, it’s coming along. Love you, guys. Byyye!

During this monologue, she’s self-deprecating, optimistic, silly, friendly, detailed, and more worried about how her wrinkles might look for potential viewers than willing to hint at the freezing cold horror awaiting inside her home. She giddily sticks her tongue out and flashes her effortless smile as she hits the stop button. Sue lived her life with brain tricks. She’d often have five dollars to her name and greet the world in trademark sunny form, her ego strong enough to handle whatever obstacle she refused to acknowledge for fear it might ruin someone else’s day. She agreed with people even when she disagreed with them so she could help cheer them up rather than take a stand or endure strife. The Ambassador of Happiness wasn’t her nickname for any reason other than that she owned the role like nobody else I’ll meet.

One friend called me an “emotional robot” at some point in the last seven months, intimating that I had borderline inhuman skills when confronting grief, skills that were a byproduct of being inured to trauma in childhood, but then morphed into something noticeably different during the course of my sixteen-plus years with Sue, still willing to be judgmental and caustic and cynical in minor moments, yet over the long haul opting to largely enact her perspective to choose joy, rather than the nothingness of my youth, in my approach to being alive.

Like any widower — married or not, it’s what I am — I miss Sue throughout each day. I see a beautiful photo of her smiling in a hallway a year or so before I met her to begin my mornings as I tear the day’s banana from a basket beside her framed image while the tea kettle heats on the nearby stovetop. I arise from my desk and look in her bedroom on trips to the bathroom, sometimes entering to smell a sweatshirt, a stuffed animal, or her pillowcases that remain unwashed. I eat my dinner from the same ceramic bowl night after night, giving it a “trailer trash” cleaning each time it’s used, a lazy man’s tribute to the same methodology she believed in. Simple stuff, not all flattering, but the list goes on and on. Rather than permit object impermanence to devastate me, I choose to be happy that I can still access her in some form. As seasoned grievers know, the devastation strikes much like a horror movie tagline: …when you least expect it. And sometimes it remains dormant when it’s most poised to attack.

I recently visited Maine for the first time without Sue, psyching myself up in advance only to celebrate a normal day with a newer friend in tow, one high point being my friend’s reveal that she’d gotten breast implants in her early twenties. That news certainly overshadowed the perfunctory process of placing two big scoops of Sue’s ashes on a beach, in a garden, and in a town square, sacred spaces respectfully stripped down to boring nouns. Like me, Sue would’ve been as intrigued by this buxom detail as being faithful to bygone specificities, always eager to cherish the unpredictable aspects of life while asking a bazillion questions, the number a go-to when her pesky enemy arithmetic got involved. A week later, I returned to our beloved local farmers’ market with my mother and went to some antiques stores with Sue’s childhood best friend, a woman she didn’t talk to during our time together. Neither was bothersome due to her absence: living with grief isn’t a competition to seek out the bittersweet, but a chance to memorialize the past by placing a fresh layer of happy memories atop the pile, or the bootleg tee shirt you buy on the sidewalk outside the venue after the concert. On rare occasions, it can be better than the real thing.

What would Sue say about all this? That’s where my mind goes, aware I must keep living my life, pursuing new moments, and not indulging martyrdom or unnecessary desolation over what cannot be changed, the same way she mostly processed the deaths of both her parents, two kind souls who lived rich, impactful lives. Would she have encouraged me to keep conversing with a pretty brunette at Target whose Rolling Stones tee shirt I complimented before realizing she was a fan of the logo, not the band? “You could’ve told her you’d cum to her emotional rescue, Blebbz,” I imagine Sue’s perverted side insisting while making an O with her pointer finger and thumb on her left hand prior to repeatedly sticking her right pointer finger in and out of the yonic opening as purposely cringeworthy “sexual” noises exited her mouth accompanied by unending howling laughter. Would she crack up as hard as I do any time I eat a strawberry from the farmers’ market and hear her voice asking me, like she did in the summertime, if I was eating “Jerry’s berries,” a rhyming phrase she monosyllabically kept repeating in a crude British accent until we were in hysterics? What might she think of my idea to start a train brick, notching a line on it each time I hear a train while in our living room, a way to turn brain tricks inside out, the type of stupid game — and tribute to her idealized mode of transportation — we both loved no matter how idiotic it would seem to anyone else?

Grief Is for People left me as upset as any grieving I’d been doing, if only because nobody wants to write a book about how, well, yes, losing your favorite person sucks shit, but also that they hopefully filled you with such unending gratitude that it worked wonders at offsetting the misery. I finished Sloane’s book — I dunno why, but I don’t like to call her Crosley — and took an eight-mile walk while formulating thoughts to type when returning home.

The town library is three-quarters of a mile from my house, so I stopped in on the return loop to grab a Blu-ray and a new book, briefly conversing with the reference librarian about the possibility of reading from my own forthcoming book in the building this summer. As I walked home, an SUV pulled up alongside me on the opposite side of the road. A black man in his seventies mentioned overhearing that I was a writer — I’d noticed him sitting at a computer — and inquired if I knew any biographers. Misunderstanding his question, I suggested Ron Chernow before he said that he meant a biographer to detail his own life story. Get me a shirt with #DumbWalker on it!

I stood beside the passenger side door of the vehicle while learning through the open window that he was my hometown’s police union chief after my uncle was voted out of the position. The man had also survived part of his nose being bitten off, gotten a double bypass in retirement (begetting significant weight loss), and disclosed that every couple inches of his body were marked by a story. He handed me his phone so I could email my contact information to my email address on his behalf, suggesting we meet up soon, him eager to pick up his wife before she called, likely “in a tizzy,” not a phrase he spoke, but the echo of which I could hear Sue saying. The ghost of her doesn’t necessarily linger, nor does it haunt, but unlike her sixteen years of running late, she promptly arrives and keeps my imagination company whenever I summon her for a tag team-worthy task.

Grief is for interludes, the inevitable time when you must stop living in the present for a minute or two or more, return to January, and watch someone humor herself, you, and anyone who ever knew her or could see the video, those lucky losers. You will be sad, but then the see-saw will suddenly shoot you to the top, a springboard to smiles. Maybe it’s more that people are for grief since grief is ultimately a form of gratitude. That may be the brain tricks talking, but who has time to investigate further when the sound of a locomotive can be heard faintly in the distance. Can someone please fetch me my brick?