The Pain Is the Memory

Last week, I lost my friend and coworker Ryan. I’ve spent the days since I learned of the loss adjusting to this new, permanent branch of my life without him. He was the person I worked with most closely at our office. He was also the person I felt closest to. One small neurosis I have is that I feel like a perpetual outsider. When I’m around groups of people, I’ll often just stay on the outside, not wanting to disturb or impose on them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By feeling like an outsider, I remain an outsider. But every now and then, I’ll meet somebody I feel instinctively comfortable with, and I can feel like an insider for a while. That’s who Ryan was for me. I’m an aging guy working in a young office with a lot of energy, so my outsider feelings are sometimes amplified. But I never felt that way with Ryan. His office was my sanctuary. I could go in there anytime and feel absolutely like I belonged.

I lost my father last year to heart failure, just a couple of hours after I spoke with him. I lost my mother a few years ago to a brain aneurism, just 20 minutes after I spoke with her. A few years before that, I lost one of the closest friends I’ve ever had to a drug overdose just 7 hours after I talked to him. When I was 13, I lost my older sister Tracy to murder. When I was five, I had my first encounter with death when my uncle committed suicide. Although every loss is different and every lost individual is unique, much of what I’m going through now is familiar. These sudden losses feel unreal, especially when they come so soon after I’ve talked to the person. It feels like some mistake has happened. A misunderstanding. When Tracy died, I spent months expecting her to walk through the door and explain that she had been lost somewhere, and that the body they’d found was someone else, because my life made no sense without her in it.

I’ve always tried to deal with losses creatively, even before I did it intentionally. When Tracy died, my father was falsely accused and arrested, and through no fault of my family, I had to spend much of my time alone. So I wrote stories. I practiced my guitar. I went out into the woods around my house and explored, imagining myself as a wizard with power over life and death or a ninja with power over my mind and the flow of energy through my body. There was a dissociative element to some of it, and I could imagine adults becoming concerned if they’d seen me alone in the wilderness imagining a fantasy world where I had magic powers, but looking back, I believe it was the healthiest way I could have dealt with the pain and loneliness. I also exercised, meditated, got guided visualization and relaxation tapes from the family therapist, read books, and otherwise sat and daydreamed.

In adulthood, and especially after I lost my friend Stephen, I was more intentionally creative. Stephen was one of the most supportive people of my creative work, and I had never been disciplined about it or released much, so I decided that the way I would cope with the pain, while also honoring him, would be to do the thing he had always encouraged: to write and record more—and to actually release it. So that’s what I did, and I found benefits beyond the coping I’d aimed for. I don’t believe there’s any better way to get through grief than to focus those emotions toward some creative pursuit. Writing fiction, non-fiction, and even a letter to Stephen all helped me to recontextualize my pain. Our minds create stories automatically, and usually we take no control of them…our minds just spin them automatically, writing us into the story following whatever bias is currently in charge. But being creative allowed me to direct the story, choosing how I wanted to be woven into it, and how I wanted to remember my relationship with Stephen. I found that making music allowed me to externalize my emotions with sound, giving me an emotional outlet and helping me to communicate some part of my inner experience with others, which eased my loneliness.

No two people deal with grief in exactly the same way, but I do suspect that the benefits of creativity for healing from grief are universal, even if that creativity takes a different form from person to person.

I’ve never been able to comfort myself with beliefs. When I was a kid, and especially when Tracy died, I tried to find beliefs that would help make sense of things, but every belief system I found failed to give me the comfort I was looking for. Eventually, I had to accept that beliefs aren’t the answer…not for me. I had to learn ways to more directly cope with the pain and to process it, and that’s by being creative. I might release my painful emotions in music. If there are things I feel are left unsaid, I might write to that person. I might fictionalize it in some way that expresses what I want to communicate. Some of what I create may never be seen by anybody else, and that’s okay. I give myself permission to create with no end in mind, just expressing my feelings in the way that makes the most sense to me, and if I’m comfortable sharing it with others later, I will…if not, it’ll just be for me.

We all have to find our own way to do this. Not everybody is good at or interested in writing or making music, and I’m not good at many other kinds of art and creativity. I think everybody can find some way of expressing and contextualizing their grief.

I can’t make art at every moment, and inevitably, my mind will wander. I’ll ruminate, and rumination can spiral into despair. So I’ve found ways to be creative in my wandering. I try to imagine a life where I’m not feeling this pain…and I discover that I wouldn’t like that, because the only way it could exist is if the person I lost was never in my life to begin with. I’ve learned from this practice that, for one, I can accept the pain I’m feeling in exchange for having known that person. And also, I’ve seen that the pain is the person living on in my memory, and I would never want to lose that.

That kind of creative recontextualizing of the pain helps me to feel it without creating unnecessary suffering. If I fight the pain and try to push it away, I’ll lose. If I distract myself, I might succeed for a while, but it only delays the suffering and the time lost seems to make it harder to process when the inevitable weight settles on me. But with a particular choice in how to understand the pain, I’m able to accept it. I can let myself feel it fully. Here’s the fundamental difference: If I see it as the pain of loss, it becomes a constant reminder that I’ll never see the person again. It becomes something I want to push away, and that makes the suffering unbearable. But if I see it as the cost of keeping that person’s memory alive, then I can embrace the pain, because it’s the same as embracing the person’s memory and the ways that person affected me that I’ll carry for the rest of my life.

Since we lost Ryan, I’ve had one particular conversation with several mutual friends that has been familiar, because it’s something all people who have lost someone close to them have experienced—that it’s the little things that are missed the most. The things we’d come to take for granted. These are the things that were such an integral part of our lives that they had become a part of us, and now those parts have been ripped away. When my dad died, there were several weeks when something would happen that I knew he’d find funny, so I would grab my phone, pull up his phone number, see his photo over his phone number, and suddenly remember he wouldn’t answer, and that I’d never hear him laugh again. Sometimes I would get halfway through a text message before remembering he would never read it. I went through the same thing when my mom died. Every time it happened, it was like losing them all over again, because for that brief moment, my mind was back in a world where they were a phone call away, and then they were gone. It happens repeatedly, and I would grieve again every time. There’s no avoiding it. It will happen to us all when we lose people close to us until those habits and little reminders have time to fade. I don’t fight it, because again, that’s the memory, and I want to hang onto it a while, no matter how painful. I don’t push it away, and I don’t cling to it; I just let it run its course. But when it does happen, I take the time to imagine what I’d say to them, and I imagine their response. It often makes the tears come on more strongly, but it also gives me comfort.

Another conversation I’ve had in the last week has been about keepsakes. People will sometimes hang onto things that remind them of the person, and again, the most potent reminders are of the little things…reminders of the person’s personality and our day-to-day relationship with them. That made me think about Tracy, because I don’t have anything like that of hers. I wondered why that didn’t bother me, and I realized it’s because the keepsakes are a part of me. When she died, she had a one year old son. The father wasn’t part of their lives, and she had moved back home with us. At that time, I had been getting into reading novels, and when I was done with a novel, she would read it, and we would talk about it, and then she would recommend books to me. I was fascinated by these authors’ ability to project imagery and emotions into my mind with configurations of words on a page, so when my English class assigned a small writing project, I went beyond what was assigned. We were supposed to write at least two paragraphs describing a setting, and I wrote from the perspective of someone exploring a mysterious forest for three pages, writing nothing but setting details as they were apprehended by the unmentioned character. Then we were assigned a project to create a two page fictional history of the annual burning of Zozobra (Old Man Gloom) in Santa Fe, and I wrote what might have been a novella about an old man arriving at a local village just as a number of people became ill and some died, and a gloom settled over the people. They wrongly blamed the old man for bringing this gloom, so they ritualistically tied him to a stake, elevated him above the village, and burned him while dancing around him to drive away the gloom and restore joy to the people. It worked, and the gloom was banished, but within a year, the gloom had returned. So they created an effigy of Old Man Gloom, burned it, and repeated the ritual annually to this day. When I took these stories home and showed them to Tracy, I could see the pride. But it was more than the pride—she was actually interested in the stories themselves. She would talk to me about them and ask questions—she wanted to know more. She would give me feedback and suggestions. She’d ask “what if…” questions. That made me want to write more. I started putting together ideas for a novel, and when I talked to her about that, she got excited. She wanted to help. We brainstormed together. During that time period, talking to her about books and writing was what I looked forward to most each day. She and I had always been close, but we’d never bonded quite like we were then.

And then, one day, she went on a date and didn’t come home. Two mornings later, someone found her body on the side of the road.

I lost her at the time when we were closest, and writing was part of how I got through it. I wrote more than ever, and I would imagine her reactions. I would imagine what advice she might give me. I wrote for her, even though she would never be able to read it. It hurt, and at that time, I wanted nothing more than for the pain to go away. I fought the pain with everything I had, but I kept writing.

My father was arrested, and our story became national news. When he was released after evidence proved it couldn’t have been him, the police never admitted their mistake (not until they caught the real killer decades later), so after he was released from jail, my family was forced to move. And then we had to move again. And again. In the chaos, we lost almost everything, including much of what I might have otherwise kept as keepsakes.

But I don’t need keepsakes, because I’m reminded of Tracy every time I write. It was also her influence that got me into music, and she encouraged me to play guitar, so every time I pick up my guitar, that’s a part of her, still surviving in me. In fact, there’s no part of who I am today that would exist in the same way without her. Many of my values came from her. My tastes were influenced by her. My constant attempts to see the world from other people’s perspectives come from both her and my mom. She’s alive in me, and I’m all the reminder of her I need.

I said earlier that I can’t find comfort in the idea that there might be some extrinsic meaning in such tragedy. I don’t care for the idea that there’s some purpose or grand plan, or some deity’s “mysterious ways” at work in such horrifying loss. But I’m not a nihilist. I may not believe in a cosmic order that I can extract meaning from, but I absolutely believe that human consciousness seeks and needs some kind of meaning and purpose. If it’s not out there, then we create it. And again, this is why I believe working out our creative muscles is so important. I’m writing this very piece to process what I’m going through, and to communicate to others the perspectives that have helped me through so many tragedies. I don’t presume to know what it all means to the universe or some deity watching from above. I’m not equipped to know. I’m happy if other people can find beliefs that offer meaning and comfort in hard times, but as far as I can tell, there’s no cosmic plan, and if there is, I would need to understand why this kind of loss and suffering is necessary before I could approve and find any comfort. It seems to me that everything that is…just is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find that meaning in ourselves and in our relationships. It’s up to us to find ways to cope and to grow from the pain rather than letting it smother us.

Another thing people have been saying in the past week is how these losses bring the people who are sharing the pain closer, and that has always been my experience. There’s no longer-lasting bond than experiencing loss together with openness and understanding. I’ve heard of some groups falling apart after a loss, turning their pain against one another, letting festering grudges explode or attempting to profit from the loss. But that’s never been me, and that’s never been my experience. When my family and friends have gone through tragedy, we’ve become closer because we shared those horrors, and our primary concern has always been for one another. Sure, I’m hurting, but what about you? We see the humanity in one another and feel pain on each other’s behalf in addition to our own. We look at each other, and there’s no doubt that we’ll be there for one another. We do our best to comfort each other, even when there’s little comfort to be found. We set all the nonsense narratives and silly disagreements aside and just share one another’s company. Last week, I looked around at my friends as we learned about Ryan, and I felt their pain, possibly more strongly than I felt my own. My heart broke for what they were going through, and when I told them I was there for them, I can only hope they felt the truth in those words. I do feel like we’ve all grown closer through this, and I don’t feel like an outsider anymore.

That’s finding meaning and purpose in loss, and it’s what I believe the people we’ve lost would want for us.