Grief Gone Wild

Grief comes in all shapes and sizes, and for all sorts of reasons. It is, at its most basic level, our response to loss. At the heart of loss is change. I once heard someone say that we as humans equally crave and fear change. I experienced this in 2006 upon the arrival of our firstborn, Lucy Joy.

I was, like most first-time moms, completely overjoyed and completely overwhelmed. I was also surprised by something no one had warned me about and a bit worried I was alone in feeling it. I missed having my baby safely in my belly. The outside world suddenly felt so big, and she was so small. The human realm felt a bit unsafe, like it could blink her 7 lb 6 oz frame out of existence in an unaware twitch of its monstrous eye.

While I loved the feeling of being pregnant, by the 9th month my body was, of course, relieved not to be lugging another human around in my abdomen, but my mind and heart had some catching up to do.

As a writer, I liken it to the process of a tiny seed of an idea transitioning into a published piece. What was once part of your inner world is out there, open for the world to read and enjoy but also to critique.

Author Elizabeth Stone put it well when she wrote,
“Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Both conventional wisdom and science support the idea that changing hormones are a major contributor to the “baby blues” and postpartum depression, but upon reflection, I wonder if the grief of such a major change, despite being a joyous change, is a larger factor than we often acknowledge.

As I move through another major change, sending Lucy off to college, familiar feelings from 18 years ago resurface. My little seed of an idea has sprouted from a small published piece into a fully developed novel and is now being adapted into a screenplay.

It’s a writer’s wildest dream, and yet many people forget how screenplays are typically written by a different writer. It’s still your story, and yet it’s not your story.

As an artist, at some level, you realize it was never really “yours.” Your muse always intended for you to share it. As a parent, it’s precisely the vulnerability of sharing your child with the world that leaves you wondering whether your child is prepared to transition into adult life. If you’re lucky, you catch glimpses of readiness as their departure from home draws nearer. I caught one of those glimpses on a hard day recently.

I was home alone following a vision-related incident that left me in a moment of incredible grief and shame. It had been quite a long time since I’d felt any intense emotion related to my vision loss, and it was as if several years of pent-up sadness came pouring out. I found myself sobbing on my bedroom floor in what I thought was an empty house. Lucy, who had gotten home early from work, heard me and rushed into my room, probably worrying someone had died with how hard I was crying.

I don’t think I ever intended to hide my emotions from my kids, but in retrospect, I mostly kept my feelings private for fear of burdening them or passing down pitying narratives about blindness. But in this raw, untamed moment of grief, there was little space for philosophy or pride.

Between sobs, I recounted the grief-inducing incident and a litany of fears about the future. I felt small, unedited, and a bit afraid of her response. After all, I’m the parent. Shouldn’t I be the one with the answers, comforting her?

To my relief, Lucy knelt down on the floor with me, wrapped her arms around me, and cried with me. She spoke words of empathy and love, and soon our tears turned to laughter, and we sat on my floor and talked for several hours. It was there that I glimpsed signs of readiness for the world that reassured me as a parent. Yes, university, future mentors, and travel will support maturity and growth. But as both an artist and a mom, I’m proud to have a small part in shaping a character with heart—one who can sit and be present in a wild moment of grief with another human being.

There will be viewers who will never know the characters in your book the way you do. They will never reach for the 1-year-old the way you did when she gleefully chased a flock of geese at the park, trying to pet them, unaware they were hissing, ready to nip her tiny fingers. They will never know the barefoot 2-year-old who chased the ice cream truck at Olympic speed or the 3-year-old who announced there is no such thing as bad people. They will never lay eyes on the 4-year-old dog whisperer in pigtails, or the 8-year-old doting on her little sis. They will never hear the 10-year-old’s sweet songs her teenage self will label “cringy.” And they will absolutely never know the bond between a 14-year-old puppy raiser and a yellow lab named Moon.

Your precious protagonist is walking off the page and onto the big screen, and you absolutely know there are viewers out there who will never read the book. Only you and your readers— the childhood friends, the family, the neighbors— know the original, unabridged version.
You anticipate the magic of seeing her come to life on the screen, and yet as a reader and a writer, you know the book is better.

To all parents and young adults making their way into the world, I dedicate the following poem by Mary Oliver. Her words capture the wildness of emotion and the sense of finding one’s place amid the chaos of life:

“Wild Geese” –  Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

May we all find our place in the family of things, embracing the wildness of both grief and joy.