Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  “People have been dropping like flies,” I said to Dan. “Every time I look up, there’s a missed call. Tammy, Chunk, my cousin, my father. It’s all so strange. This year feels like a dream. The first time I start really dealing with my grief about Chet, it feels like death is knocking on my door. I keep losing things that I love, and I now know what people mean when they say they’ve had a rough year.”

  “Do you feel like you are grieving?”

  I didn’t, and needed to explain to Dan what years of walking around with psychological cement felt like.

  “I have a very out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude when it comes to people. It seems harsh, but I really just stop thinking about people once a relationship has been severed.”

  “Well, that’s the way you say goodbye to people. It has to be black or white. That’s the only way you know.”

  “I don’t miss people. Ever. I don’t think I’ll miss my dad.”

  “You’ve been preventing yourself from missing people because missing someone means that you are vulnerable, and you are only just learning how to be vulnerable. You can’t expect these things to shift overnight. You are trying very hard.”

  “Yeah,” I said, sighing. “You keep saying that.”

  “Are you angry?” Dan asked me.

  “No. Nothing even close to angry.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “Um, I want to say yes, but I feel like that would be a lie. I guess, based on my reaction to his death, my father wasn’t one of my self-defining relationships.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t,” Dan agreed.

  “That’s sad,” I told him, with the tears finally welling up in my eyes.

  I felt sad, but not necessarily about my father. What I was mourning wasn’t just my brother, or my father, or my cousin, or Chunk, or Tammy. I was mourning the childhood that had lasted years into my adulthood—because I got stuck. I was reconciling myself to the loss of my youth as a self-actualized adult, now that I had the tools to face it all—and now that I was officially an orphan, and had no choice but to grow up.

  “I totally get me now,” I told Dan. “I can work with this.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I’ve learned that many people are just bridges to someone else. Some people become bridges that you take back and forth to get back to yourself. That’s how I interpret self-defining relationships. The people who bring you back to you. The ones who say, “You are always welcome here. You are family. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so get used to it.” My father’s funeral was a reminder of how important family is, and how important tradition is. That showing up for a funeral is tradition, and that tradition is not a trope and that there’s nothing stale about it. Every person that came to my father’s funeral had given me information I hadn’t had before—information I was now willing to receive. My dad would have loved that.

  There are a lot of people in my life who I know love me and care about me and worry about me, but before Dan, I was intent on tuning out that noise. I would shudder or turn away because the last thing I wanted to feel was safe. That feeling had backfired on me before, and it took me thirty years to figure that out.

  I didn’t know about attachment figures before I met Dan. I couldn’t see that I’d adopted certain habits to avoid my deep pain. I cultivated a kind of hubris that allowed me to barrel through life, knocking over everything in my way, and then look back and be surprised at all the casualties. Casualties represented weakness, or disloyalty, or people who couldn’t cut the mustard. I never took them as signs that maybe the common denominator was me. Chet had basically commandeered most of my life, and I barely knew the guy.

  Don’t let other people decide what kind of mood you’re going to be in. Don’t let anyone change your life in one day. Don’t let death take you down and keep you down. Go down, but get back up. If we don’t give in to our despair—and instead lock it away—we fail to properly mourn the people we love. How on earth are we honoring the very people we are grieving if we fail to mourn them fully? We should be celebrating the people we’ve lost. I missed thirty years of celebrating my brother.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was no longer shipwrecked. I was now floating somewhere in Katama Bay—the bay of water that is filled with my favorite childhood memories, the bay that separates Chappaquiddick from Edgartown—thinking about how strong I feel with my new set of tools. By sheer force of will, I can get myself almost anywhere I’d like to go, but I choose to use my newly acquired awareness as a strength—a tool to keep me in place—and not as part of my kinetic motion. I know I can continue swimming away from myself, or I can get out of the water and stand on my own two feet, firmly in one place, and take a look at all the other people struggling to stay afloat. I have the strength and mental grit to withstand what comes my way, and if someone I love dies along the way, I will survive.

  What matters the most is that I was ready to take an uncomfortable look at myself and ready to accept whatever image I saw. I’d like to think that the messenger—Dan—had something to do with it. Maybe it’s as much about the messenger as it is the message. I needed Dan, and I needed the message. He could have delivered that message in a Magic 8-Ball. I had found someone I was ready to dig deep with.

  Once Dan elucidated all my attachment issues in relation to Chet, I made it my business to unlock my nine-year-old brain and take a look at my behavior. That’s when the lights started turning on everywhere I looked. Chet’s death and my response to it became the blueprint I followed anytime I experienced disappointment with people. I terminated friendships, with little sentimentality, because that was how I thought relationships ended. You move on and forget about that person in your life. Keep moving. There are new people everywhere.

  I learned that adventure is never bad, but the alacrity with which you go through life has an impact on the wisdom that life has to offer you. That slowing down doesn’t mean you have to do less. It means you have to pay attention more and catch what the world is throwing at you. That every situation you put yourself in deserves your full attention, and that each of us has a responsibility to be more aware of ourselves and of others.

  I learned that saying nothing can be much more powerful than saying anything. To not work so hard at making an impression and to let things settle more. Some people’s lessons are to learn how to use their voice, or to speak out more. My lesson is to keep quiet a little more and let things happen around me instead of always inserting myself. It used to be hard not to say the thing that I believed would change a person forever, and it’s now so easy to say nothing. There’s power in adjusting your behavior and pulling back. No more screeching or waving my arms around to get attention. I’ve always been more interested in sharing what I was thinking, but now I try to think about what I’m thinking.

  I have confidence in my ability to make the best out of a bad situation. I have an equal amount of confidence in myself to make the worst out of a mediocre situation. When left in a gray area or anything that could be construed as average, I will always tug in one direction or another. Far left or far right—that is my habit. Now that I have identified my propensity to do that, it’s up to me to identify when that response is appropriate and when it’s appropriate to look for some gray. Not everything has to be so definitive.

  I also know when I need to allow myself to cry. I don’t fight it as much. I know if I’m tired, I’m going to be more sensitive; if I’m exhausted, I will have less patience. When I’m impatient, it’s because of me and my mental state and not somebody else’s fault, and I catch myself. Identify that you are going through something and go through it. Know it. Don’t push fast-forward. Know that if you are sad or upset, it’s for a reason, and then reason with yourself. Don’t try to please everyone. Be honest. Know the situation. Identification. Awareness. Modification.