AN ARTIST’S GUIDE TO GOODBYES Lost. Toy Story 3.  Inception.  Elegies for the Brokenhearted. These four pieces of art have several things in common with each other: they all made me weep within the space of several months. They all deal with the act of choosing to say goodbye, specifically, coming to the realization that a goodbye is what’s necessary. That’s why they made me weep. They all deal with letting go (which is not always the same thing as saying goodbye). That’s why they stuck with me. Over and over last year, I felt like I was being bludgeoned over the head with a similar message all year as I took these things in. No matter where I looked in 2010, something was saying to me: Move on with your life.  Say goodbye and let go. Start the next phase of your adventure.  These two movies, this episode of Lost, and this novel all preceded a season of personal grief in my own life. I didn’t know last summer how truly my life would imitate the art I was weeping over. When my dog of 14 years died that Fall, I didn’t realize how much the films, the show and the novel had prepared me for saying goodbye. When a friendship of nearly two decades ended a couple months later, I began to realize. And this year, after my first miscarriage, I get it.  Or at least… I now understand what I was unknowingly being prepared for: a season of grief and a season spent struggling to say goodbye to things. This may not make sense to some people: how I make sense of my life through the media that I consume. It may, in fact, sound like an episode of Community, and I’m a slightly less autistic Abed (and there I go again with the pop culture tie-ins…) But you see, throughout my life, and whether or not it makes sense to anyone but me, I’ve ordered my experiences into a narrative. I draw out the layers and analyze the subtext and express my longings and my darkness in poetry, my determination forms into hard prose, my joy and pain become songs that compose the score. It’s been this way as long as I can remember. And as much as I form my life into a narrative, looking for epic arcs, deeper meaning, and so on, I look at established narratives in film, TV and literature as more than just diversions. You may be scratching your head about what I’m writing or maybe you’re as familiar with C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell and their works on archetypes and the unconscious as I am. But I believe good stories speak to what we all go through. Great stories make us feel less alone inside our heads. They address things we all deal with on conscious and unconscious levels. Last year, the stories I watched and read all addressed one particular universal experience. The act of letting go of what you loved may be the hardest part of being human. At least in Lost and Toy Story 3, there is even a crazy kind of joy, a euphoria, expressed in the faces of those letting go. Two scenes in particular break me every time I watch them. First scene is of Jack dying, smiling through a painful final breath, as he looks up at the plane fly over head. He lays down in the same spot where he woke up six years prior and there’s nothing but peace on his face. The other scene is the look on Andy’s face when he sees Woody wave goodbye. There is a blend between joy and heartbreak there that brings me to tears each time I see it. Both endings express a truth that angered me on an embarrassing gut level last year. I didn’t want to think about what bliss lay in the act of moving on. I appreciated what I saw on screen in an aesthetic way, but somewhere inside me was a pouting child, crossing her arms and shaking her head, refusing to acknowledge the wisdom of those scenes. Maybe I felt what was coming. I don’t know, but as the Fall fell upon my husband and I, we began to talk about death and an unexplainable sense that we both had: that we’d experience it in early 2011.  We didn’t expect it to be our baby.  At the risk of sounding callous, we expected it’d be someone older. Someone nearer to death. Someone who’d had a nice full life. We weren’t even trying to get pregnant. I thought I’d had an incredibly long stomach flu until other symptoms began to clue me in on my condition.  Vasant and I were thrown by the news for maybe 12 hours. Despite our parenthood happening earlier than we’d planned, we embraced it. Within days, our hearts had opened up, rearranged themselves and lay in wait for the baby that would come. We’ve had the names picked out for years. We began to make plans and everything seemed bright and hopeful.  I began to bleed a couple weeks later, around my 8th week of pregnancy. I stayed up late combing internet forums every night, trying to assure myself. But there was little relief when the bleeding continued, increased, and the doctor began throwing words around like “miscarriage” and “possibly ectopic”. Soon I was put on bedrest and was told that, due to my hormone levels continuing to climb while bleeding, it looked like my baby may’ve been growing in my fallopian tube, and that I needed to go to the ER if I felt the slightest bit of discomfort. If I delayed, the tube could rupture and I could lose my uterus at least and at most, my life.  So I waited for the next two weeks. I laid on the couch and panicked at every twinge of discomfort. I knew that at best, my baby was dying within me and at worst, I was at risk too. People were saying things like, “It would be good news if it was a miscarriage” and while that upset me, I agreed. And I hated myself for agreeing. I hated myself for caring about whether or not I’d be okay.  Finally, weeks later, the doctor said my hormone levels were falling at an acceptable rate and that this could safely be called a miscarriage. Bedrest ended and, though the miscarriage hadn’t finished, I was at least in the clear. I felt relieved and grieved. I kept telling myself to wait to begin grieving until after the miscarriage is over. I’m still telling myself that. If I’m honest with myself, what I really mean is “Repress your grief until the miscarriage is over”. The grief has already begun. Every time I see a mother and child in the store I mist up. Watching TV and seeing a pregnant woman, I have to turn away. My husband and I were in a store the other day and we unexpectedly came upon some baby toys. I picked it up without thinking, smiled as I showed it to Vasant and then dropped it as if it had bit me. An image of a tiny baby’s hand holding the toy had flashed into my head. My eyes filled with tears and I walked, almost ran, out of the store. When I stopped, I saw that my husband was next to me, his eyes also full of tears. He grabbed my hand and mouthed “I know” and pulled me close to him. I don’t even know, at this point, how to fully begin grieving. We began losing this baby almost a month ago and for me, at least physically, it’s not over yet. We’ve been experiencing overwhelming moments of grief and then we repress. We tell ourselves it’s not time to grieve yet. But we are. We are grieving, whether or not we let ourselves dwell in it or not.  When our dog died last fall while we were filming, we took time to grieve, but it was difficult to finish the process until we left Italy and came home and she wasn’t there to greet us. I’d been dreaming about her every night while in Rome, a sign that my brain was refusing to accept the reality until it wasn’t just a concept. I had to experience the lack of her to accept it. When a friendship that my husband and I had treasured ended a couple months later, it was honestly something we’d seen coming for a while. And for us, we’d been grieving for it before it definitively ended. An email confirming that this person had no interest in continuing a friendship with us was the closure that we needed. And the grief ended almost as soon as we received it. A month before that goodbye was given, I’d read the novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted. In it, the character Mary Murphy narrates five beautiful elegies to five people who’ve gone by the time the goodbye is given. Every page into the book made me feel better about taking time to say goodbye. But there’s something dangerous about grief that grows in strength when it’s kept alive in the mind by a lack of closure. As I was re-watching Inception a month ago, I thought about how Cobb kept his wife alive by revisiting his moments of guilt and grief concerning her. He had never been able to say goodbye, since she jumped while he was pleading with her to stay with him. And there was no physical closure for him, like there were at the endings of Lost and Toy Story 3. He had to continue to deal with this in the realm of the mind, saying goodbye and banishing his grief and guilt at the deepest level of his subconscious. And maybe that’s what I have to do.  And for me, there’ll be no email from my baby saying goodbye. There’ll be no returning home and realizing the house lacks her, since her tiny feet were never able to touch this earth, let alone the carpet of our home. And despite this, the loss is real, the force of it throbs and threatens to consume. I’m not a repressive person. I enjoy psychoanalyzing all my problems, letting them work out as they come so I don’t end up as some passive aggressive who let’s her issues drive her actions. But this grief scares me. It hits me in waves when I least expect it and since I’ve never held her or talked to her, her loss is something I can’t wrap my mind around. Perhaps, like with Inception, this goodbye can only be something conceptualized and bid farewell to in the realm of the mind. Maybe my wait for grief to begin once my pregnancy hormone levels reach 0 is pointless. I’m searching for an external signifier to coincide with grief for the loss of a relationship that was never externalized.  I’m still figuring out all that this means. I live, and my husband lives, in a surreal suspension between what has happened, what would’ve happened and what will happen next. There is a fifth piece of art that fits into this season. Last fall, I began work on a new book. It’s about a couple that loses their child, and how their lives recover. I bought books on grieving for the loss of a child and began an intense course on trauma and how it affects individuals and relationships. This happened months before I conceived. Months before I lost the child we’d conceived. Art brought me into the season. And maybe… art will lead me out.  Maybe that’s how I’ll conceptualize my goodbye. Through my fiction. Again, that’s still something I’m figuring out, but this post and the hope of picking my book up again within the oncoming months feels like a light dawning at the end of a tunnel. This is what I love the most about art, specifically stories. They prepare me. They guide me. They give me more than an escape. They give me a launchpad for my thoughts on these issues. Watching these films and shows is like taking part in a national discourse on what grief is, what it means, and what it takes to get out of it. All these stories are just a part of our collective soul, manifested into a narrative. And maybe my recovery will add to this discourse. Or maybe these words here on this blog will be all that I ever share.  Knowing me, I’m betting on the former. But for now, this post will have to do.  And as I send this onto my site, I whisper, “Goodnight, dear void” and thank God for all the stories and all the storytellers out there that have helped me get by, will help me get by and hope one day that I’m good enough to help someone else get by with the stories welling up inside of me. (And thank you, by the way, to whoever reads this massive post, for letting me share this story with you. It’s already helped.)

AN ARTIST’S GUIDE TO GOODBYES

Lost.

Toy Story 3. 

Inception. 

Elegies for the Brokenhearted.

These four pieces of art have several things in common with each other: they all made me weep within the space of several months. They all deal with the act of choosing to say goodbye, specifically, coming to the realization that a goodbye is what’s necessary. That’s why they made me weep.

They all deal with letting go (which is not always the same thing as saying goodbye). That’s why they stuck with me. Over and over last year, I felt like I was being bludgeoned over the head with a similar message all year as I took these things in. No matter where I looked in 2010, something was saying to me:

Move on with your life. 

Say goodbye and let go.

Start the next phase of your adventure. 

These two movies, this episode of Lost, and this novel all preceded a season of personal grief in my own life. I didn’t know last summer how truly my life would imitate the art I was weeping over. When my dog of 14 years died that Fall, I didn’t realize how much the films, the show and the novel had prepared me for saying goodbye. When a friendship of nearly two decades ended a couple months later, I began to realize. And this year, after my first miscarriage, I get it. 

Or at least… I now understand what I was unknowingly being prepared for: a season of grief and a season spent struggling to say goodbye to things.

This may not make sense to some people: how I make sense of my life through the media that I consume. It may, in fact, sound like an episode of Community, and I’m a slightly less autistic Abed (and there I go again with the pop culture tie-ins…)

But you see, throughout my life, and whether or not it makes sense to anyone but me, I’ve ordered my experiences into a narrative. I draw out the layers and analyze the subtext and express my longings and my darkness in poetry, my determination forms into hard prose, my joy and pain become songs that compose the score. It’s been this way as long as I can remember. And as much as I form my life into a narrative, looking for epic arcs, deeper meaning, and so on, I look at established narratives in film, TV and literature as more than just diversions. You may be scratching your head about what I’m writing or maybe you’re as familiar with C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell and their works on archetypes and the unconscious as I am. But I believe good stories speak to what we all go through. Great stories make us feel less alone inside our heads. They address things we all deal with on conscious and unconscious levels.

Last year, the stories I watched and read all addressed one particular universal experience.

The act of letting go of what you loved may be the hardest part of being human. At least in Lost and Toy Story 3, there is even a crazy kind of joy, a euphoria, expressed in the faces of those letting go. Two scenes in particular break me every time I watch them. First scene is of Jack dying, smiling through a painful final breath, as he looks up at the plane fly over head. He lays down in the same spot where he woke up six years prior and there’s nothing but peace on his face. The other scene is the look on Andy’s face when he sees Woody wave goodbye. There is a blend between joy and heartbreak there that brings me to tears each time I see it. Both endings express a truth that angered me on an embarrassing gut level last year. I didn’t want to think about what bliss lay in the act of moving on. I appreciated what I saw on screen in an aesthetic way, but somewhere inside me was a pouting child, crossing her arms and shaking her head, refusing to acknowledge the wisdom of those scenes.

Maybe I felt what was coming. I don’t know, but as the Fall fell upon my husband and I, we began to talk about death and an unexplainable sense that we both had: that we’d experience it in early 2011. 

We didn’t expect it to be our baby. 

At the risk of sounding callous, we expected it’d be someone older. Someone nearer to death. Someone who’d had a nice full life. We weren’t even trying to get pregnant. I thought I’d had an incredibly long stomach flu until other symptoms began to clue me in on my condition. 

Vasant and I were thrown by the news for maybe 12 hours. Despite our parenthood happening earlier than we’d planned, we embraced it. Within days, our hearts had opened up, rearranged themselves and lay in wait for the baby that would come. We’ve had the names picked out for years. We began to make plans and everything seemed bright and hopeful. 

I began to bleed a couple weeks later, around my 8th week of pregnancy. I stayed up late combing internet forums every night, trying to assure myself. But there was little relief when the bleeding continued, increased, and the doctor began throwing words around like “miscarriage” and “possibly ectopic”. Soon I was put on bedrest and was told that, due to my hormone levels continuing to climb while bleeding, it looked like my baby may’ve been growing in my fallopian tube, and that I needed to go to the ER if I felt the slightest bit of discomfort. If I delayed, the tube could rupture and I could lose my uterus at least and at most, my life. 

So I waited for the next two weeks. I laid on the couch and panicked at every twinge of discomfort. I knew that at best, my baby was dying within me and at worst, I was at risk too. People were saying things like, “It would be good news if it was a miscarriage” and while that upset me, I agreed. And I hated myself for agreeing. I hated myself for caring about whether or not I’d be okay. 

Finally, weeks later, the doctor said my hormone levels were falling at an acceptable rate and that this could safely be called a miscarriage. Bedrest ended and, though the miscarriage hadn’t finished, I was at least in the clear. I felt relieved and grieved. I kept telling myself to wait to begin grieving until after the miscarriage is over.

I’m still telling myself that.

If I’m honest with myself, what I really mean is “Repress your grief until the miscarriage is over”. The grief has already begun. Every time I see a mother and child in the store I mist up. Watching TV and seeing a pregnant woman, I have to turn away. My husband and I were in a store the other day and we unexpectedly came upon some baby toys. I picked it up without thinking, smiled as I showed it to Vasant and then dropped it as if it had bit me. An image of a tiny baby’s hand holding the toy had flashed into my head. My eyes filled with tears and I walked, almost ran, out of the store. When I stopped, I saw that my husband was next to me, his eyes also full of tears. He grabbed my hand and mouthed “I know” and pulled me close to him.

I don’t even know, at this point, how to fully begin grieving. We began losing this baby almost a month ago and for me, at least physically, it’s not over yet. We’ve been experiencing overwhelming moments of grief and then we repress. We tell ourselves it’s not time to grieve yet. But we are. We are grieving, whether or not we let ourselves dwell in it or not. 

When our dog died last fall while we were filming, we took time to grieve, but it was difficult to finish the process until we left Italy and came home and she wasn’t there to greet us. I’d been dreaming about her every night while in Rome, a sign that my brain was refusing to accept the reality until it wasn’t just a concept. I had to experience the lack of her to accept it. When a friendship that my husband and I had treasured ended a couple months later, it was honestly something we’d seen coming for a while. And for us, we’d been grieving for it before it definitively ended. An email confirming that this person had no interest in continuing a friendship with us was the closure that we needed. And the grief ended almost as soon as we received it. A month before that goodbye was given, I’d read the novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted. In it, the character Mary Murphy narrates five beautiful elegies to five people who’ve gone by the time the goodbye is given. Every page into the book made me feel better about taking time to say goodbye.

But there’s something dangerous about grief that grows in strength when it’s kept alive in the mind by a lack of closure. As I was re-watching Inception a month ago, I thought about how Cobb kept his wife alive by revisiting his moments of guilt and grief concerning her. He had never been able to say goodbye, since she jumped while he was pleading with her to stay with him. And there was no physical closure for him, like there were at the endings of Lost and Toy Story 3. He had to continue to deal with this in the realm of the mind, saying goodbye and banishing his grief and guilt at the deepest level of his subconscious. And maybe that’s what I have to do. 

And for me, there’ll be no email from my baby saying goodbye. There’ll be no returning home and realizing the house lacks her, since her tiny feet were never able to touch this earth, let alone the carpet of our home. And despite this, the loss is real, the force of it throbs and threatens to consume.

I’m not a repressive person. I enjoy psychoanalyzing all my problems, letting them work out as they come so I don’t end up as some passive aggressive who let’s her issues drive her actions. But this grief scares me. It hits me in waves when I least expect it and since I’ve never held her or talked to her, her loss is something I can’t wrap my mind around. Perhaps, like with Inception, this goodbye can only be something conceptualized and bid farewell to in the realm of the mind. Maybe my wait for grief to begin once my pregnancy hormone levels reach 0 is pointless. I’m searching for an external signifier to coincide with grief for the loss of a relationship that was never externalized. 

I’m still figuring out all that this means. I live, and my husband lives, in a surreal suspension between what has happened, what would’ve happened and what will happen next.

There is a fifth piece of art that fits into this season. Last fall, I began work on a new book. It’s about a couple that loses their child, and how their lives recover. I bought books on grieving for the loss of a child and began an intense course on trauma and how it affects individuals and relationships. This happened months before I conceived. Months before I lost the child we’d conceived. Art brought me into the season. And maybe… art will lead me out. 

Maybe that’s how I’ll conceptualize my goodbye. Through my fiction. Again, that’s still something I’m figuring out, but this post and the hope of picking my book up again within the oncoming months feels like a light dawning at the end of a tunnel.

This is what I love the most about art, specifically stories. They prepare me. They guide me. They give me more than an escape. They give me a launchpad for my thoughts on these issues. Watching these films and shows is like taking part in a national discourse on what grief is, what it means, and what it takes to get out of it. All these stories are just a part of our collective soul, manifested into a narrative. And maybe my recovery will add to this discourse. Or maybe these words here on this blog will be all that I ever share. 

Knowing me, I’m betting on the former. But for now, this post will have to do. 

And as I send this onto my site, I whisper, “Goodnight, dear void” and thank God for all the stories and all the storytellers out there that have helped me get by, will help me get by and hope one day that I’m good enough to help someone else get by with the stories welling up inside of me.

(And thank you, by the way, to whoever reads this massive post, for letting me share this story with you. It’s already helped.)

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