Yet this tendency toward inertia is not the only reason we long for undiluted emotion. That yearning also has to do with a mistaken sense of how we are supposed to experience the most important aspects of our lives. We have a notion of what love is, a bright, clear stream of joy flowing continuously through a sunlit valley, and we have a notion of what grief is, a dreadful crack and fall, as of some great limb coming down, bringing the soul it strikes to its knees. Those ideas do describe some part of each experience, but they don’t capture what it really means to be in love or to be bereft. Plenty of other feelings crowd in, some of them in the same general register. Love really is that clear and constant stream, but it is also desire and tenderness and admiration and gratitude. And grief really is that terrible fracture, but, as I learned after my father died, it is also anxiety and irritability and yearning.
Moreover, plenty of feelings in other registers characterize each experience as well. It is virtually impossible to mourn without sometimes feeling nothing and sometimes feeling the “wrong” thing—some mood or emotion wholly unsuited to our idea of grief. To be bereft is to be furious at total strangers one day and unbearably moved by them the next; it is to feel, depending on the loss or the moment, bleak amusement and covert resentment and a current of relief and powerful regret. And we love as we mourn, with wildly variegated, equally sincere emotions. In addition to everything lofty and lusty, love is also being hurt when your wife is brusque with you or annoyed when you realize that your husband has walked past the cat vomit all day without cleaning it up; it is alternately intervening and forbearing when your beloved bites her nails, and listening patiently as your partner vents at length about his boss when you really just want to get back to reading your book. There is no enduring love on the planet, nor ever has been, that isn’t characterized by these crisscrossing moods. “Whoever supposes,” Montaigne once wrote, “to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”
We think of all these other emotions as supernumerary, as obscuring or even defiling the real thing. But there is no real thing—or, rather, taken together, this grab bag of reactions is the real thing. Love is the totality of ways you feel while in love; grief is the totality of ways you feel while grieving. Everything else is just an abstraction, a stream or a tree limb in the mind. “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness),” C. S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed. “One only meets each hour or moment that comes.” And whether you are living through happiness or cancer, the hours change and change. We all have, as Lewis wrote, “many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst.”
I know of no clearer example of this in my own life than the reception that followed my father’s memorial service—which, despite the loss that occasioned it, ranks as one of the greatest parties I have ever attended. The service itself felt more or less as I would have expected, somber and loving and elegiac. But the get-together afterward, in an old friend’s front yard on a beautiful autumn evening, just down the street from that house where I grew up, was something else entirely. I doubt I would have believed it if someone had told me so beforehand, but it was incredibly fun. I love the people who loved my father, and never more so than that night; just at the moment the world seemed emptiest, they replenished it, bringing us their laughter and their stories and their matter-of-fact kindness, giving it back its golden edge. I remember looking around at all of them toward the end of the evening, full of gratitude and chocolate cake—after weeks of barely being able to eat, I had found myself suddenly famished—and thinking, not at all mournfully, about how much my father would have loved to be there. That moment is as inseparable from my experience of grieving him as the one when I watched a nurse disconnect all the monitors and IVs on the day we decided that the time had come to let him die.
Anyone who has ever been bereft understands the importance of the kind of gladness I felt that evening. It diverts, for a moment, the clear stream to the devastated clearing; it lifts our eyes to some light terribly but, as it reminds us, not impossibly distant. Still, the price we pay for this changeability of emotion is steep: sometimes, sadness derails our joy instead. I know this, because I have felt the light shift suddenly not only on my darkest days but on my brightest ones, too. Some months after C. and I got married, we finally sat down to look through all the photographs from our wedding. We were in the middle of delightedly reexperiencing it when we came upon one of my mother and me, standing side by side on the waterfront, beaming. It is a beautiful picture, and the elation in both of us is evident. But looking at it after the fact, all I could see was the vast expanse of the Chesapeake Bay on my other side, a wide blue emptiness where my father should have been. It was the starkest possible representation of the way that grief had reorganized my family; his absence was so obvious that he almost seemed to have been edited out of the picture. I felt a sudden and excruciating double anguish—for how much I missed my father, and for how much my father, gone at that point for under two years, had already missed.
That picture has been on the wall beside me the whole time I have been writing this book. After the shock of first seeing it wore off, I came to love it very much, partly for the way it makes my loss visible and beautiful—it feels like the closest thing I have to a picture of my father at my wedding—but chiefly because, in a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can’t strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence, and we shouldn’t want to if we could. The world in all its complexity calls on us to respond in kind, so that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated; it is to be complete.
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