On Moving On – A Review

In Joan Didion’s memoir on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, she wrote “a single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

Within the book she explains that one of the most painful parts of grief was having something come up that she wanted to share with her husband, but couldn’t. She said “this impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” Which, for her was problematic because she often felt like she could imagine “what [he] would say or do” if he were alive, because, as a writer, that “comes as naturally to [her] as breathing.”

I don’t know if that’s necessarily a quality limited to writers, as much as it is the quality of someone who spends a lot of time living outside of their head. I frequently play out conversations in my mind, how things would go if I reached out to someone I’m not talking to anymore, what the reaction would be if I was blunt and told them how they made me feel (the good and the bad), and of course, what I’d say to my grandmother, or to Kennedy, or even to my grandfather, who I never met.

These conversations largely get me nowhere. What they “say” to me is a looping cassette of whatever reinforcement I need in the moment, despite that the conversations often become consuming. Talking to these imaginations, well, it’s like picking off a scab. You’re reopening the wound, exposing yourself to the outside elements. It feels good, but you’re sure it’s bad for you. At the very least, it doesn’t get you anywhere.

That was Joan’s takeaway too. She struggled to escape grief because she constantly fell back into it. It wasn’t until she came to terms with the fact that she did not know everything about her husband that we see any real healing in the book.

Memories are mutable. We make them and the people we share them with into what we want them to be. This is a lesson Joan didn’t learn until Blue Nights, a book she wrote six years later about the death of her only daughter.

I think one of the biggest intrapersonal problems people tend to face is the conflict of memory. How a moment is perceived is filtered through a dozen lenses and biases, that perception is then contorted to fit a world view that your brain can rationalize, and over time is adjusted and changed by a dozen other memories.

When I travelled more, I found myself in a city I dreamed about visiting. And I was there with someone I had feelings for. It was every bit as gorgeous as I expected it to be, and looking back I can remember smiling ear to ear when I got off the bus. I then remember having an absolutely terrible time.

When I look back on the trip, I think about how it was a waste and how that place that seemed so magical to me, was now ruined—but when I look back at pictures of myself that I took there, I’m smiling. I wrote a message to a friend stating “travelling with someone for the first time has extra road bumps built in, but I am having a great time.”

I don’t remember that message, but I do remember the road bumps.

This is unfortunately the trick memory plays on us. It boils away the filler and leaves the concentrate. The sweet and the bitter. The laughter and the apologies. The good and the bad. At that point, only time can dilute it, or at least wash the taste from your mouth. But you’ll never get the holistic experience back, it’s gone.

We do the same thing to people. In fact, I’m not sure how old I was when I stopped treating people as events to experience and started treating them as well, people, but I can remember the before and after. I think it’s a lesson we all learn, and probably a little too late.

But the thing is, for people you lose, they actually become an event. They’re no longer changing. They’re static. Something that you experienced. You won’t have new moments or change or anything with them. There’s no new context to be found, you can’t hear how they experienced your shared moments. And as much as you try to picture them in the here and now, as someone reacting to what you’re doing or seeing, they’re just whatever you can remember. They’re a guess.

There’s this phenomenon that the poet Donald Hall wrote about in an essay entitled “The Third Thing,” in which he explains what made his life with his late wife, Jane Kenyon, so successful. The third thing, to Hall, was something that is essential to all marriages, and in my opinion is essential to all successful relationships (whether they be platonic or otherwise). It’s the things you share. Common interests, moments, really just any point of external connection.

You frequently hear about people “seeing” the dead in everything they do. Or having someone feel like everything around them reminds them of someone they lost, and to me that’s why. These were things that belonged in that shared space between the two of you, and now there’s no one on the other side to hold it up to. There’s no one else’s gaze looking at the same thing you are. They’re not there to share in the experience, because at this point, they are one.

It’s here that I need to mention my own misgivings about grief. I find the process to be largely inappropriate. You are never directly taught to cherish the moments you get to share with someone. And even if you learn it, you never think you ought to cherish them now. Beyond that, grief doesn’t pack up and go home with the caterers after the funeral. It lingers in those shared spaces forever.

They also don’t teach you that grief is reserved for the dead. They don’t tell you how loss can feel like the right course of action even when its optional. And most importantly, they never tell you how to escape from it.

Moving on becomes something you have to learn on your own, but you can’t. Grief can make you feel stupid. If billions of other people have found a way to move on, then can’t you? Here is where I’d like to give you a step-by-step guide, but there isn’t one. Moving on isn’t something that you can plot or pace or even expect. It’s a gradual distance, one you don’t realize you’re traveling until one day you wake up and realize you’ve done it.

The most important thing to know about grief is that it cannot follow you. Grief is the amber that traps and discolors memory. It holds, but it does not move. This is not me telling you to outrun grief, although I’ve certainly tried. No, this is me instead telling you that grief will always be wherever you leave it.

Usually that’s in things you’ve shared. Those third things that populated your time with them. Those experiences unique to them. The ideas you’d want to tell them about. You don’t get to control what reminds you of who—but you do get to control what you do while you’re remembering. Don’t tell yourself how to feel. But just feel. Think about it, face it, and when you’re ready, let go.

And if you can’t? Well, that’s okay. Because that grief isn’t going anywhere, and it isn’t going to follow you out the door either. It’s going to be there for whenever you’re ready to face it.

While that might seem like a dramatic line to go out on, I’m not quite finished. Because I need to somehow make this about me again.

Last night, I was talking to someone about novelty—and while the specifics of the conversation weren’t in this vein, it led me tangentially to realize how much novelty is the opposite of grief. While I’ve had a life peppered with grief throughout, the two largest assaults grief hit me with were followed by radical change.

In many ways I exist as a sort of contradiction. I’m obsessed with routine, but I constantly crave change. Change that comes in new experiences, new places, and new people. These two concepts don’t mesh well, and so that change is usually temporary. It has to be.

And yet some things persist. The novel experience transitions into the routine. And becomes new in a whole other way. I’m at that transition point with a lot of things in life. My town, my job, my friends and I’m embracing that, or at the very least, trying to.

Something new cannot be stagnant. It can’t be trapped. And, most likely, it’s something that’s constantly changing, or perhaps it just seems like that because that something is changing you or at the very least your perception of it is constantly changing too.

I find that humans in general aren’t very attentive to what motivates them to act in certain ways. I’ve talked on this blog before about how you tend to pick up the vernacular of people you talk to as a form of social mimicry. That phenomenon actually extends to body language, breathing patterns, and emotional responses. Usually its temporary, but with enough contact between two people, some things become second-nature.

We are extremely susceptible to become what we perceive and we perceive way more than we realize. That’s why advertising works so well. You see someone successful and happy drink a Dr. Pepper on TV, and somewhere subconsciously that gets stored away and who knows, you might want to mimic that.

It happens most often with people who you respect/trust. That’s why you’ll notice that family members walk similarly, or have similar speaking patterns, especially when they’re together (I’m sorry if I just ruined the next dozen dinners you share with your SO’s family).

And motivations/actions go WAY deeper than that. We are all influenced by so much that we can’t even perceive. Even our gut biome conditions us to crave certain foods/sleep at certain times via pheromones.

This is why novelty or change is necessary. Because in order to move on you have to, at the very least, move. Otherwise, you’re just stuck in miasma of experiences, locations, and ideas that just remind you of whoever you lost.

And again, I am not advocating to run away from your problems. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t really help in the long run. No, instead, I’m saying move. Don’t just stand there, do something. Grief is like shock, except you’re the only one who’s going to snap you out of it.

And that’s the dramatic line I’ll go out on.

Thanks for reading!