June 27th marks one year since Eric died. It’s a magical milestone when grief is officially over, and I can toss my mourning cap in the air Mary Tyler Moore style, and swing back into a happy life.
Kidding! Life still sucks without Eric. OK, “sucks” is hyperbolic. How about life is still hollow without Eric. I mean, I’m back on Earth where I laugh with friends, delight in donuts, and shred AC/DC riffs on Eric’s guitars thanks to the lessons I’ve been taking. But everything feels askew.
And when a note like this randomly falls out of a book that I picked up today, I still devolve into a blubbering mess. It’s vintage E: lowercase letters, old English “thee,” use of “mmwwwaaa,” which he texted me every day. Memory bomb!
I was hoping a year would bring me to the turning point when memories are no longer stabby ones of loss, but morph into ones of gratefulness for what I had with Eric for 24 years. Isn’t that the promise of Big Grief - its alchemy into a soothing, zen form? Hasn’t happened though. Not yet.
A year is arbitrary. It’s the easiest thing in the world to say “time heals,” and it has a sliver of truth. But time also carries us farther away from the dead. More time makes it more real. More permanent. We’ve moved that much farther into a radically altered future.
What staggers me is how much Eric’s death staggers me. Losing a partner is common. It’ll happen to roughly half of us who are reading this. So why does it feel so unexpressed, so solitary, like floating in a life raft in the middle of the sea with no land in sight? Aarrgghh! (Cue pirate voice.)
Rock poet Patti Smith described the time after her husband died as “mystically terrible.” I concur. I wish I had mystic words of advice to offer after a year in the sorrow hole, but all I’ve got is this:
* Don’t waste time trying to prepare for what life will be like after your person dies. It’s nothing like you imagine. You can’t get a leg up on it. Give your energy to the present instead, while your person is still here.
* Lean on friends. Don’t be embarrassed if they have to slice and butter your breakfast muffin and put in on a plate in front of you because you are too shell-shocked to feed yourself. Or be embarrassed, but accept the muffin anyway.
* Remember hard; booze sparingly; and invest in Kleenex and Visine that you place in strategic “sob stations” around the house.
Eric, of course, would add that we should “Be kind and help others” no matter what our current state of sadness, stress or distraction.
It’s hard to believe it has been a year. It ticked by fast. It ticked by slow. It ticked by. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
[Sidebar on Vonnegut, whom Eric loved: Eric named one of his bands Billy Pilgrim after the “so it goes” character in Slaughterhouse-Five. Unbeknownst to him, another 90s band also was using the name, and their record company paid Eric’s band around $7000 for rights to the name. Nobody paid Vonnegut, but Eric thought the author would smile at how Eric’s small-time band parlayed the name into copious beer, mushrooms and Nutty Buddy bars.]
Awfully weird to "heart" this post, and e would mock me/us in doing so. Love you love e. See you in August. I want to hold one of his guitars.
And I can't believe we've been reading these beautiful pieces for a year. Much love in this next one.