Today is always a rough day for my family. I’ll probably delete this later, but for some reason I want to talk about a few things. Seven years ago I was in France for a WHO meeting. I was excited to be speaking and to be with some old friends and to meet some new folks.
I had spent the day with @AnantBhan walking around a lake and taking photos. I was in bed and I was about to turn off the ringer on my phone when my wife texted. I had already said good night to her already half an hour before. But something was wrong.
She got a call from her dad. He had come home from work and found her mother on the floor. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he called an ambulance. Something was seriously wrong but we didn’t know what.
I had been awake a long time by this point. I had flown in that day and was trying to get on local time. But how could I go to sleep not knowing what was happening? I left the ringer on and tried to close my eyes. Then another text.
Tracy’s dad was in the emergency room and things were serious. She was texting me while talking to her dad. They thought her mother had maybe had a stroke. How bad was it? Maybe it wasn’t serious? Then another lul and I drifted off.
My phone woke me up. Another string of texts. It was bad. The stroke was major. I’ll never forget the words when they came across—she is dying.
What am I supposed to do? It is now late at night. No one is up. I’m supposed to give a talk the next day. But I have to leave. You have to come home.
I’m up on my phone looking at how to change my ticket. I tell Tracy I’ll come back as soon as I can. But nothing leaves until morning. So I have to sleep and then leave.
In the morning I find Mark Sheehan and tell him that he has to give my talk and I take him through my slides and I borrow a phone I can use as a phone from someone at WHO and arrange a flight and I’m apologizing to everyone for leaving and eventually I’m in a car on the way to
the Geneva airport and I don’t remember anything until I’m on a plane back to the states and the last text I get from Tracy is that things are really bad and that I need to hurry home which I’m trying to do but “hurrying” involves sitting in a seat, on a dark plane for 7 hours
The next thing I remember, really, is waiting in the office at my son’s elementary school. They called him out of class.
Tracy was in Virginia now and I had just gotten home. Josh was in 2nd grade. We walked outside and he looked up at me
Tracy was in Virginia now and I had just gotten home. Josh was in 2nd grade. We walked outside and he looked up at me
and he asked if his Grammie was dead and we sat down on a bench and he cried and I cried with him. He was so small. So innocent. I remember his hair in the wind and the tears on his cheeks and I remember saying to him
that grammie loved him very much and that she would always be with him in his heart and I remember him saying that it wasn’t fair and holding onto him and hugging him because I needed to hold into him.
At the funeral, you would be ok. You would be standing with a group and talking. But then someone new would arrive. A family friend. And they would see you and their eyes would fill with tears and they would hug you and you would lose it again and that was a cycle
that kept repeating. But people came together and they shared stories about good times, good memories, moments of sunlight and humor and the little connections that enliven a life and bind people together across years.
And some of these people had already known loss. This wasn’t the first person close to them to pass. Sometimes you could tell by a look in their eyes. It was a look of profound sadness and openness and understanding. Because, you see, death is a constant in life.
No matter who you are, where you live, what you have accomplished, your achievements or your sins, the people you love will pass away, as one day so will you. And you can’t really express that. You can’t make someone know what that’s like.
the loss of a loved one creates is a hole in your life, and in the lives of everyone who loved them and that common experience creates a bond that links people together. And you can tell when people have been in that place because they are with you in a different way.
I was glad that nobody ever said “I know what you are going through.” Because I don’t think that’s true. I think a person can know loss and because of that they can know how to be with you. But we are each fundamentally alone with loss and I don’t think I can comprehend your
loss. Sometimes the point isn’t about understanding or comparing. Death takes something from you that you yourself may not understand, and I think that experience is unique to each person each time it happens.
I feel this most profoundly with my wife and my kids. My wife lost her mother. My kids lost their Grammie. In every life that’s a mixture of sorrow and regret, unfinished business, the bad memories mixed in with the good. But for my kids it was more like
the brightest shining star was plucked from the sky.
I think about all of these things on this day. We usually go out to dinner or to a movie or something to keep our minds off of the shadow in the room. Part of what is hard is the thought of the missed birthdays for the kids, the milestones, the things that would have been.
After my friend and mentor John Arras died I remember sitting at my computer one day and getting some piece of good news and thinking, “I need to tell John about this” only to realize in a flash that I would never be able to share something like that with him ever again.
The paradox in all this, for me, is that death is a fundamental incommensurable. You deal with it alone, you confront it alone, and you one day experience it alone but this is a universal truth, a part of the shared experience and shared plight of every human ever.
Loss has made me more humble. Life is fragile and fleeting, a borrowed treasure you cannot keep no matter the depth of your desire. While you have the people you love, show them your love. Make memories they can carry with them. Invest in compassion
