Thread by @VABVOX

I got a text to do pre-check-in for #TheWife's chemo scheduled for Monday as I always did. A glitch in the system that sent me into a paroxysm of sobbing, calling to her and feeling as if I my heart would explode from the searing pain of her loss. Grief is an undertow.
1/🧵

Sunday has been the hardest day. Sundays have been hard for me since childhood, but this Sunday was excruciating. There was no one here all day. Just me and the vastness of the empty space where The Wife should be. Her presence was so huge, even sick she was so dynamic.
2/🧵

The Wife was so funny all the time. And we were funny together. It got us through the worst times. But our love for each other was huge--a cocoon,but never suffocating. It kept us safe from all the terriblenesses of her cancer,my illness, the relentlessness of homophobia.
3/🧵

The #ClubQ mass shooting took me back to covering the Pulse shooting. The Wife was with me through that. She also nurtured her students through that--they were shaken by the violence and the suddenness. The youngest victim was an 18 year old from Philly who'd just graduated.
4/🧵

We are taught to look away from grief because people's grief is raw and messy and hard to fathom. We don't know what to say, how to be around loss. I want us to learn to be around loss. When I was in 8th grade, the oldest brother of a classmate was killed in a car accident.
5/🧵

A few months later the mother of my closest friend dropped dead of a heart attack at 38. The boy's viewing was at home. The open coffin set up in their enclosed porch. It was pouring rain that day and the scene was shockingly intimate. Even at 13 I knew this was intense.
6/🧵

At the graveside of my friend's mother, her Italian immigrant grandmother was wailing and keening--much like I was just hours ago--and had to be restrained from throwing herself into the grave. It's a scene I shall never forget. But I totally understand the emotions.
7/🧵

We can't protect ourselves from grief--nor should we. Think of all the grief from the pandemic that was hidden from us. I saw Erin Burnett break down on air one night--a woman who had covered wars was interviewing a woman about her husband's death--he was a beloved teacher.
8/🧵

Burnett suddenly sobbed as the woman read a love letter from her husband. The couple had children. Whether it was the similarity of their ages and their children's ages or just the impact of covering the pandemic, it was a moment of total realness and unvarnished emotion.
9/🧵

We need more moments like this. Less dispassionate renderings and more honest emotion. More acknowledgement that other people's losses touch us and also scare us. What if that happens to me? Talk about loss, about grieving,about pain. Maybe that will make it less terrible.
10/🧵

I don't know what to do with my grief and how much of it there is. And so here I am doing what I do--writing. I'm used to telling other people's stories. Now I am telling our story --The Wife's and mine. I know how special she was and lucky we were to have the love we have.
11/🧵