I’m mourning a particular and overwhelming loss. Just after I hit send on my last newsletter, I got a strange call from a friend of my mom’s. I knew what would happen next, while I silently prayed it would not. Three hours later I was talking to a cop about what would happen with my mother’s body.
I wrote a kind of interim eulogy of her I shared on Instagram, which I share again with you at the end of this email. I hesitated at first to bring this news into my “professional” world. Her death will color every part of me, as her life did, so I am taking the risk.
As I sit more with this grief, I am struck by how familiar it feels.
I am fairly attuned to conversational elephants. Working with sharp and ambitious people is impossible without developing a sixth sense for what is going unsaid. M. John Harrison calls this device in his fiction “Dialogue that doesn’t say what it means, although what it means is clear enough.” Our real lives—especially at work—are filled right now with conversation that really doesn’t say what it means.
Today we all swim in a mounting flood of losses: of the plans we had, of kids’ years of development, of weddings and funerals delayed, of the elders and friends who have passed on, of the simple pleasure of dinner with the people we love. Losses by the hour! Yet when I talk to entrepreneurs and collaborators recently, we say little beyond a “when this is over” lament.
Grief surrounds us and yet we fight tooth and nail to deny it. Francis Weller writes about this contradiction in contemporary society generally, yet his words feels crafted to this past year:
The accumulation of losses are pressing on our psyches and demanding that we engage the multiple sorrows that are enfolding our world and our lives. This crack in our denial is one of the most hopeful signs I see for our planet. We are beginning to take in the wider expanse of loss that is happening in our culture and our ecosystems. In addition to our personal wounds and losses, we are hearing the earth itself calling for our attention and affection, our care and action.
… The interweaving of personal and planetary losses has left many of us feeling uncertain, anxious, and ultimately heartbroken.
… This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation.
Weller’s call is one I want to share with you: To run at that crack in our denial. To try to embrace grief, metabolize it in our communities, our work lives, and our selves.
I don’t pretend to have the script for any of this, but my particular grief calls me to reach out and ask about yours. Grief deserves its due space, and I won’t cede this fertile ground to trite lessons of how we learned to “stay productive” in this thousand Tambora year.
About my mom
My mom died in early January. I wasn’t prepared—to ask the police hundreds of miles away to find her body, to write her obituary, to tell her siblings and oldest friends, to try to mourn in this isolation. Not prepared at all. She died painlessly in her sleep: a thin solace.
You feel compelled to hoard grief like this, afraid to share it. But it’s time I try.
I loved her fiercely. Ours wasn’t the easy story of “best friend and inspiration!” I read here every mother’s day. Addiction and incapacitating depression were frequent interlopers in her life. She doubled the hurt by hiding it. She often made me miserable, and I love her no less.
I was born when she was still a kid herself, a few years after my dad took the Polaroid here. She didn’t even make it to 60. The past five years, I have dedicated a piece of my heart to trying to save our relationship and, in a way, her. It felt like the fitful start of something bright, now cruelly extinguished.
Archie made dinner last night in a red tin my mom gave him last summer. I had offhandedly mentioned his pandemic experiments with Julia Child, and one day this enormous red soufflé pan just showed up. Packing her desk, I found a post-it with “Archie’s birthday - June 10” underlined three times. There were days last year when she could hardly get out of bed. But the person I love? That mattered.
“You’ve been my biggest cheerleader these past few years,” she said in one of our last conversations. It was only pennies of payback for a lifetime of her being mine.
I love you, Mom, and I’ll never stop missing you.
Matt, this is both heartbreaking and beautiful. I'm so sorry for your loss. 😭 There is so much that we collectively need to learn to grieve better. My wife and I lost our son in 2015 and are still wounded and trying to make sense of it. Your meditations here are both beautiful and healing to read.
Matt I’m sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing this- what you wrote is so beautiful and raw and real love. ❤️