The Chaos of Grief

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 208
I write in the books I read. Always with pencil, and not necessarily neatly. I put a checkmark next to the poems I enjoy. I write responses to the author in nonfiction books. A couple of months ago, I filled a book with comments to the author and then thought my daughter, Erin Mallory Long, might want to read the book as well, so I wrote her a longer personal letter, again in pencil, covering the flyleaves of the book. Sometimes, I circle sentences I particular want to find again. Sometimes, the circle repeats itself in one continuous line, forming a vortex of graphite on the page.

Writing is a response to the world. And my writing in books is a response to each of those books. In the few cases that I do not write in the book, it is as if the book never existed. I forget it.

But I won't forget Jonathan Santlofer's The Widower's Tale, a memoir recounting the unexpected death of his wife and the effects he experienced from that death. It is a book, essentially, concerning grief, but also about anger, love, friendship. Santlofer's is a story about rebuilding a self when one is so deeply connected to another that one's soul is hollowed out by the loss of another.

Such stories interest me, even though I have never experienced quite this level of loss. When my mother died, I was shellshocked for a few months--a surprise, since I wasn't close to her. I've suffered other losses somehow similar to Santlofer's. Life is loss (as I wrote while finishing his book). There is something about a trauma such as this that reveals the self, that cracks open the hard carapace of the normal human and shows the person within.

And I want to see those people.

There is a story to how I came to read this book. My wife, Karen Jamison Trivette, had scheduled us to attend a book signing uptown, the book having something to do with Fred Pomerantz, a dress manufacturer, and an icon of New York's Garment District from the 1920s and '30s. Somehow, the book in question had something to do with the collections Karen oversees at the Fashion Institute of Technology, so I assumed the book was a history of manufacturing or fashion design with some focus on Pomerantz.

Once the author, Andrew Gross, a grandson of Pomerantz, began to talk about his own book, Button Man, I realized my assumption was radically incorrect. The book is a thriller that takes place in New York and concerns the fates of a family, the garment industry, and the Jewish mob. During his opening remarks, Gross noted that "People don't know how much of our history the Jewish mob was." One of the characters in this book is based on that grandfather of his, and he thanked Karen by name in his talk and in his book for help and for giving him to hear his grandfather again, via an oral history, 35 years after his death.

Given the unexpected focus on Karen, I became more interested in the proceedings. I knew why we were there.

During his opening remarks, Gross recognized his family and friends in the room. One introduction he made piqued my interest. He mentioned a friend who had a successful memoir entitled The Widower's Notebook, said a few words about it, and noted the bookstore had copies of it. I didn't catch the friend's name (something beginning with "San"), but I remembered the title. Jonathan Santlofer was sitting angled in his seat so he could see his friend talking, his left arm cocked on the back of the chair, and he waved off the compliments with his right hand. He seemed genuinely a bit embarrassed by the attention during his friend's rightful time in the spotlight. He had a quiet gentleness to him. He seemed, maybe, to continue to carry the weight of his own story.

As soon as the applause ended and the line for book signing began to form, I ran around the store looking for the memoir section. Asked a clerk where it was. Eventually found the section despite the poor directions I had received, only to realize the book was resting almost directly behind where I was sitting, on a shelf facing my back.

I grabbed a copy of the book and joined Karen in line. She was talking to Jonathan Santlofer himself and introduced me as her husband. My response was to show him the book and ask him if he would sign it. He was surprised, but touched, by my gesture but also by Gross's. He noted this was his friend's time for recognition. He also mentioned the book was a big best seller, but he said it without any hint of boastfulness. He said it with an air of humble surprise. I told him that stories of real life interest me the most. What I didn't say is that stories of deep loss have a depth of pain at times that allows people to process their own loss. What I didn't say is that we are all people partially broken by life and trying to move through the world.
Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Title Page
I started to read the book as soon as Karen and I made it home. I'm a slow reader, so I made it only 75 pages in until I decided, near 1 am, that it was time for sleep.

Only rarely do I write true reviews of books. Instead, I write personal essays, sometimes poetic essays, in response to books. The books themselves guide the response but so does the sight of Governors Island right out the window to my left, the clean blue of the sky half-filled with clouds, the dissipation of dozens of white wakes crossing the water of New York harbor.

Only a few minutes into Santlofer's book, I felt the pull of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. In both cases, there is a married couple, a man and a woman, living in Manhattan, both writers (though Santlofer is also an artist), with separate offices to do their work, and one of the spouses dying suddenly at home. Santlofer even writes, somewhere in the book, "In grandiose moments I could imagine we were Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman or Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne."

I had read Didion's book only about a month beforehand, having run across a first edition. I love her work but hadn't read this one. In Santlofer's book, when the EMTs rush in I think of the same scene in Didion's book. At first, I imagine for Santlofer the same arrangement of his apartment I imagined for Didion, but that fades as I slip deeper into his world. Santlofer provides more details. I see his apartment as a unique separateness, his book in the same way, the need for both these books as somehow essential to life. I feel a connection to Santlofer, maybe because we lived near him when we lived in Chelsea. When he writes of the Whole Foods near him, I imagine exactly where he walks through that store. Didion always seemed, to me, to live in the clouds.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Pages 68 and 69
Santlofer writes in simple clean prose. His paragraphs are short, sometimes but a line. And he writes in the present tense about most of the past. He writes like the fiction writer he is. He leaves the reader hanging at the end of many chapters. He foreshadows--and sometimes almost tells us--part of the story he will leave till the end to reveal. He creates tension in his storytelling.

But the tension come most deeply via the emotions that arise from within him, even as these change, as he struggles to make sense of a palpable fact so real, so direct, he has insufficient means to deal with it, sometimes even to comprehend it. Emptiness is not merely ineffable--it is incomprehensible.

He cannot always understand what occurs around him.

His wife's name is Joy, a fact that almost stuns. The first chapter of this book begins with "Joy." Life is ironic, death only more so. What we best understand we least expect. This book is much about how we trick ourselves, how we trick ourselves to survive, how we never survive.

Santlofer's memory shuts down in parts. He cannot remember it all. We wonder if the body can persist if the mind remembers it all. He finds himself suddenly as a man without. A piece missing, he cannot always see a way forward. For much of the story, he swirls among his memories and thoughts, keeping but a precarious purchase to the earth.

A central part of the book is a secondary loss, the missing autopsy that might explain how he lost Joy, that might help him make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. We learn early that he will wait two years for those results. The foreshadowing isn't a shadow; it is a rock. He will battle--his verb--the surrogate's court for two years. I work about 40% of my time in that building, so I have become a part of his story, an accessory after the fact. I cannot extricate myself from the story. I read 75 pages a day, until four days later I am released.

But I cannot release the story.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 52
The book somehow represents the acute pain of traumatic loss without being self-pitying. Instead, it seems preternaturally real. I feel, too hard, his loss and struggle--but from the point of entry of other traumas of my life, other losses. The narrative replays itself as Santlofer attempts to bring order to his memory, but also tries to determine how he could have kept this story from happening in the first place. Huge losses lead to interior irrationalizations: "if I had gone in ten minutes earlier I might have saved her."

He cannot save her. He hasn't saved her. He couldn't saved her. We know this from our perch on Mount Olympus, but he can not yet know this from the foot of the mountain, where the ant-sized humans of the world scurry trying to make sense of the world without the benefit of perspective.

Jonathan also draws, literally, his world for us, primarily portraits, and he displays them within the book. These pencil drawings are filled with depth and contours. Most he has based upon photographs, but his realistic drawings don't merely ape the photos. Details are omitted, details added--a drawing is like a story: it is not the actual event, but a review of that event, a rational representation of that event, something we can understand, a life given boundaries so it becomes comprehensible. In a drawing that includes him, I recognize his face. In the words he writes, I recognize the man I have barely met and cannot say I know. I see these as authentic. He has a real voice.

He presents himself as flawed, yet he has something I cannot say I have the capacity for. He demonstrates, after assiduous effort, self-forgiveness, though he had nothing to forgive. And he does something more important: he asserts that "men suffer loss as much as women." Without directly stating it, he allows us to know that society as a whole, not just men themselves, somehow believe men are unemotional (except with regard to anger), that men are also humans who suffer the terrible pain of life and death. He gives men the right to feel, and to accept that they can feel, grief.

He even encourages us--though only briefly, in passing, but also as an important final point to a thought--to ask others for help, to struggle through pressures of life not alone but together, to bind ourselves to humans to make, not keep, our spirits strong.

The book, in the end, is more positive than I can muster, which is a blessing it bestows upon us. He says his mantra for grief is "You are doing the best you can."

This year, as I read the books that meant the most to me, intellectually or artistically or emotionally, I wrote a brief squib on the book, chapter by chapter, or night by night, and tweeted them out copying the author when I had their Twitter handle. When I do this, I feel as if I'm demanding attention from the author when the book is about the author receiving our attention. I do it, though, to show the author that someone is intensely consuming their work, to demonstrate how their thoughts engender others' thoughts and help create and disseminate knowledge and connection.

So when I reached the comment about the best one can do, I sent out into the ether, but copying Santlofer, a mantra of my own, one I have often said to my staff--not to be mean, but to be rational, to put the world in context: "The best we can do might not be good enough." Because it might not. Sometimes, we are not smart enough or good enough or skilled enough. Sometimes, we will fail, and sometimes that failure will hurt us dearly or even permanently. Or hurt others.

For emotional matters, I should likely allow a little more leeway. We trick ourselves so deeply into believing falsehoods about our emotional abilities and our emotions as realities that it may be unfair to hold us to account in such situations. Yet we often hold others to account for their emotional failings, and if we do so we must also hold ourselves to at least the same rules, if not more. We should never be kinder to ourselves than to others. Our positive biases must always be outward facing.

Near the end of the memoir--which is filled with stories of dealing with loss, stories of love and hope, stories of struggle, and none I feel a need to recount because I'm here only to think and feel the book back out to the tiny bit of the world that will read this, not to recreate the book itself for them--Jonathan finds himself at a dinner party where most of the diners are criticizing the book In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief Healing and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi.

The book recounts the sudden death of the author's wife, an event nearly simultaneous with the birth of the wife's and writer's daughter. The diners criticize the book, without having read it, because they believe writing about grief exploits the dead, that the book might have been written merely to make money. Jonathan responds to these people on behalf of "grieving men who are not allowed to openly grieve, yet condemned if they do not grieve enough."

Myself, I would like to respond on behalf of people who write and who cannot always process their emotions without the intense intellectual process of writing. I cannot understand what I feel unless I write about it. I need that focus. I need the requirement to write another sentence, to finish a thought I don't even know the conclusion of yet.

This is how Santlofer writes. This is why he writes this. I can hear his emotion, I can feel his heart as it beats. The emotional is almost entirely intellectual. We just fail to accept that. And emotion is something we must process when it is powerful and negative, when it overwhelms us.

I'm reading Luzzi's book now. The opening of it is so painful my intellect recreated far too clearly the pain of his loss, because we all have stores of loss to pull from. I feel the pain of loss that Santlofer suffered. I can see how he tries to process his grief. We even see when he fails, but we see him trying. Too often an empath, I feel these stories too hard. My body shakes a little and my heart beats too fast, right now, just remembering these stories of emptying loss.

So I ask myself why I read these stories, why I am reading them now, why a small handful of gracious words by Gross about his good friend made me rush through a giant bookstore in search of a bookful of loss. I concluded, about a week ago (I wrote myself a note to remember it), that I read these "to feel something." Not that I don't always, not that emotions don't course through my body frequently. It's merely that we need to feel a little bit of pain occasionally to wipe away the process of going through the necessary and automated motions of life: wake, brush, wash, leave, work, eat, return, cook, eat, watch, read, sleep. We need to break out of the cocoon of activity, of productivity, frequently enough so we can understand we are not merely thinking but also feeling beings.

Even if it takes thinking to make it so.

In another context, Santlofer writes "I think: I am thinking too much."

I hear him, but I can never think too much, not matter how hard I try. I cannot feel without it.

ecr. l'inf.