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March 25 - April 9, 2020
Dave used to say that when he met me it was love at first sight, but he had to wait a long time for me to become “smart enough to ditch those losers” and date him.
“Dave isn’t here!” Leslye paused, then yelled back, “Where’s the gym?” I pointed toward some nearby steps and we started running. I can still feel my breath and body constricting from those words. No one will ever say “Where’s the gym?” to me again without causing my heart to race.
Someone asked if I wanted to see Dave to say good-bye. I did—and I did not want to leave. I thought that if I just stayed in that room and held him, if I refused to let go, I would wake up from this nightmare. When his brother Rob, in shock himself, said we had to go, I took a few steps out of the room, then turned around and ran back in, hugging Dave as hard as I could. Eventually, Rob lovingly pulled me off Dave’s body.
The unimaginable. Sitting down with my son and daughter and telling them that their father had died. Hearing their screams joined by my own.
When we arrived at the cemetery, my children got out of the car and fell to the ground, unable to take another step. I lay on the grass, holding them as they wailed.
Grief is a demanding companion. In those early days and weeks and months, it was always there, not just below the surface but on the surface. Simmering, lingering, festering. Then, like a wave, it would rise up and pulse through me, as if it were going to tear my heart right out of my body. In those moments, I felt like I couldn’t bear the pain for one more minute, much less one more hour.
She had lost her husband a few years earlier, her close friend had lost hers a decade before, and neither of them felt that time had lessened the pain. She wrote, “Try as I might, I can’t come up with a single thing that I know will help you.” That letter, no doubt sent with the best of intentions, destroyed my hope that the pain would fade someday.
When Dave died, Adam flew across the country to attend the funeral. I confided to him that my greatest fear was that my kids would never be happy again. Other people had tried to reassure me with personal stories, but Adam walked me through the data: after losing a parent,2 many children are surprisingly resilient. They go on to have happy childhoods and become well-adjusted adults.
Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity—and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.
This book is about the capacity of the human spirit to persevere. We look at the steps people can take, both to help themselves and to help others.
On my daughter’s birthday, I did get off my bedroom floor and smile through her party, where to my total shock I saw that she was having a great time.
Life is never perfect. We all live some form of Option B. This book is to help us all kick the shit out of it.
We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery:2 (1) personalization—the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence—the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.
Hundreds of studies have shown that children and adults recover more quickly when they realize that hardships aren’t entirely their fault, don’t affect every aspect of their lives, and won’t follow them everywhere forever.
Then I brought up the two other P’s: pervasiveness and permanence. We talked about all the good in other areas of her life and I encouraged her to think about how the despair would feel less acute with time.
Adam finally convinced me that I needed to banish the word “sorry.” He also vetoed “I apologize,” “I regret that,” or any attempt to weasel my way past the ban. Adam explained that by blaming myself I was delaying my recovery,
No one thought I should apologize for crying. Once I tried to stop saying “sorry,” I found myself biting my tongue over and over and started letting go of personalization.
Child psychologists and grief experts counseled me to get my son and daughter back to their normal routines as soon as possible. So ten days after Dave passed away, they went back to school and I started going to work during school hours.
For the first time, I had relaxed. As the days turned into weeks and then months, I was able to concentrate for longer. Work gave me a place to feel more like myself, and the kindness of my colleagues showed me that not all aspects of my life were terrible.
After the death of a loved one, only 60 percent of private sector workers get paid time off—and usually just a few days.9 When they return to work, grief can interfere with their job performance.10 The economic stress that frequently follows bereavement is like a one-two punch. In the United States alone, grief-related losses in productivity may cost companies as much as $75 billion annually.
My dire projections put me in good company. When we’re suffering, we tend to project it out indefinitely. Studies of “affective forecasting”—our predictions of how we’ll feel in the future—reveal that we tend to overestimate how long negative events will affect us.13
Assistant professors thought being denied university tenure would leave them despondent for the next five years.15 It didn’t. College students believed they would be miserable if they got stuck in an undesirable dorm.16 They weren
Rabbi Nat Ezray, who led Dave’s funeral, told me to “lean in to the suck”—to expect it to be awful. Not exactly what I meant when I said “lean in,” but for me it was good advice. Years earlier, I’d noticed that when I got sad or anxious, often the second derivative of those feelings made them doubly upsetting. When I felt down, I also felt down that I was down. When I felt anxious, I felt anxious that I was anxious. “Part of every misery,”18 C. S. Lewis wrote, is “misery’s shadow … the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
Rule number one was “Respect our feelings.
Counting blessings can actually increase happiness and health by reminding us of the good things in life. Each night, no matter how sad I felt, I would find something or someone to be grateful for.
I also deeply appreciated our financial security.
We all deal with loss: jobs lost, loves lost, lives lost. The question is not whether these things will happen. They will, and we will have to face them.
“You’ll quit your job. You’ll fall in love. You’ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn’t matter, because none of it will be discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything about your life.
up. “In my experience, survivors want the opportunity to teach and not be shunned because they went through something unknowable,” Merle said. Still, people hesitate to ask questions out of concern that probing will dredge up trauma.
Silence can increase suffering. I only felt comfortable bringing up Dave with a small group of family and friends. Some of my other friends and coworkers made it easy for me to open up; psychologists literally call them “openers.”6 Unlike
Openers are not always our closest friends. People who have faced adversity tend to express more compassion toward others who are suffering.
Adam was certain people wanted to talk about it but they didn’t know how. I was less sure. Friends were asking, “How are you?” but I took this as more of a standard greeting than a genuine question. I wanted to scream back, “My husband just died, how do you think I am?” I didn’t know how to respond to pleasantries. Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
I sought refuge with Mark in his conference room. I told him I was worried that my personal connections with our coworkers were slipping away. He understood my fear but insisted that I was misreading their reactions. He said they wanted to stay close to me but they did not know what to say.
as one man wrote, even though Option A was gone for so many of us, we were not alone.
“I’m here if you ever want to talk. Like now. Or later. Or in the middle of the night. Whatever would help you.” Instead of making assumptions about whether or not someone wants to talk, it’s best to offer an opening and see if they take it.
They thought about how losses later in pregnancy can be far more devastating. When they returned home, the pain was less raw and it was easier to talk about. Allison started sharing her experiences with her friends and found out that several of them had suffered the same loss but never said a word either.
Anthony became a sociology professor and studied the challenges of coming out in immigrant families.15 He conducted interviews and learned about a Filipino teenager who drank from a cup and then watched his mother “throw it away because she thought it was dirty.” When another immigrant son came out to his family, they drove him to Mexico and “took away his passport so he could learn to be a man.
He suggests that “the most powerful thing you can do is acknowledge. To literally say the words: I acknowledge your pain. I’m here with you.
You can’t wish the elephant away, but you can say, “I see it. I see you’re suffering. And I care about you.” Ideally not shouted from an escalator.
CTE has been linked to severe depression and implicated in the suicides of a number of football players. At the time of his death, Owen was the youngest player to be diagnosed and the first with no history of concussions. After learning about the CTE diagnosis, Adam blamed himself less for missing the warning signs of mental illness and started thinking about ways to give more support to students who were struggling.
I learned that at times, caring means that when someone is hurting, you cannot imagine being anywhere else.
Growing up, I was taught to follow the Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. But when someone is suffering, instead of following the Golden Rule, we need to follow the Platinum Rule:6 treat others as they want to be treated. Take a cue from the person in distress and respond with understanding—or better yet, action.
Specific acts help because instead of trying to fix the problem, they address the damage caused by the problem. “Some things in life cannot be fixed.8 They can only be carried,” therapist Megan Devine observes.
I was suffering from so many insecurities that I almost started a People Afraid of Inconveniencing Others support group, until I realized that all the members would be afraid of imposing on one another and no one would show up.
Anger is one of the five stages of grief famously defined by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.11 In the face of loss, we’re supposed to start in denial and move to anger, then to bargaining and depression. Only after we pass through these four stages can we find acceptance.
A friend might say the wrong thing and I would react way too strongly, sometimes lashing out—“That is just not helpful”—or bursting into tears. Sometimes I caught myself and apologized right away.
My anger scared me—and made me need the comfort of my friends even more. Like the people in the stress experiment who were consoled by the simple presence of a button, I needed friends who let me know that even if I was difficult to be around, they would not abandon me.
Self-compassion isn’t talked about as much as it should be, maybe because it’s often confused with its troublesome cousins, self-pity and self-indulgence. Psychologist Kristin Neff describes self-compassion as offering the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to a friend. It allows us to respond to our own errors with concern and understanding rather than criticism and shame. Everyone makes mistakes. Some are small but can have serious consequences. We turn our heads for a split second on the playground at just the moment our child falls. We change lanes and hit the car in our blind
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Self-compassion comes from recognizing that our imperfections are part of being human.
Those who can tap into it recover from hard...
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