Everything is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss

by Stephanie Wittels Wach

Driving away from the Hills, I wonder why we even felt it necessary to visit. It wasn’t going to bring you back. I suppose it’s all part of the manic investigative phase, which is missing from the stages-of-grief flowchart.

I keep trying to piece together a timeline, to crack the case, as if this will somehow soften the blow. I go over and over and over the facts like some deranged, sleep-deprived detective:

Even time moves differently now. It used to be measured in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Now, it’s measured before you died and after. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time.

Is it you? Or is this what the grieving do?

Do we need to find meaning in the mundane? Do we need to make connections where coincidences used to occur? Is this what we have to do to keep going?

We’re all human, and we’re all just doing the best we can. In his words: ‘Let’s stop finding a new witch of the week and burning them at the stake. We are all horrible and wonderful and figuring it out.’”

This sort of explosion is becoming more rare as time passes, which is fortunate. It takes so much energy that there would be none left. Mostly, I’m learning to live with the feelings. It’s all very normal now.

It’s not that I don’t want to feel the feelings. I don’t mind the feelings. I welcome them, in fact. I just don’t have anything left to say about them. You’re gone. You’re never coming back. And it sucks. And it hurts. And it will always hurt. And that’s just the way it is now.

I finally understand the meaning of acceptance on the grief chart. It’s not that the bereaved ever accepts the death of the loved one—I will never accept your death—it’s that you come to accept that these really are your shitty, irreversible circumstances. One day, it just becomes clear: this is the way it is now. The delusions, denial, hysterics, depression, torment—it eventually starts to melt into this pit of mush that lives in your stomach and just sort of weighs you down. It’s not even necessarily fueled by emotion any more. It’s just the way your body works now. Like the day you accept that your stomach will never again look the way it did before you grew a child in it. You’re never gonna like it, but you’ll eventually get to a point where you go to the fucking store and buy pants that are the next size up because you have to wear pants. Acceptance.

There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you’re the way you were, and in the next, you’re someone else.

Time is now measured before and after that day.

It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time.

The Greeks called it a peripeteia: a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances. A point of no return.

Change and movement is inevitable. Unstoppable. And tragedy can function like fuel. After surviving The Tragedy, I realized I didn’t give a shit about outcomes in the same way I used to give a shit about outcomes. Because when someone you love with all your being suddenly drops dead, it’s a reminder of a few things: 1. We aren’t in control. 2. Time is running out. 3. Nothing matters. At first, the nothing matters was a sinking ship or a mound of quicksand or a pile of rubble where I sat, paralyzed, for months and months. There wasn’t much to do during that time except for the Irish keening and the crying and the occasional pounding of my fists on the floor. You read the book. But after 365 days of grief, my tears dried up long enough to lift my head and survey the damage, and I realized, I don’t have to sit here forever. It’s uncomfortable—even painful—to live on a pile of rubble. Not sustainable. Unsafe. Devoid of plumbing and pillows. And since nothing mattered anymore (see above), the stakes felt lower in a way. Like I could do anything I wanted to do and be anything I wanted to be. I could revise the script. I had to. Because I was no longer myself. My debilitating sadness started morphing into something empowering. Positive. A freedom and a courage that I’d never really felt to make the most of the time I do have. I started to look at all the things that were weighing me down even before Harris died, the stuff I’d shoved into overstuffed drawers and hidden in the part...