On a Sunday in the late morning, the person I loved and wanted to spend my life with left. On Tuesday early morning I got on a plane back home to Boston by way of Atlanta. And on Wednesday at a downright leisurely time for rowers I got into a double with one of my best friends. After less than 3,000 meters of paddling, my lower back spasmed and I couldn’t move.
I looked up the definition of Spasm a minute ago:
1. pathology a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction
2. any sudden, brief spell of great energy, activity, or feeling
It’s the best word I can think of for what’s been happening in my body, and in my mind and heart, for the past two weeks. And really for longer than that, if I’m honest.
It’s the best word I can think of to describe grief.
Between that terrible Sunday morning and Tuesday 6am when I left Key West, I did a whole lot of sudden, abnormal, involuntary things. I walked the four long blocks between Ryan and Keith’s house and my place 16 times, because I kept forgetting things that I wanted to bring over so I could stay with them instead of being in my home alone.
First my toothbrush, then my razor, then my laptop cord, then a clean t-shirt. I went back one time because I couldn’t remember if I locked my car. I went back again a half hour later because I thought my right front tire might have been too low and figured I should double check. I went back to pack Will’s things. Emptying them out of the closet and drawers. Taking the blanket off the bed and the painting down from the wall. Birthday cards and photos came out of the letterbox my grandmother painted for me when I was little. I put all of it into paper bags from Fausto’s market and left them in the front hallway. I went back an hour later to make sure that they were gone. And they were.
Then I made the walk three more times that afternoon and stood in the empty entryway and waited to cry. Each time when I didn’t, I left and walked the four blocks back to Ryan and Keith’s. I sat in their backyard. I lay down on their couch. I got up and went outside and paced in circles staring at the ground.
I got blisters from my sandals. My hair got sweatier and frizzier. I got sunburned on my face and arms. When the sun set, I booked a one-way ticket to Boston.
And starting at 6am the morning I left, I ducked into bathroom stalls in every Delta terminal from Key West to Atlanta (A, B, and C) to Logan where my dad picked me up, wracked by sobbing fits that came on with no warning and that shook my body until I was slumped against flimsy aluminum walls under fluorescent lighting, too tired to move.
Sudden? Yes. Involuntary? Check. Abnormal? I think it’s fair to say that I looked like a goddamned crazy person.
In the middle of this impulsive travel day, during the second leg of my plane ride home, I listened to a Hidden Brain podcast about grief. The guest, Lucy Hone, is a professor who specializes in the study of it, and she knows what she’s talking about. Seven years ago, Lucy lost her nine-year-old daughter. She and her husband got into their car to head to their country place for the weekend; they agreed to let their daughter ride in a separate car so she could spend the drive with her friend from school, who was headed to the same seaside town they were. The car that Lucy’s daughter was in got t-boned at an intersection by a guy in a truck who ran the red light. Lucy’s daughter was killed instantly. Lucy ID’d her by the sparkly pink Chuck Taylors she was wearing.
The thing Lucy talked about that stuck with me is the difference between Grief Reaction and Grief Response. The best I can understand it, Grief Reaction is a spasm. It comes on suddenly. It’s a pain so acute you can barely breathe. There is absolutely zero that you can do about it. Grief Response is something different. Grief Response, Lucy says, “is pervaded by choice. It’s made up of tiny micro-decisions. Each of those decisions is a chance to ask yourself: is this thing that I’m doing right now going to help me or harm me in my quest to survive this?”
My first 24 hours in Boston I spent in emotional spasm. On my parents’ couch after I landed. In my friend’s spare room that first night. On the walk to the boathouse the next morning in a haze of sleep deprivation and with a stomach that hadn’t kept down solid food for three days. When my back went out 15 minutes after shoving off the dock, the first thing I did was grab the sides of the boat, stabilize my lower body, and wait for a wash of sorrow and sobs to overcome me.
But that’s not what happened.
My friend had me hold the gunwales and get into a comfortable position. He turned our little boat around. Then he rowed me home through the dead-flat Basin. And as he did, I looked around – at the skyline that looks a little different than it did when I left three years ago. At the sun that was nudging its way up and sparkling on the water…that looked just the same as I remembered. And the burst of feeling I had was gratitude. Crazy, crazy gratitude. I was so happy to be back in this place I love, in a little boat that was gliding through the Mass Ave Bridge, with my friend who wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to me.
I’ve had a number of Grief Reactions since that morning on the water. And they’ve hit hard. But in the nine days since my back went out, the vast majority of my time has been filled by definition #2: bursts of energy, activity, and feeling thanks to friends and family who’ve surrounded me with beds to sleep in and food to eat and music to listen to and doctors – real credentialed doctors with actual medical degrees! – to help me heal this mess of a spine and get back to training in a sport I almost gave up. The sport that’s been and given me the loves of my life. In a home I wasn’t sure I could ever come back to. Which right now is the only place I want to be.
At the close of the podcast, Lucy says: “Your grief doesn’t shrink over time. Your life grows larger around it.” For me, in this moment, the spasms have stopped. The stiffness is loosening. And every day that I make micro-decisions to jog (slooooowly) by the river, spend time with my friends, chip away at my work, and pour energy that for two and a half years went into another person, into me, my life grows a little bit larger.
