Hot & Grieving

Where Do I Go To Scream pt I

^audio version if you prefer to listen!

“Hot and grieving” became an inside joke with myself over the past year and a half, a silly, unserious way of answering the loaded question of “how are you doing?”

“Hot. And grieving!” I would say out loud, or just to myself. It’s the quickest way to say I’m scraping through devastation every single day, but I’m trying really hard to live.

Plus, it makes me laugh.

At the risk of spoon-feeding you, I’ll define what being “hot and grieving” means to me.

Grieving

Starting with perhaps the more obvious half of the title, I am grieving the loss of my beloved, kind, magnanimous, tough and goofy father. He died July 1st, 2023, after a year and half long struggle with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Occasionally people will ask me how he found out he had cancer, whether he was feeling poorly. I reluctantly tell them the nightmarish reality that it was simply routine blood work that revealed an anomaly: he was anemic. From there, a series of tests ensued that we prayed ferociously might reveal only an innocent vitamin deficiency. Instead, they revealed an aggressive cancer with a rare and difficult to treat mutation. Explaining this to people feels like showing up to a birthday party with a lead balloon. “It came out of nowhere…there were no signs…he was otherwise in perfect health…no, we don’t know the cause.”

My dad was strong, handsome and sturdy. He possessed an innate charisma and confidence in the way he carried himself. Those traits combined with his head of wavy white hair often attracted attention from kindly baristas and Delta gate agents. My entire life, I knew whatever I asked him to do, he could and would do happily. He had an engineer’s mind and an artist's eye, though he was neither, officially. I believed he could fix pretty much anything with his hands and his large collection of tools because he proved time and again that he could. More than that, he would do it joyfully, peacefully. He exuded a sense of safety for everyone around him. He was successful in business, often overworking himself, but he was not materialistic and he was unfailingly generous.

It is so strange to lose the strongest person I knew to an illness that never physically revealed itself. I never saw the cancer making him sick, only the treatment. In fact, the treatment is what killed him. My sturdy beacon, a larger than life presence, a father who would have dropped anything to help anyone, snuffed out. Here, then gone. It often feels like he blew away, disappeared from our grasp like sand slipping between the cracks of our fingers. Which doesn’t even make sense because he was surely too powerful for the wind to carry him.

Over a year later, it is surreal to even be writing these words, because it still feels to me as though he may just be on a long trip. I fear that I am in a state of arrest while awaiting his return. Most days it feels as though he died just yesterday. Yet, against all logic, the earth has made over 365 rotations since his departure.

My dad and I were very close, and I was blessed to feel overflowing love from him my entire life. I spent a good amount of time with him in and out of the hospital during his illness. I am now tasked with unpacking and learning to live with the trauma that is inextricably linked with watching someone you love so enormously battle an aggressive, debilitating illness.

I am grieving my father, I am grieving all that he still wanted to do, I am grieving the memories I thought we would be making, I am grieving the family unit I cherished for 30 of my years on earth, I am grieving the life I believed I was living, and I am grieving the person I was before watching my father die.

When you lose a person, it turns out you lose an entire constellation of possibilities. In death, a complex puzzle of inner life can now never be completely uncovered. A magnificent landscape of external creation that once flowed from someone’s mind and hands has permanently halted.

Sometimes, I am self-conscious about sharing my experience, first and foremost because I am not an expert on grief. I have no scholarly qualifications and I am actively living through a loss that has me continuously and rapidly orbiting a complex cycle of emotions.

In the Fall of 2023, I expressed these concerns to a friend of mine who lost her mother when she was a little girl. We were together on an international flight and found ourselves wiping our tears with airline cocktail napkins. She said “But you are an expert on your grief. You’re an expert on being several months out from tremendous loss. Just like I am an expert on my grief. Grief shouldn’t be compared.”

I sought comfort from another friend, sharing with her my fear that opening up about my loss comes across as attention seeking. She texted me:

“Nothing is that serious!! I think it’s great and the attention seeking narrative is an old control tactic for us to continuously feel shame or shame others for seeking connection…I think it’s all an experiment of what makes [me] feel a little bit better than this absolute aching hole inside my chest.”

And moreover, for whatever reason, I feel called to share my writing. In “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” Rick Rubin writes: “Expressing oneself in the world and creativity are the same. It may not be possible to know who you are without somehow expressing it.”

In the past year and a half, I’ve enjoyed posting on social media here and there about my thoughts and feelings surrounding my grief. I’ve had a handful of friends and strangers alike reach out with comments that my experience is resonating with them, and I’ve found that to be one of the only true comforts as I navigate daily uncertainty and despair.

Grief was not meant to be experienced alone, this much I know. Many ancient religious traditions and even animal behaviors point to this being an innate truth. Connection and community may be the only way through.

Which brings me to the other half of this title…

Hot

Am I calling myself hot? Yes, why not! For the love of all that is good, we have to at least think highly enough of ourselves to call ourselves hot. I love to throw the word “hot” around liberally. It’s one of my favorite compliments. Perhaps inspired by Paris Hilton, I find it to be such a visceral accolade. Being hot encapsulates so many things beyond just aesthetic appeal: confidence, vibes, a multifaceted personality, an alluring embodiment of a nuanced internal life.

I just turned 32, and was about 6 months into 30 when my dad died. I am single, dating, living alone, independent, making my way in my career, exercising, journaling, meditating, going out, dancing, traveling. I found that turning 30 brought me a new kind of peace within myself, a greater alignment between my interior and exterior worlds that felt somewhat at odds with the chaotic and tragic circumstances I found myself in.

It would be ludicrous to assert that I am alone in this. My mother and brother are navigating their own mourning parallel to mine. I have a tremendous support system of friends, family, and loved ones. But the phase of life I am in necessitates that I navigate much of this grief journey by myself. When my dad was diagnosed, I had just gone through a breakup of a 4 year relationship. I was 28, and we were all living through a global pandemic. I’ve experienced varying states of momentum, career-wise, romantically, creatively and socially over the past couple of years. And I find myself in this unique space of navigating loss independently - not alone, but not in a family unit where I am the genesis.

I am in the middle of so many things. Constantly in progress. Trying to live life to the absolute fullest while also reconsidering everything I ever thought I knew about the very nature of existence. Accepting I don’t have many answers and have to find a way to proceed in spite of that fact. Sometimes I am out dancing with friends and acquaintances, making small talk, flirting. And a mere 30 minutes later, I’ll be crying in the car to a friend who I feel safe crying with. Sometimes they’ll be crying with me.

I have to figure out how I tell dates that I only have one living parent, which somehow feels like a betrayal. How can I show this virtual stranger that although I am saying my dad is dead, he feels very alive to me and I wish he would feel alive to you too? I don’t feel like they can know me if they don’t know my dad. But I very much want to let someone know me.

I have to turn my camera off on Zoom because sometimes a work call is too long to get through without an absolutely heartrending thought finding its way into my mind. I balance stepping into my power and purpose and self love and body confidence with questioning how I can ever feel safe again. With knowing that one of life’s few certainties is that the other side of love is loss, loss that hurts beyond belief.

Does this sound hot to you?

Perhaps not. But I hope you understand what I mean. I am a 32 year old teenage girl but I am also so sad. But I find comfort in sunshine and bird calls. But I also have flashbacks in grocery store check-out lines. But I am also going on dates to bowling alleys. But I am also crying behind my sunglasses. But I am also picking out an outfit for a birthday party on Friday. But I am also in therapy working through EMDR. But I am also writing in a shared notes app with friends about what restaurants we want to try. But I am also waking up in the night begging God to help me know peace.

I keep making jokes. I laugh in spite of it all. I have days where I feel hopeless. But I know that loss is the one universal assurance. And therefore, I know it’s something on which we can all connect.

So that is my hope, in sharing these imperfect and inherently underbaked thoughts. I do not wish to come to conclusions or even give advice, but I do wish to share and be honest and hopefully feel less alone. And in my ultimate dreams, help someone else who is hot and grieving feel less alone.

I’m writing to understand. I’m writing for you, my reader, whoever you are, just in case you understand. I’m writing because after years of challenges and impossibilities, writing this, to you and me, is easy. Writing seems to flow in proportion to the magnitude that loss consumes.

I’ve realized in seeking comfort that it is less about hearing the perfect words or perfect advice, and more about feeling seen, heard and understood. I do not profess to be an expert on grief. But in the space allotted to me by these words and the essays that follow, I endeavor to be an honest anthropologist in my own grief experience, processing, feeling and reflecting it back to you here.

Thanks for reading! Coming next week: meditations on nature, Griffith Park, coyotes, and how they saved me.