Saying Goodbye

December 13, 2020, Freeport

“Gigi, did you know that the Japanese pilots who bombed the ships in Pearl Harbor were told the day before the bombing to say goodbye to their families and the people they love?”

Finn, who turned eleven three days before December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, drops this question into the damp air between us as we walk in the woods collecting different species of moss for a moss garden we are making as a present for a friend.  He commandeers the trowel, only allowing small sections of moss to be taken from any clump.  “They need to stay together,” he admonishes me when I try for a little larger heist.  By the time we have collected enough pillow moss and fern moss for our project, he has, in one breathless monologue, recounted a brief history of the development of the nuclear bomb and its role in defeating Hitler and ending WW2, narrated the story of Jewish women and children packed into trains and sent to concentration camps, speculated about what would happen to the planet if hydrogen bombs were dropped on its cities, and weighed the odds of whether or not humans could survive on Mars. 

During times of grave threat to people and institutions, poets and artists translate the unconscious fears and hopes of the times into images and stories so that we can more readily make sense of the moment. By the time we get back to the house, Finn’s stories have taken me on a dizzying walk through the forest of this moment’s unconscious.  While taking place in the past, I think his stories encapsulate some of the emotional authenticity and truth of experience of the 2020’s.  They speak to the grave and terrifying possibility of the loss of democracy our country is facing. They address the grief for the massive losses suffered from the mishandled response to our war on the pandemic.  They hold the racism of this moment and the dire threat to the planet from climate change.  And too they hold the hope: In the words of Gary Snyder, the poet, Stay together. Learn the flowers. Go light.   

This week began with the unexpected and sad news of the death of one of my clients, whom I have known for a long time and cared for a great deal.  This client died not from covid, but from some other cause.  Because of the nature of my confidential relationship, I will necessarily have to grieve her loss from a distance and alone.  But, the loss brings me in connection to the thousands and thousands of people who, because of the runaway death toll of this pandemic, are grieving the death of a loved one from afar.  Another client, whom I saw for the first time since we were both young and unwrinkled in the 90’s, related the story of her husband’s death last July.  Frail and suffering from dementia and coronary disease, he fell one night. Unable to get him up, she called the ambulance.  In the dark, she followed the ambulance to the hospital but got lost on the way there.  By the time she arrived, he had been sedated.  He never regained consciousness.  She never got to say goodbye. 

Say goodbye. Say goodbye.  The phrase resonates and provokes.

Say goodbye to my client. Say goodbye to the thousands of people dying every day from the pandemic, to the assumptions about democracy’s health and wellbeing which I have banked on for three quarters of a century, to nature as I knew her as a child: inexhaustible and infinite. Say goodbye to the pre climate change planet with the oceans in their place and the winters cold and bracing and the forests rich and breathing.  Say goodbye to the blindness and guiltlessness I carried about what it means to be Black, to the idea that my neighbor and I are not at war about how we understand the threats we face to our lives and our future, to the idea that these threats will be solved before I die. Say goodbye to a country fueled by good manufacturing jobs, by union solidarity. Say goodbye to the idea that we discovered America, that it was empty when the first explorers arrived and that we didn’t steal from and kill millions of Native Americans in order to claim this land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me.  Say goodbye to the idea that, as Americans, we are  #1. 

Say goodbye to normal.  The way forward will look nothing like the path behind us.  It is, like Finn’s breathless monologue, overwhelming.  I don’t want to hold all this grief by myself, but I understand if you, reader, do not want to hold this loss with me this morning, on this almost darkest day of the year.  Perhaps, we can wait till the light comes back in February, or till we have a vaccine.  Or perhaps there is no time to wait. 

“Americans are very bad at grieving,” another one of my clients who isn’t from this country, said this week. “I agree,” I said.  

My theory is that as children of immigrants we are all descended from someone who has packed her bags, said goodbye to her grandmother, her family plot of land, the apple tree beside the farmhouse, and left her country for good.  Our ancestors had buckets of grief but, with little hope of ever returning, dealt with the grief of that leaving by iron clad denial. They looked forward, idealized individualism and self-sufficiency.  They didn’t cry.  They didn’t examine their choices. They didn’t consider what price they’d paid by leaving their country and family.  They just marched forward into the bright Western sun of the American Dream. 

The jig is up.  There’s no place to march. There are no new shores to reach.  Stay Together. Learn the Flowers. Go Light.  Together we can hold the pain. 

My client who said Americans are lousy at grief isn’t from this country, but from one which has had to come to terms with its own guilt and grief in order to reclaim what is important to its people.  And her country has done a good job.  Grief is a great pointer. In saying goodbye to my deceased client, in sitting with my memories and felt experience, I assess what was valuable about our relationship, about this person and what this person leaves behind.  It helps me prepare too, for my own death, to think about what I need to do differently.  I am going to leave open her time slot on my calendar for a few more weeks.  Sit in the dark with the loss. 

Say goodbye.