Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  When I finish, I look up and find Kessler regarding us gravely. “How old was your daughter when she died?” he asks me.

  “She was two,” I tell him, surprised by the ripples of shock that pass through the room; we have heard already from people whose adult children have hanged themselves, who have died as teenagers from cancer.

  “Was she ill?” Kessler asks, and I feel that familiar anticipatory messenger’s dread.

  “No. A brick fell from the eighth story of a building and hit her.”

  I hear gasps. From the corner of my eye, I see that dog of self-pity, trotting up near me and wagging its tail: Even in this room, with these people, you’re still a rock star of grief, it says, cocking an eyebrow. Even these shattered people can’t imagine being you. How about that?

  “That is a terrible story, and I am sorry to learn it,” Kessler says. He pauses, then adds, “You sound angry. Are you angry?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I feel the dangerous heat come out of my voice, pulling tears with it. “I’m angry all the time now. I never used to be. I’ve always hated anger. Everything bad I’d ever seen happen in my life was because someone was angry at someone else. Anger makes people hurt each other. I didn’t want anger in my heart. Now I live with it constantly. I feel like I am going to choke on it.” I am crying now. “I feel like less of a human. I feel like I have cancer.”

  “Of course you are angry,” Kessler says. “I am angry for you just hearing this story. Could you both do me a favor, please? I’d like you to come up to the front of the room.”

  I glance over at Stacy to read her eyes, which have gone opaque with panic. Thanks to me, we are entering her worst nightmare in slow motion. Asking Stacy to “please come up to the front of the room” is a bit like inviting an ant to please step underneath this magnifying glass, or to please willfully place your hand into this wood chipper. We slowly stand and file our way through the center of the rows of folding chairs.

  “I’d like to do some anger work,” Kessler says. “We have all these ideas about anger in our society—that it’s bad, that it’s dangerous, that we should suppress it. It’s natural to be angry, and frankly it’s healthy. We feel anger for a good reason, and it only makes us feel sick or lash out when we deny it and fail to let it loose into the world.”

  He turns to me. “Jayson, you said that you thought anger hurt people, and I don’t think that’s true. I think suppressed anger hurts people. I think anger is a positive emotion, and we only truly let go of it when we honor it.”

  He has cleared some space in the front of the room, and he bounds over to the corner, where there are yoga props, returning with two fat, soft rectangular support pillows and handing them to us. “Pounding pillows is a classic technique for releasing anger,” he says. “Here’s what I want you to do; actually, here, I’ll show you.” With that, he leaps down to his knees with startling alacrity, and he raises both of his fists above his head like a comic-book villain cursing the heavens and brings them down, rhythmically, as he screams: “IT JUST! ISN’T! FAIR!”

  I catch Stacy’s eyes again, which have widened further as the scope of our exposure becomes clear. Kessler jumps back up, dusting off his knees, and holds out the pillow, expectant: “Here. Here you go. Go on!”

  This has gone beyond Stacy’s worst nightmare into absurdist territory. My throat is constricting with guilt, but the laws of group dynamics are working, and the two of us kneel, slowly and queasily, on the small wooden pallet that sits in front of the room. There are blankets folded over double to cushion our knees. Then we look up at him helplessly, like children awaiting instructions from a kindergarten teacher.

  “OK, now I want you to think of something to say,” he says. “What makes you angry? What do you hate?”

  I think for a second. “I hate happy families,” I tell him. “Whenever I see a family taking a walk, or a father with a child on his shoulders, all I can feel is rage and hatred. I hate them. Sometimes I actually wish something terrible will happen to them, and then I feel nauseated; how did this get inside of me?”

  “Well, what right do they have, to have a child when you’ve lost yours?” Kessler shouts. “I want you to say it now, and hit the pillow as you say it: ‘I hate happy families!’ And for support, we’re all going to say it with you. Ready? One…two…three!”

  The walls nearly shake as the crowd shouts along with me, but I might as well be alone for all I notice it. “I hate happy families!” I scream, slamming my hands into the softness, feeling them sink.

  As I pound, I feel currents loose themselves in me. Violence, I sense, has been lurking inside of me. I slam and howl in a roomful of adults, and as I do, a buried dream—one I’ve had more than once but haven’t allowed to dislodge from the lowest rungs of my subconscious—bubbles up.

  In the dream, my anger becomes a person—a man, midthirties and white like me, nondescript. He is probably a composite of all the healthy, rested, and contented men I pass on my morning commute. In the dream, I find myself doing profound, monstrous violence to that person. I kneel on this protesting man’s chest, my knees cutting off his airway and his face turning beet red, his eyes pleading with mine as he splutters. Rearing up deliberately, I hit him, hard, in the nose and feel the thin bones give way instantly, crunching into softer viscera beneath. I hear him scream, hear liquid fill his mouth and turn his cries wet. I pound and I pound. My fists glisten. The face below me becomes unrecognizable. In my dream, I let out a warlike scream, as if to notify the world around me: it cannot take from me and expect me to remain mute.

  I am slamming the pillow repeatedly with both fists now. I sense Stacy is somewhere behind me. She hovers over her pillow, her hands curled into reluctant half-fists, a passenger on a journey I have signed us up for.

  “Stacy, what are you angry at?” Kessler demands.

  She looks stricken. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Well, come on!” Kessler says, goading her. “Your daughter was killed! What kind of world do we live in that would allow that to happen?”

  Even with blood racing in my temples, I tense and turn around, snapping instinctively at Kessler: “Don’t YELL at her!”

  “Well, the building was a center for seniors, and now when I walk around, I feel…sometimes, when I walk past older people, I have a hard time…”

  She falters, and my throat constricts. I feel like I am watching her thoughts withdraw into her preverbal cortex like a tape measure zipping shut.

  She takes a breath. “They just…they make me angry sometimes. But what am I supposed to do? I can’t go around saying ‘I hate old people,’ ” she says, letting out a nervous little laugh.

  “Sure you can!” Kessler cries, pouncing on the line. “You absolutely can. Everyone here knows what that means. You don’t really hate old people. You hate the time that they have; you hate that they have lived full lives while Greta’s was cut short. Everyone is going to join with you now; why don’t you pound the pillow and scream ‘I hate old people!’ ”

  Stacy’s eyes widen in horror.

  “Are you ready?” he demands, and then counts, “One…two…three…I HATE OLD PEOPLE!”

  I look at the room and see a silver-haired woman in the front row, holding a pillow and screaming along. “I hate old people!” she hollers, the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. Some, unable to help themselves, laugh. I do, too, even as I kneel like a penitent on the floor in front of them. We have become some sort of infernal rally, mobilizing to stick it to all those old people and happy families. My hands are warm, and my face flushes with pleasure.

  “You see the power anger can have,” Kessler observes. “When we stop to release it, and to feel it, it can set us free. Now, I’d like to thank Stacy and Jayson for being so brave. If anyone else wants to follow their example, I’d like to invite everyone to grab a pillow and take a seat an
ywhere they would like on the floor. Everyone is free to shout whatever they want, at whatever time; the important thing is that you get it out of your system.”

  I watch in wonder as nearly all the chairs empty, and men and women station themselves in corners. Two women come up to the front and plop their pillows directly in front of us, on the wooden raised pallet.

  “OK, is everyone ready?” Kessler calls. “On the count of three, I’m going to ask everyone to just let go of everything they have. Put all of your anger into that pillow, and shout whatever comes to your mind. OK? One…two…three!”

  The room erupts. In the far left corner, a stocky, intense man begins screaming about his in-laws. I can’t make out if his dead loved one is a son or his wife. A woman next to him wails and pounds as she rails against her dead mother for leaving her with her sister. “I’ve always hated her, and now you have left me with her to go through all of your shit!” she shrieks. Directly in front of me, a woman rages against her husband, who committed suicide with no warning signs after decades of marriage. “Why did you leave me here alone, with this house I can’t sell!” she howls, pounding with both hands and sobbing abjectly.

  The air is charged and tingling in a way that reminds me of weather events. The energy being unleashed here feels capable of lifting cars, ripping up fence posts, upturning trees. I sit back on my haunches, slackened and vacated completely, as I listen to the squall. I close my eyes and think of watching lightning storms from my mother’s lap on our front porch: I am witness to impressive, elemental violence, but I am safe and warm inside of it.

  I look back at Stacy, whose eyes are shining and cheeks are pink; unbidden, we grin at each other.

  * * *

  After the pillow pounding, we all stand around, mixing warmly with strangers. “Guys, I’d just like to say that I am touched by your bravery,” a dark-haired woman in a cowled sweater and loose-fitting pants says, touching Stacy’s elbow. She is here, we find out, mourning her husband, who isn’t even dead: years ago, he had been bitten by a mosquito and contracted West Nile. It had destroyed his mind and turned him, as she says, “into a two-year-old with adult strength.” He became dangerous, and she moved him to a full-time facility. Her mother-in-law accused her of abandoning him and hasn’t spoken to her since. “It’s time that I moved on from him,” she says sadly. “The man I married died years ago.”

  Grief, I am learning, is a world you move into—a world of softer voices, gentler gazes, closer observation, heightened compassion. It is, in many ways, a beautiful and redemptive place to spend time, and everyone at Kripalu has given themselves over completely to it by now. There is beauty here, all around us—in this woman’s watchful compassion despite her own heavy life, and in the immediacy and warmth in which we find ourselves responding to her. If you allow it to be, grief can be a soothing stone temple where you hear only the murmured echoes of your own voice and the voices of your fellow travelers. None of us is expected to accomplish anything concrete while we are here, or to rise to any particular occasion. The mundanities have burned off, and only ultimate meaning remains.

  Before we leave, Stacy works up the courage to approach Maureen. Over three sessions in two days, we have received no word from Greta. We had hoped Callie, Kevin and Melissa’s daughter, might find Greta in the room and hold her hand; perhaps the two of them together could make themselves known to Maureen. But every time her eyes dilated, scanning the crowd, they alit and focused on someone else; another attendee got to have a message from the beyond. The weekend is over now, after a group photo, and people are starting to drift into the hall, to the doors. I feel Stacy yearning next to me, and I turn to her: “You should go,” I urge. She stands up and wanders over to Maureen, who is chatting with someone by the podium up front.

  Stacy returns a few minutes later, her eyes clouded and battling disappointment.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “She didn’t get much,” Stacy says sadly. “I told her our story, and she held my hand. She said she was just getting little flashes, no words.”

  I press her. “She didn’t see anything? What kind of flashes? Did she get a picture of anything?”

  “The one thing she said she saw clearly was a balloon. One balloon. I don’t know, does that mean anything to you?”

  I am electrified by this. “Stacy, oh my god,” I say. “Don’t you remember? The day on the rooftop.”

  The previous summer, Stacy and I had done a yoga class on a roof deck every Thursday. The teacher lived on the top floor of a six-story building looking over Coney Island Avenue, and her apartment, improbably, had a wraparound deck. From the remove of the deck, even Coney Island Avenue felt serene. We would go every week, after work, gazing up at the blue as music played softly from her iPhone, plugged into a portable speaker. Her six-year-old son, Justin, would occasionally break loose from whatever movie was keeping him occupied to come outside and run across all the mats, shouting. Sometimes her dog would come outside and yap at us in savasana, our eyes closed and our limbs melting. But the happy mess of her life felt integrated seamlessly into everything, and after class we would eat fresh fruit and watch the setting sun burn the rooftops on the skyline.

  One such class, we were on our backs, twisting to one side and gazing up, when I spotted a purple balloon, a single dot, sailing clear across the cloudless blue sky. I pointed to it and quietly said to Stacy, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, “That’s Greta,” and Stacy began sobbing unaccountably next to me. She felt the truth of it.

  Sitting at Kripalu, I feel the chill pass through Stacy as it passes through me. Greta was obsessed with balloons—specifically, the way they flew away from you. It was one of the first lessons I taught her about lack of control. We were around the corner from our building, lingering on some interesting crack in the sidewalk or at one of the skinny trees, when a couple with a toddler pushed past, their stroller festooned with white balloons, catching Greta’s eye. The mother, kindly, untied one and handed it to us, and I tried to tie it to Greta’s wrist. She was having none of it; she was going to hold on to the string.

  “Well, then you really gotta hold on tight, OK?” I told her, feeling the comical inevitability of what would happen next.

  Sure enough, Greta took two steps before her grip loosened, and the balloon sailed up and nestled in the crook of a branch. Watching that slow-motion second of pre-meltdown pass over her stricken face, I stepped in to flood her with chatter.

  “Look, Greta, the balloon flew up—up into the sky!” I pointed up at the balloon with great interest, as if the balloon’s travels were the most interesting thing in the world, a natural phenomenon we might study together. “You had it in your hand, and then it went out of your hand, and now it’s up there! Up there, in the tree! It flew away up into the sky!”

  I kept repeating this, tracing the journey for her, treating the loss as matter-of-fact, one more thing we might chat about. Her face softened and grew pensive, her eyes deepening, and she said, tentatively, “It flew away? Up into the sky!”

  Whenever anything was lost after that—her pacifier (which was hidden rather than lost, since she grew interested in it only when she pretended to be a baby), her milk bottle, a tiny stuffed doll, a toy car—that was how she processed it. “It flew away—up in the sky!” she would exclaim. The balloon was an object lesson about impermanence—the way of all things—that never left her.

  “Pay attention to signs,” Maureen had said in her final session with us, addressing the group. “You have to try to relax and accept them, be receptive. You have to turn off your skeptical mind, because that’s something we all do—‘Oh, well, of course I saw that penny on the street with the birth year of my father, it’s just spare change’—even if you’re not wrong, you’re not going about it the right way. Seeing signs is about receptivity. You have to learn to be receptive. The spirits, they are always trying to reach us, but they ca
n only do it with little signs like that. If you’re not looking out for those signs, you’re going to miss the opportunity to hear from them.”

  For the first time since Greta died, Stacy and I feel the curtain separating us from her spirit parting.

  We drive home in awe. We see the skyline of the city approaching us, and we feel as if we are reentering it from another dimension. We pledge to keep this spirit alive in us, even as the city seeks to deafen it.

  Four

  searching for home

  RETURNING FROM KRIPALU, WE ARE FACED finally with the rootlessness of our lives. It is nearly Thanksgiving, and for the past six months we have lived for nothing. The absence of meaning has been comforting in a way. We must like the feeling, because we keep doubling down on it: having lost Greta, it seems, we are experimenting with how much of ourselves we can harrow away and still technically exist.

  First to go was our home. Greta was everywhere in it, padding agreeably around every corner. Being in our apartment where she was not, walking past the closed door of her empty bedroom and averting our eyes to use the bathroom, was unendurable. The grief books all said not to make any radical changes for at least a year after catastrophic loss. We quickly decided this was bullshit.

  By July, Stacy had taken the lead, sorting real estate listings according to price, to neighborhood, to number of bedrooms, to condominium vs. co-op. In moments of great transition in our lives, I tended to become cargo: Stacy would plot the course, and if I had the presence of mind, I scrambled for the rudder. There was something spiritual in her ability to map the contours of our future, to trace its corners and wrestle with its logistics, before it came into view. There has to be something up ahead in this blackness, so let’s start taking measurements.

  Her real estate search occupied most of her free hours, and the rest of her time was spent getting rid of paint cans, old sweaters, electronics. The clutter that I had pushed to the top shelves of our closets on her orders suddenly began whispering to her, and I found myself on a ladder, dragging it all back down to the carpet. We dropped bags of our old clothes at recycling; we got rid of stray connectors and RCA cords. At night, we sat on the couch as Stacy scrolled through listings. We liked this floor plan; we didn’t like how old that building was; there had to be a reason that one was that cheap; oh my god, the maintenance on this building was insane. “I only want to throw things away and look at real estate,” Stacy declared to me.