The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  A woman named Trudy arrives and takes a seat next to Marcy. Trudy lost her boyfriend to a sudden heart attack just over a year ago. He died in her arms in the apartment they shared. A few weeks after he died she found an engagement ring he intended to give her, tucked away in his sock drawer. She wears it on her ring finger now and refers to him as her fiancé. She explains that it gives the loss more legitimacy.

  When I say I lost my boyfriend, no one takes it seriously, she says. Calling him my fiancé changes everything. Only then do people think I actually lost something.

  The rest of the group nods along in response to Trudy’s statement.

  Nobody gets it unless they’ve been through it, Sarah says.

  And thus group has begun. We usually begin with a general check-in, unless a spontaneous discussion like this one starts things off.

  It’s true, Marcy chimes in. Did I tell you guys what the woman who sits next to me at work said last week? I’m still furious.

  The group gives a collective head shake, and I settle deeper into my seat.

  She told me that she thinks I’m being really negative, and that if I just focused on happier stuff then I wouldn’t be so sad all the time. I lost my fucking husband, Marcy says.

  I hope you said that to her. James looks expectantly at Marcy.

  No, of course I didn’t. I couldn’t even speak. I just walked away.

  I lean forward now. Marcy, tell us more about how you felt when she said that to you.

  She begins to cry, and James pushes a box of tissues toward her.

  I was so angry, she says, balling her hands into fists. But sad too. I felt so . . . so . . . lonely. Like no one understands what my world is like.

  I can see other members of the group nodding their heads in agreement.

  Marcy’s voice grows stronger as she talks.

  Coming here every week is a huge release. It’s like you guys are the only ones in my life who get it. I can come here and cry and not have to explain anything.

  I feel the same way, Sarah adds. I feel recharged after these meetings, like I can go back out and face the rest of the world.

  Exactly, Marcy says.

  Everyone is nodding now, the conversation unfolding on its own. I lean back in my chair again and steal a glance out the windows. The sun glints off little drifts of snow caught on the sill.

  Even in the midst of all this pain and sadness I see something beautiful. I see a basic human connection. I see a bond created out of loss and love. I see what it means to move forward through life.

  I see how fragile and how strong we all are.

  I DON’T KNOW what happens when we die.

  I’ve spent over a decade thinking about it, and I still haven’t come to a firm conclusion.

  When I was growing up, my parents attended a bland amalgam of Presbyterian and Methodist churches. I went to Sunday school and attended youth groups, but none of it ever resonated. After learning about the role religion played in controlling populations, in my world history class in tenth grade, I came home and told my mother that I was no longer going to attend church.

  Three years later, when she died, I realized I had no idea where she was. In those early years after her death, when I was full of sadness and fear, I decided that she was nowhere. It was easier to believe that she was simply gone, that life was pointless and bleak and that it could be over in an instant. The alternative—that she might really be somewhere else—was somehow more painful to accept.

  As the years went on, my stance softened.

  It happened in small moments.

  I remember standing underneath the inky night sky one night in Wyoming, while driving across the country with my high school friend Laura. The night air was cool and the stars were brighter than I’d ever seen, and life suddenly seemed much bigger than I’d ever given it credit for.

  In that moment I felt humbled—and foolish for thinking my life was so important that it might be all there is.

  The night my father died I held one of his hands in mine as he took his last breaths. I watched his chest rise and fall for the very last time, and when I looked up at his face again, my father was gone.

  He was gone.

  My realization in that moment was swift and simple: we are not these bodies.

  My daughter was born seven years later, on a cool June night in Chicago. I labored for nine hours without medication, and when her slick, hot body emerged from mine I felt every cadence of her arrival.

  I also felt the undeniable presence of a force much bigger than me.

  WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME what I do and I say that I work in hospice, they often recoil in a horror that ushers forth a series of well-meaning exclamations.

  Oh, isn’t that hard?

  That seems so sad!

  I couldn’t do that.

  The truth is that I don’t find it sad at all. When I talk to grieving people, it’s like looking at a negative image—the deeper the grief, the more evidence of love I see.

  After my father died I let the follow-up calls from the hospice bereavement counselor go unanswered, and sought out my own coping methods. Sometimes these involved drinking and losing myself in the people around me, but I was also driven to learn as much about grief as I could.

  I read everything from scientific texts to memoirs about loss. I found myself drawn to movies about death and to information specific to my particular parental loss. I read about trauma and its effects on development. I studied anxiety and how to overcome it. I read about attachment theory and tried to link it to my current relationships.

  I couldn’t help wondering if what I felt was normal. And each time I came across someone else’s story, each time I found reassurance that I wasn’t alone in my grief process, I relaxed a little more.

  I see this happen all the time with the people I counsel. Whenever one of the members of the grief group relates to another, each time one of them registers recognition with another’s loss, I see their shoulders drop just a little bit. I note the slightly audible sigh of relief. Just saying the words “it’s okay to feel sad” can elicit an enormous release of emotions from a grieving person, and with that release comes a touch of peace.

  The bottom line is that there is simply no one way to define grief, but the irony is that almost every grieving person I’ve met seems concerned about whether they’re doing it right.

  There just isn’t a right way to grieve though. There’s no easy way to heal, and certainly no time frame to adhere to. Yet without fail, the majority of people question the way they’re going about it.

  Almost all of them bring up Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief.

  I think I’m in the anger stage, one will say.

  I don’t understand the bargaining process, another remarks.

  I don’t think I’m going through the grieving stages in the correct order.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross herself says, in the opening paragraph of On Grief and Grieving, that “the stages have evolved since their introduction, and they have been very misunderstood over the past three decades. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.”

  The stages are just there to give you a frame to work with, I tell them. You may never experience all of them. You may go through them out of order or sometimes find yourself in more than one of them at the same time.

  More often than not judgments about how to grieve come not from the people who experienced the loss but from the people around them.

  It’s been six months, a friend might say.

  After a year you have to move on, another might opine.

  Even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders allots only two months to grief in its current assessment of the process.

  I know that I constantly considered myself a mess, but now that I’m no longer in the midst of grief,
I can look back with understanding and sympathy at how I reacted to the loss of my parents.

  It breaks my heart to see myself at age twenty-two in New York. How lonely I felt. How afraid I was of myself and the world around me. Of course I was lost in my relationship with Colin. Of course I drank too much. Of course I cried myself to sleep on a regular basis.

  If I’d had someone, anyone, to guide me through those years, to tell me that what I felt was normal, that I wasn’t alone, maybe it would have been different. But if you haven’t been through a major loss, then the truth is that you just don’t know what to say to someone who has.

  I know now that grief is a process, and that to move through it you must give yourself over to it. I fought it for a long time, trying to fill up my life with as many people and distractions as possible. Years after my father’s death, when I finally forced myself to sit through all those baths, I discovered that the grief had never really gone away. It had just been covered up.

  I’ve had people show up to my group with decades of hidden grief in their hearts. One man lost his wife thirteen years before attending the group. Their daughter was six months old when his wife died, and he felt that, in the throes of taking care of an infant, he didn’t have time to grieve.

  Now that his daughter was entering high school he felt that he might have room in his life to attend to those lost emotions. The grief came hard and fast, as though it had never been hidden at all.

  But isn’t that like walking into pain? One of the members of my group asked this question recently when we were discussing how to sit with grief.

  Why would anyone want to walk into pain?

  I know I certainly didn’t. But when I did, I found that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. And once I walked through it, I knew that doing so was much easier than what the effect would have been had I not.

  I will always mourn the loss of my parents, and in the last few years, as I’ve become a wife and a mother, I’ve missed them more than ever. But I’m no longer actively grieving.

  Losing someone you love is akin to a deep physical wound. It will eventually heal but there will always be a scar.

  It’s not that the loss goes away. It’s just that you learn to live with it.

  AFTER THE GROUP CONCLUDES I gather up the boxes of tissues and the sign-in sheet and head back to my car in the garage. I turn off the CD player as I drive home, winding my way through the Chicago suburbs until the yards give way to sidewalks and buildings.

  I live in a quiet neighborhood near Lincoln Square, on the north side of Chicago. Greg and I found this place three years ago, and I will always remember it as the place where I became a wife and a mother.

  In the morning we wake to the sound of ducks quacking on the riverbanks, and if I time it right, every afternoon I can catch a glimpse of a rowing team powering north through the murky brown waters. The apartment itself is sun filled, with hardwood floors and an old art deco stove.

  I park in the garage and climb the steps. I walk in through the back door, and I can hear Greg and Veronica before I see them. They are having an imaginary tea party by the living room windows.

  It’s early afternoon and sun floods the room, capturing them both in a golden light. My young, handsome husband and our beautiful, little daughter.

  There is only a single breath before they become aware of my presence, and in that breath I wish desperately to stop time. I want to live in this moment forever.

  But I know I can’t.

  I know that we will all keep marching forward. That Veronica will one day become a woman. That Greg and I will grow old.

  That all three of us will die.

  But I also think that somehow, somewhere, this moment will continue to exist. That it will spin out across the universe, the three of us, linked by love and by those who have loved us, encapsulated for the rest of time in a perfect bubble of golden afternoon light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s hard to know where to begin thanking the people in my life for making this memoir possible. Creating this book wasn’t just about writing, but about moving forward as an individual with the help of many, many others.

  I’d like to first thank the esteemed group at Penguin, in particular Clare Ferraro and Caroline Sutton, and especially Denise Roy, who is more my idea of a soul mate than an editor. A generous heap of gratitude is due to my agent, Wendy Sherman, who believed in me when others didn’t, and who is a model for the kind of savvy and confident woman that all females should aspire to be.

  I am so appreciative of the team at Advocate Hospice in Chicago, and the members of my Saturday bereavement group. My time with all of you taught me more about life and love than you know.

  I want to deeply thank two of my most influential writing teachers, Pearl McHaney and Joan Dulchin. Pearl, you flung open the door of literature for me, and Joan, you pulled me through it.

  The amount of friends and family I want to acknowledge is vast. A big thank-you to writer friends Jillian Lauren, William Richter, and Brad Listi for helping me along the publishing path. Thank you to Jessica Herman, Emilie Zanger, Elizabeth Garrett, and especially Lien Ta for early reads and valuable criticism on these chapters, and for being the best kind of friends a girl could ask for. Speaking of girlfriends, Ashley Alexander, Laura Dawson, Channah Gray, Amber Hopper, Abigail Freeman, and Francesca McCaffery must also be thanked for their fierce love and support through the years. Holly Bond Farrell and Lucy Curtis, you both get a special shout-out for seeing me through some of the worst years, and loving me despite—we’ll always have Bangkok. Liz Gillies, if I have a sister in this life, it is you.

  Additionally, a hearty thanks must be sent out to all of my devoted blog readers. Your comments, e-mails, and support over the years have been astounding and have filled my life with a strange magic that only strangers over the Internet are capable of creating.

  Finally, to my aunt and uncle, Pam and David Purdy, who have treated me like their own child, I will never be able to thank you enough for all that you have given me. Thank you to my brother Mike Smith—I’m always happy to tell you how much I love you. More gratitude to my aunt Penelope Chatterton and my cousins, Ron, Jessica, Kristen, Chris, Steffani, and Alex; I am honored to be part of this family. I also want to thank Bill and Rita and all of their children for folding me into your clan—I feel privileged to carry the Boose name.

  Lastly to Greg and Veronica, you have healed me. I am so humbled to be your most important person.