Tar pits

A woman named Tatiana Schlossberg died recently from leukemia at the young age of 35.  She was the granddaughter of JFK. My first thought when I heard this news was not about her grandfather, or the heartbreaking loss for her young family or the bitter unfairness of cancer taking another life too soon. Instead my mind immediately went to her mother, Caroline Kennedy. In an essay Tatiana wrote in November, she said that she lived her whole life trying to be good and never add to the tragedy in her mother’s life. Because her mother was once a child whose father died a few days before her 6th birthday. Then she lost her uncle a few years later. Then in adulthood, her mother and brother both passed a few years apart, which marked the loss of her entire nuclear family and made her an orphan before she reached the age of 40. Tragedy covered her life like colored Saran-Wrap, you could still see through it, but life was mottled, different.  

I wondered about her mom, almost the same age as my own, who had endured so much and now had lost her adult child. How would she face a grief so unbearable that it leaves people changed for life. For most us, one loss is enough. We experience it and then like a haunted scene of a horrific tragedy, try to avoid it thereafter. Maybe today she allowed herself to go there… to drive by that haunted place that she usually avoided after this deep loss. 

I think the reason so many of us avoid it is because once there it it ensnares you. Sadness becomes a tar pit. Your feet stick. You can never get a full breath. The air is so heavy. You risk not being able to find a way out of the pit. And if you do by miracle and hard work find your way back to the light, to your life, it seems that a little piece of yourself stays in the darkness making it too easy to fall back into the pit. To catch your foot and fall backwards. Or maybe it's that a little piece of darkness always stays within you. 

Thinking back to Caroline,  does she ever allow her mind to simmer in the unfairness of loss? Does she wonder what it means that the universe wishes her to keep learning the lesson of loss over and over again? Maybe she has come to terms with it. Maybe a guru has given her a secret that the rest of have yet to find. Maybe she survives by living only in the good memories and the gratitude. I ask myself all of this partly in conjecture and partly as projection of my own journey (and partly because therapy appointments are expensive). 

A few days before my birthday I experienced another gut wrenching loss/life change. After a year of living with me, Z moved to another foster family instead of the adoption I had hoped for. It was the right thing for him and for everyone, but it has truly been gut wrenching, it's the only way I can describe it. I have not had much contact with him, but I have been told that he is doing better. But he is not with me and so everyday I wake up and have to figure out how to live without this child that I loved so much and without so many of my other loved ones and still be present for the rest of my family that I love and care about. And so I grocery shop, and show up to performances, watch netflix, have dinner and joke and cry and melt down and try to stay out of the tar pit and figure out how to not add to the tragedy. Figure out if it is even possible to hold on to myrself without feeling all of the loss that inevitably comes with living life.

I’m less prayerful than I used to be, but today I prayed for Tatiana and especially her mother.  

Another mother, that I follow on social media always signs off her thoughts with “Good night everyone, the grievers especially…” 

  Photo by imleedh ali unsplash