Grief

What I learned from Craig and keep learning

When I decided (when all of you precious readers urged me to decide) to keep writing beyond 1994, I outlined a couple dozen weekly episodes to continue the stories through 1997. According to that outline, after writing about my trip to Durango in May 1996, the next installment, this installment, was meant to be an essay on Grief – a topic that would circle back to my very first post here on Thanksgiving of last year, the one about Grief, Gratitude, and Grudges and my first mention of Craig and Rosetta Gadson.

Following the discipline of my weekly writing schedule, I am beginning this essay four days after devastating fires ripped through Lāhainā, Maui, burning all the structures of this beloved place to the ground as residents and visitors fled on a literal momentʻs notice. Not all made it out. Most who did lost their homes and everything but the clothes on their backs. There is no need for me to dig deep into the past to stir up a memory of grief. The individual and collective grief weighs heavily on all of us in Hawaiʻi in the present. Breathing that heaviness in the very air today, I acknowledge I have no idea where this writing will go. Only that there is never such a thing as getting accustomed to grief.

I did not learn of Craigʻs passing until the second morning after, after a full day of travel from Durango to Denver and then back to New York.

By chance I had a routine dentist appointment first thing that next morning. Alvenia reached me there with the news about Craig. You always remember where you were when you heard the news.

Rosetta did not answer her cell phone or the land line in Craigʻs apartment, so my clean teeth and I walked directly to the East Village. Apparently Karen had come by to take Rosetta to the funeral home. I settled into a chair in the foyer for the next sixty minutes until they returned. “I knew youʻd come,” were Rosettaʻs words of greeting. The three of us embraced, went up to the apartment, pulled a bottle of chilled Sancerre from the fridge, sat on Craigʻs bed with our glasses of wine and toasted him at 11 am. We cried. We hugged some more. Laughed through our tears. Sorted through Craigʻs makeup bag, the items for “pale girls” set aside for me. For a while words were few and unnecessary. And then we got down to the business of planning for the onslaught of well-wishers and for his Homegoing Celebration.

The pain of the next couple of weeks is masked by recollective amnesia. I came back to conscious awareness in the viewing room of the Frank E Campbell Funeral Chapel. Of the service itself, I remember fervently “holding the frequency” for Rosetta, Craigʻs final request to take care of her ringing in my ears. I remember my Big Brother Best Man Carman at my side to take care of me, and having some inkling that Craig had set me up with the Reverend Carlton Elliot Smith as another brother, to support each other and Rosetta from that time forward. I remember singing Amazing Grace.

I remember the times over the coming months when I would turn a corner, catch a glimpse of someone who from behind or at a distance shared Craigʻs coloring and height and body type and for a moment catch my breath thinking it was him until the impossibility of that crashed through my brain with a wave of migraine level pain. I remember moments when for seemingly no reason at all I would gasp and bend over with arms folding protectively across my belly as his absence would punch me in the gut with absolute physicality. And I also remember the luminosity.

I felt his presence. I heard his voice. On the road trip I will be writing about in the coming weeks, I would find myself in a motel room and suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to flip on the television. There on the screen would be Della Reese as Tess, the wise black angel in the series Touched by an Angel. Or an urge to turn on the radio at a precise moment to sing along with the Rolling Stones on Ruby Tuesday:

“Catch your dreams before they slip away
Dying all the time
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind
Ain't life unkind?”

I never questioned that these were love notes from Craig, any more than as a child I had questioned that my recently deceased grandfather reassuringly drew a blanket over me the first night I slept in the bed that had been his.

There are things I do not believe but that I know to be true. I have written about some of them already. Here is another one: that some form of discrete consciousness survives, for a shorter or longer period, after the death of the body. And that this consciousness can communicate with those of us still in bodies.

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The fact is, I was forty years old before I experienced this level of grief. I must be lucky in that. My grandparents had died, but grandparents do that. My parents and siblings were alive. So were every single one of the men I had loved and those with whom I had cohabited, and all my dearest friends. I had experienced only Level 1 grief until then. And even almost thirty years later, after so many more losses, there are levels of grief, of life interruption, from which I have thankfully been spared.

Nothing in particular qualifies me to write about grief, then. So many have already written about grief with heartbreaking, stunning clarity out of their own experiences of it, out of the particular experience of unexpectedly losing a spouse or of losing a child, the natural order of things being inverted. Or of losing absolutely every one of your worldly possessions, and the very home that held them, in an instant.

Grief, however, is universal. We feel it individually and at times of shared loss we feel it as a collective resonance. It is in our basic animal nature. Just as we grieve for our close animal companions, we observe that somehow they also grieve for their human companions and for each other. My beloved mare Zara and I watched as Rainbow, her longtime closest herd member, was buried in an adjacent pasture. She raced repeatedly in frantic circles, returning to stand next to me, her eyes glassy as she stared towards the machine at work. After the backhoe left, I opened the gate between paddocks and she and I walked together, haltingly, towards his grave. She sniffed and pawed at the ground. Then I watched through tears as she lifted her head, gazed out to the horizon, and whinnied loudly – and then repeated her call, turning to each of the four directions, before walking a few more steps to stand with her head low, her sides heaving as if processing her loss.

When in an Equine Guided Education session I see this mare comfort someone who has experienced the loss of a loved one, I believe in her empathy.

And I believe that often lifeʻs most severe, irreparable interruptions and our willingness to feel them fully and still put one foot in front of the other, walking an unknown path together, can lead to transformation of the kind that changes lives for the better. And maybe this is the purpose that grief serves. That we remember to love.

Please consider donating to the Maui Strong Fund via this link to support recovery of those who lost homes and loved ones on Maui. Support will be needed for months and years to come:

https://www.hawaiilife.com/company/charitable-fund/