So It Goes
So It Goes
About a year ago I started writing short stories. I’d dabbled in short stories before, but last year is when an actual collection started to take shape in my head. They all seemed to be ghost stories, which is fairly on brand for me. Gothic fiction is one of my favorite genres, and I began writing them alongside a thematically similar horror novel. A difference I started noticing somewhere around the third or fourth story, however, is that none of my ghost stories were particularly gothic or scary. I wouldn’t classify any of them as horror, in fact. What they do all share is one common theme - grief.
I think about grief. It’s not necessarily a conscious thought. I don’t go around constantly analyzing it or feeling sad. Living with grief is not the same as reliving what caused it. But it entered my life twenty years ago and, whether I’ve noticed it or not, it has stuck around.
When I say “twenty years ago,” I mean almost to the day. I used to think not many people had big definitive Before and After moments in their lives, but I have a feeling they do. I do. For me, that moment was early in the morning on January 27, 2004. I was in my dorm room, having been back at college for a little over a week following winter break, and my cell phone rang far earlier on a Tuesday than it ever needed to. Though, if I’m being honest now, I don’t remember what time it was. By the time I got the call, it may have been the afternoon. It must have been, now that I think about it. It felt early.
It was my mom. Her brother, my uncle, died that morning. He was forty-four years old. I was nineteen.
I’ve tried writing about this before. Being a writing major at the time gave me a lot of opportunities to process my grief through personal essay, after all, but I never felt as if I were able to articulate why saying “my uncle” felt insufficient. It failed to capture the full reality of who he was to me. In a short piece like this, I doubt I’ll be able to do it now either. We were both quiet and withdrawn in a family where that stood out. We were the observers, and the ones most likely to say the funniest thing no one else in the room heard. We also had dark sides, though mine had the convenient camouflage of teen angst. It wasn’t until my late twenties and recognizing my own depressive tendencies that I thought, maybe, he subconsciously saw in me what he never acknowledged in himself, but there we both were.
And that is who he was - the person who was always there. He wasn’t always emotionally available or one to talk about his feelings, and my connection to him was unspoken in a lot of ways. We shared a lot of looks. In the months after he died, when my family kept up Sunday dinners until they became unbearable without him, I would catch myself looking at his former spot to share an eye-roll or grin with an empty chair.
In a little over two months, I’ll be 40 and close to the age he was when he died - suddenly, but not surprisingly - of a heart attack. He always seemed older than he was - in stature, in attitude, in demeanor - that it can be so hard to remember he never got old. He barely got to spend time middle aged. His daughter was six years old. His mother was, and is, still alive. None of it seems real even now.
This year will be the first year I’ll have lived longer without him than with him. I think maybe that fact alone is why the concept of grief keeps creeping into what I write. There is no expiration date on it. There is no outliving it. It’ll just ebb and flow, reminding you of its presence just long enough before letting you go about your day. And that’s what it always seems to do too - let you carry on. Who you carry on as may look a little different from who you used to be, but that doesn’t need to be a bad thing. Sometimes I question whether I am who I am now because I have two decades of adulthood behind me, or if I’m this particular way because that’s who emerged from the trauma of that day twenty years ago.
Either way, I like who I am and there’s a little bit of guilt that comes with that, knowing that some of the most significant decisions I’ve made were not only ones he would have disagreed with, but were often made, consciously or not, in response to his death. And what’s more, I am a better, happier person for having made them.
He was a man who hated change so, so much, and feared it, and then there he went, causing the biggest change of all to our family that still has ripple effects. Life is cruel and funny that way. I miss him. I’d rather have him than my grief. But I didn’t get to make that choice. It’s here with me now, and the lessons I took from his life and death are with me. I made something, and someone, new out of them, and that’s all the phrase “living with grief” can mean. Just… living.
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Author Note: This is the first newsletter I'm sending via my new host site, buttondown (RIP TinyLetter!). Please forgive any wonky formatting or typos. I'm still figuring it out.
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FUN STUFF:
What I'm Reading: The City of the Living by Nicola Lagioia
What I'm Watching: Lupin (Netflix)
What I'm Listening To: Showtunes
What I'm Eating: Pretzels w/ nutella
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Sarah Writes Too is a free monthly newsletter featuring short personal essays by me (Sarah LaPolla). The best way to show support is to subscribe, share posts you liked, or leave me a tip. You can also find me on Bluesky at @sarahlapolla.Thanks for reading!