Fitting a sphere inside a box
A response to all the "How are you holding up?"s
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who read my last post regarding the recent passing of my mother, and especially to those who took the time to respond via email, text, letters and packages. It’s meant a lot to me, especially in the context of the pandemic, to connect with all of you in all kinds of ways, in a world where we can’t be together physically. As I’ve written about before, I’ve been trained all my life to live internationally, make a home wherever life takes us, and maintain friendships regardless of the distance. It was my mother who taught me to live this way, and I know that she would have been grateful for your gestures, even if it was the simple click of opening an email. She probably would have been slightly embarrassed by my tribute to her, and would have begged me to take the spotlight off of her immediately. That’s the kind of person she was. But oh well. She’s been my muse for a lot of the writing I did while she was alive, and I imagine she’ll continue to have that influence over me in the years to come…
In the last few weeks, I’ve had many friends reach out to me, sometimes just to check in. Just to say hi. A lot of the times, they ask, how are you holding up?
The quick answer is: I’m okay. I get up every day, put on makeup, keep two children alive, eat all the meals, bathe at night. I’m back to teaching another writing class. I keep my unread emails at 0. (It’s my one superpower.) I haven’t slept well since our first son was born in 2018, but I’m used to it. I splurged on a bottle of perfume that my mother used to wear—and immediately booked myself an extra freelance job to pay for it. I keep it by the door and sniff it sometimes. It’s become a kind of ritual. Another way to remember her.
The complicated answer is: I don’t know.
It’s not that the quick answer isn’t true. It is. And it’s not that I’m not okay. I’m both. I’m neither. I don’t know.
It’s been about a month, so I’m still in the thick of it. A philosopher once said it’s impossible to put a name on an era we’re living in. It only becomes apparent after a cultural shift occurs, and we can look back on that era with distance. For example, there was a time when mirrors didn’t exist, and people went about their lives never knowing what they looked like. But they wouldn’t have characterized their own time period as a time without mirrors. They didn’t know. Other things mattered more. People painted portraits…
In that vein, I might not know exactly how I’m holding up today, until a year or two later.
Here’s an image that’s helped me, though. Grief, I’ve been told, is like trying to fit a sphere inside a box. At first, the sphere is too big. The walls of the box stretch outwards. Therefore, it hurts. It’s unfamiliar. All you want to do is take the sphere out. Go back to the way things were. But the sphere stays, and over time, it starts to shrink. The walls start to retreat back towards its original position. But the sphere stays. Sometimes it bounces, hurting the walls. Other times, it’s unnoticeable.
What I like about this is the part about the sphere staying in. The story isn’t meant to teach me how to get rid of grief. It’s about learning to live with it.
It also reminds me of a book I read years ago called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in London in 1884. The narrator is a square living in a two-dimensional world, who is visited by a three-dimensional sphere. At first, the square is confused. He sees his new friend start out as a small circle, growing bigger, then smaller again. Throughout the book, the square navigates the world of one dimension and three dimensions. The book is gimmicky, and it’s meant to be. (At the time, it was a social satire on Victorian culture and how people were divided into classes.)
Anyway, it’s possible that grief feels like this, too. Like discovering a new dimension.
That’s it, isn’t it. Lately, I’ve been thinking that experiencing a death or a birth can allow one to time travel. What we once thought of as a thing of science fiction becomes reality. Yes, time travel is often portrayed in films like Back to the Future as a fantasy, where one can change the course of history by going back and forth in time. This kind of time travel is fun, sure, but that’s not the kind of time travel I’m talking about. I’m thinking of the kind portrayed in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (which later turned into a sci-fi film called Arrival). In it, a linguist encounters aliens from outer space and is tasked with learning and interpreting their language. It turns out that the aliens experience time differently than humans—it’s non-linear. They can see into the future. When the linguist acquires the aliens’ language, she ends up acquiring the same ability to see what’s going to happen next. What’s remarkable about Chiang’s story, though, is that it’s actually not about the aliens. No, no. It’s about the linguist becoming a mother. She chooses to be a mother, despite her knowledge of her child’s untimely death.
Samantha Hunt, a fiction writer, famously said that to create a life is to create a death.
My mother lived to the fullest, and she was able to say, even years before she passed, that she had zero regrets. She did all the things, despite knowing what was on the horizon. Maybe she was a time traveler all along. She never stopped making friends. Probably even the sphere! Oh, I don’t know. I wish I could be more articulate about all this. I wish I could make sense of this feeling, to be able to give an adequate answer to the question, how are you holding up? Forgive me. I’m still a little lost in Flatland.
If you or someone you know is also going through grief, here are some helpful resources that have helped me:
What’s Your Grief - a website with articles and online courses for those who are grieving, as well as those who are supporting a griever. Here’s a useful article on the difference between comforting and supporting, which helped me articulate what I needed from Jin, especially in the immediate aftermath.
If you’re in Nashville, there’s a grief support service offered by a local hospice, and they’re currently offering sessions online due to the pandemic. They also facilitate various online support groups.
There’s a beautiful children’s book called Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, which has been a favorite of mine to read to Ray. Death is personified, and goes through his own character development thanks to his friendship with a duck.
