We're on the express elevator
Reflecting on nine months of loss
It’s funny how you could read an entire book and remember just a few lines. Here’s one phrase that stood out, like an elevation sign at the top of a hike.
“Grief is like an express elevator to empathy,” wrote my friend Carla, in her book Renegade Grief. My friend Jimmy shipped it to me a few days after the funeral.
I’ve been riding that elevator ever since.
That’s the truth.
You go through something as hard as losing a parent, a sibling, a friend - and there’s no going back. You’re imprinted with the big G, and somehow find yourself connecting with people and complete strangers also going through loss. Recently or decades back, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is they mattered, and I find myself in conversation about death and grief a lot.
It’s a nice change from the other hot topics of AI, work disappearing, how exhausted we all are, and kids' birthday parties we don’t want to attend.
We’re coming up on nine months since we lost my dad. People ask me, “How I’m doing with everything,” cleverly dancing around the subject at hand. Afraid to fully name it and say it, afraid to awaken the evil eye.
But they’re asking, so I’ll share. Nine months in, I can say “I’m doing okay,” which is only half true. I’m all for vulnerability, but that level of openness gets tiring.
But I’m okay, mostly. I’m able to function. I look forward to working. My sleep is improving thanks to the thousand mgs of magnesium. I wake up most mornings excited and grateful to be alive. To enjoy all of this. I’m training more, I’m optimistic, I make plans for next week.
But that’s only half of it.
There are also the middle of the day waves of sadness that short-circuit my batteries. Random acts of quietness that leave me frozen and assaulted with the reality of loss. For a few minutes or a few hours, I sit there and contemplate everything. The shortness of life. The quickness of death. What this all means.
And then it passes, and I can resume writing marketing copy or scripts for a tech company with jokes that are delightful but not offensive. Context switching at its finest.
On the bigger timeline, I’m at a point where I witness things that make me smile, or laugh, or scream, and my first thought is “My dad would have loved this.” And the fact that I can’t call him and share that experience with him sucks so much. But I do anyway, because I can. I go on neighborhood walks and have full-on conversations with my deceased dad like some meshugana.
I was in Joshua Tree with some friends - sauna, hiking, shabbat - and we were watching a terrible show on Netflix. My friend Marad grabbed the remote to find a movie. Within seconds of scrolling, he took a wrong turn and somehow hovered over the Exit Netflix option. He was about to click and destroy everything. It was the equivalent of firing off an accidental nuke.
Of all the moves he could’ve made, he picked the worst possible option.
I died from laughing. I couldn’t breathe. My dad would have loved that. He would have died. He would’ve died again from laughing. I called my brother Edahn to share the story, and he was crying from laughter.
That happens a lot.
Another one: yesterday our son harvested tomatoes and peppers from the garden and went to work in the kitchen. He chopped up a salad and served it to the family. “Is it good, Aba?” Yes Chef. Then our four-year-old said with total sincerity, “Thank you Levi. This is the best salad in the whole world.”
Lisa and I looked at each other. What is going on? Did we just win an award?
I’m so happy. I’m smiling. I can’t believe it. But what goes up must come down. My mind goes to my Aba, and the heartbreaking pain that he’s missing all of this.
Or maybe not. Maybe he exists in some spiritual plane just out of focus. A hovering Hungarian man, smiling at us from a distance, unable to get too close.
But just close enough for us to keep him alive.