Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,150
the joy.
“You’re both so alone in your grief,” I say. “And in your joy.”
In our sessions, John had dropped occasional hints of his joy: his two girls; his dog, Rosie; writing a killer show; winning another Emmy; a boys’ trip with his brothers. Sometimes, John says, he can’t believe that he’s capable of feeling joy. After Gabe died, he thought he’d never live through it. He’d go on, he figured, but like a ghost. And yet, just a week after Gabe’s death, he and Gracie were playing together, and for a second—maybe two—he felt okay. He smiled and laughed with her, and the fact that he laughed amazed him. Just one week ago his son had died. Was that sound really coming from him?
I tell John about what’s known as the psychological immune system. Just as your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack. A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never laugh again, but they do. They think they’ll never love again, but they do. They go grocery shopping and see movies; they have sex and dance at weddings; they overeat on Thanksgiving and go on diets in the New Year—the day-to-day returns. John’s reaction while playing with Grace wasn’t unusual; it was the norm.
There’s another related concept that I share with John: impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again. For John, on Gabe’s birthday, on certain holidays, or simply running in the background, there will always be pain. Hearing a certain song in the car or having a fleeting memory might even plunge him into momentary despair. But another song, or another memory, might minutes or hours later bring intense joy.
Where, I wonder, is John’s shared joy with Margo? I ask him what he imagines would have happened with Margo had the car crash not happened. What would their marriage be like today?
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he says, “now you think I can rewrite history?” He looks out the window, at the clock, at his sneakers, which he had slipped off when he lay down on the couch. Finally he looks at me.
“Actually, I think about that a lot lately,” he says. “Sometimes I think about how we were a young family and my career was taking off and Margo was taking care of the kids and trying to run a business, and how we’d lost touch with each other, the way people do at that stage of life. I think about how things might have changed once both kids were in school and we were farther ahead in our careers. You know, life would normalize. But maybe it wouldn’t have. I used to be so sure that she was the right person for me and I was the right person for her, but we make each other so unhappy, and I don’t even remember when that started. Everything I do is wrong in her eyes. Maybe we would have been divorced by now. People say that marriages fall apart after a child’s death, but maybe we stayed together because of what happened to Gabe.” He laughs. “Maybe Gabe saved our marriage.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe you stayed together because you both want to rediscover the parts of yourselves that seemed to have died along with Gabe. Maybe you both believe you can find each other again—or for the first time.”
I think about the family of the drowned toddler in the ER. What are they doing right now? Did they have another child? Their baby, the one whose diaper was being changed while their three-year-old ran outside and drowned, would now be in college. Maybe that couple is long divorced and living with their new spouses. Or maybe they’re still together, stronger than ever, perhaps taking a hike on the scenic trails near their home on a peninsula south of San Francisco, reminiscing about the past, remembering their beloved daughter.