In 2020, the year my father and brother died, I discovered a new genre of laughter. It was a kind of laughter that happened to me. Nothing was funny, though it was the year I published my first novel, and the novel had a lot of jokes. Humor, like grief, like poetry, is occasionally a language of dissonance: dissimilar things side by side reflect back on each other some surprise or shared meaning. But there was no apparent meaning in the adjacency of my mourning and erratic, often ill-timed laughter. It happened when I talked about my father, and because of the professional requirements of that year, it happened with journalists as I talked with them about my book. 

I was embarrassed. To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere. The blunted, abject language of bereavement, and the responsibility I had, which I had worked for and wanted, to speak clearly about my own sentences. Troubleshooting Zoom for a digital tour in the midst of a pandemic after my father died of Covid, alone in a different state. That I could be talking about him, and hear, as if I hadn’t participated in it, my own laughter. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about the tonal discrepancies endemic to our most acute horrors. The ships that are sunk on Sunday mornings, the clear skies from which planes fall. She writes about the audacity of ordinariness, how it isn’t asynchronous with the fact of grief but inherent to it. For a while, I struggled to reconcile both realities, the one in which we buried my brother some months after my father and the other in which my book had changed my life so radically that the weirder manifestations of my grief were sometimes happening on air. I struggled especially with how those experiences changed my relationship to language, and naturally, to writing.

Writing through or about grief is a confrontation with containment, both in the self and on the page. It sanctions an inclination to digress, not only because revisiting is an organic and necessary part of the experience, but because it is an unstable state and subject, prone to a volatility that resists attempts to find forward motion or shape. There can be a holiness about the parenthetical, the cadence of interruption that affords you the scaffolding to approach a subject that feels dangerous. However, if you’re a writer and so obligated to the work of exclusion that brings an end into sight, it is a terrible crisis to be lost in that digressive purgatory. That shapelessness can be chronic, in part because it can feel, when there is no beginning, middle, or end, that there is no way out. Bereavement makes a mockery of borders and by extension narrative. It’s somewhat of a paradox, too, in that to engage with it is to engage with permanence — the foreverness of death, of grief — but also with what happens after death, whether those questions are spiritual or the practical problems of being the person who is still alive and tasked with the quotidian, like showering or deciding whether or not to stay alive. So it should be noted that grief is sometimes this, grappling with your own desire to die. 

I believe in weathering it badly, in nursing the grudge, and tending pathologically to the archive of people you have loved.

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This is a good time to be explicit in my biases. I resent the idea of grief as pathology — pathology negatively connoted as failure, as disease, rather than its valid classification as a mental and physical phenomenon that depresses the body’s processes, and lacks tidy parameters that might permit a person to, within a reasonable amount of time, Get Over It. I don’t believe in getting over it. I believe in weathering it badly, in nursing the grudge, and tending pathologically to the archive of people you have loved. This essay is for people who don’t get over things. That is not to diminish the real and desperate feeling of wanting not to be in pain, but to affirm it as a way of being that you have a right to, and that has to be acknowledged if you want to examine how it has remade you and, potentially, your craft. Grief alters your relationship to your tools. Being able to write again meant acknowledging how my process had changed. A revelation I resisted, as my writing practice had developed around jobs, cohabitation, and formative periods of loneliness, until it was nearly circadian, a practice that graduated into something I simply had to do. It’s a lucky thing when the work feels like a primal imperative. This was overwhelmingly my experience: pleasure, ease, which is almost as impolite to talk about as the ugly shape of your grief. How good it feels when you are taken up by a project and everything is going so well. 

Bereavement changed this experience. I couldn’t think, and those failures of thinking were evident on the page. Foiled sentences; the opaque, ironic language of fear. Imperatives began to feel like work. In A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, a collection of entries drawn from the notebooks he kept after the death of his wife, Lewis writes: “For the first time I have looked back and read these notes. They appall me.” In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde’s account of her experience with breast cancer and life post mastectomy, she writes about not being able to think, about the necessity of articulation and the problem of language under the pressure of grief. She writes about not being able to write, and how in that silence “each of us draws the face of her own fear.” She describes a loss of control, wanting to write about anger and finding sadness instead.

In Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about the failures of language made apparent by the awkward vocabulary of condolences. The bright platitudes of other people. Attempts to manage the unmanageable that make obvious the paltriness of words and the ancient horror of death. Meaning absolutely everyone is freaked out by it, and no one knows what to say. After her father’s death, Adichie noted the strangeness of people’s remarks, the frequency with which her father’s death was referred to as his demise. In The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat’s examination of death across literature and of her own grief after the loss of her mother, she writes that the word mass was more palatable than tumor. Danticat also writes about the pivotal scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Sethe, an enslaved woman, kills her baby, Beloved. This scene has “some of the most deliberately unadorned language in an otherwise densely lyrical novel,” she observes, and notes how quietly the killing is conveyed through “the arc of its mother’s swing.” Danticat refers to an interview where Morrison explains that choice: 

For me, in the process of writing, it is just not authentic or legitimate enough to look at it from the outside. I always tell my students, it’s not a Black father; it’s yours. The one you know? The one. So if I’m going to imagine what it takes to kill your baby, then I have to put in my arms, my baby. And when that happens — and it’s difficult — then the language just pares down. You don’t get ornamental with that, you get very still, very clean-limbed, and very quiet, because the event itself is bigger than language.

I feel a debt to these writers for articulating the hairy business of bereaved articulation. The way language becomes truncated. The not being able to think. The debasement of seeing on the page how severely you are not thinking. The infiltration of grief into your prose when you have not made a conscious effort to write toward it, or even when you have made a conscious effort to write away from it. The animate quality of a draft and the submission it requires of its writer is beautiful. The improvisational magic of writing and all it dredges up from the unconscious means you will often surprise yourself. But it has a different resonance when everything you make feels suddenly governed by your dead. If your primary experience of writing was one of pleasure, it’s difficult to adjust to the hostility of this kind of haunting. Writing toward it intentionally presents its own difficulties. The complication of momentum and linearity when grief collapses time and compels you to return. Digressions, born of the need to create safety and make sense of what happened, undermine an attempt to find structure, borderlessness being both an impediment to narrative and a result of the fluidity of grief. It’s hard to paint a subject that is moving, and even harder when processing grief requires you to be still and to be able to look at it head-on. Adichie aptly calls this problem of looking “the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare.” 

For the grieving person, stillness can be unthinkable and movement the preferred medication. Busyness, blunting one’s feelings with the manic activity that is the hallmark of the bereaved and newly single, avoiding yourself and your work — anything is preferable to committing the words to the page, because to go on about your life at the same cadence is to disrespect what has been upended and affirm that what happened is real. After my father and brother died, there was a period when I was given to these activities. They died five months apart, my father in March of Covid and my brother in September of ALS, and in between those events my debut novel was published. Publishing a first book, while an active undertaking, was not an activity in which I could lose myself. It was too new, too public, too high-stakes. The activities I found to blunt my grief I found off-duty and outside of that universe, all the usual means of obliteration that use the body against itself. I was dead to myself and my art, which in some circumstances is a totally reasonable way to be. Life is hard, and it should be permissible to find no art in its tyranny. 

However, it’s possible to establish a pattern of diversion that, once you and your work want to be alive, gets in the way. Lewis writes about that period of unavailability that has “the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting,” and makes you unavailable to the wonder you need to work. You need to be interested, available to look, and I was stuck, in part because I was afraid to court the catastrophe of looking directly. No art comes from an averted gaze. After the death of his wife, Lewis writes about feeling like a leper and an advertisement for marital death, seeing on the faces of other married couples a fear that they would end up like him. In Stay True, Hua Hsu writes about feeling like the “death of the party” after the murder of a close friend. And after her mastectomy, Lorde took issue with the idea that not wearing a prosthetic breast was bad for the morale of the women in her ward, writing, “however well-meaning and under whatever guise, it must be seen as damaging, for it keeps the post-mastectomy woman in a position of perpetual and secret insufficiency, infantilized and dependent for her identity upon an external definition by appearance.” Hiding prioritizes comfort over truth, a false sense of order over the messiness of self-revelation. My period of avoidance was a way to dull and busy myself, to feel in control, but being still was a necessary concession to all that was out of my control — deadly systemic failures and acts of God, and my feelings about those things, which could not be tidied or expedited and surprised me in their lawlessness. Grief is constantly evolving. Documents of it quickly become artifacts. Its resistance to containment, which troubles the boundaries of where it begins and ends, creates a kind of anti-closure, a necessity to get good with not getting over things. Being able to embrace that possibility frees you from the constraints of ordered grieving à la Kübler-Ross, and from designating some discrete, future moment as the moment you should rejoin the world and make things again. 

There is some merit in accepting that for some indeterminate time, you may be fucked up, and that is as fine a time as any to do the work. Lorde writes about the importance of not waiting until she wasn’t afraid anymore to write about her experience, in part because she felt it was likely she might die first. This is not to romanticize the idea of suffering well or the material forged from that suffering. Enduring a traumatic experience is plenty. It does not have to be productive. It’s OK to be inert, useless, or agnostic about the value we ascribe to perseverance. Being unable to persevere, or being stuck, can be a directive from your body to slow down or stop. Lorde’s account of not waiting to do the work is not about a denial of that condition, but an acknowledgment that it could go on indefinitely. It embraces a philosophy of anti-closure and imbues that endlessness with urgency. It complicates the framing of grief and death by liberating it from the past tense. 

I couldn’t think, and those failures of thinking were evident on the page.

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This revelation feels particular to a person grappling with a deadly illness. Dying, or being terminal, is not a discrete form of grief. Its borders are strange. The terminal person never truly sees its end. To mourn a person whose death is certain is to be suspended in mourning, grieving not only after it has happened but while it is happening. In 2014, my brother was diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that results in progressive atrophy and in nearly all cases death. He was a painter, and the disease began with his hands. A season before we knew he was sick, his wrist was tender. It seemed innocuous and not unrelated to his drawing jags. We carpooled to our mother’s house for Thanksgiving and the drive was terrifying. I ascribed that to his masculinity. The provocative showboating that the open road seems to inspire in men. In hindsight, he was struggling with the steering wheel. There was the normal bargaining, some hope that the disease might stop, though there was a threshold at which too much had been taken and there was little function to preserve. It destroyed his emotional regulation and his bodily autonomy. He was more prone to tears, and I return, often, to the last time I saw him climb stairs: 2015, Pittsburgh, some months before he moved back in with our mother, who took care of him until he died. For six years he was dying, and every interaction was a confrontation with that certainty. It was evident in his communications, which were mediated through software that allowed him to spell with his eyes, and in his body, all the major and minor bones newly explicit. 

When my father died, the parameters of grief were blurred partly by that early moment in the pandemic when people with Covid died in isolation. I could not see him or attend his funeral, and the news of his death came in a phone call from an estranged relative who felt the occasion was worthy of a détente. Closure can be complicated by those protracted or incomplete iterations of grief, but that untidiness can be a kind of freedom from the rigid taxonomies in which a person can be stuck. 

Naturally, an examination like this essay also comes up against the caveats born of that fluidity. As I wrote this and my novel, I came up against it myself — how the instability of grief leaves you always changing your mind and having to reckon with iterations of yourself that feel disparate. The sentence you wrote a few months before feels alien and a little stupid. Anti-closure is about recontextualizing grief as a continuum and also as a set of diverse, specific, occasionally self-alienating feelings. Being awake to the diversity of your feelings can be one way to address a creative bottleneck, which includes dealing with the ways you are suddenly unfamiliar to yourself. The mores of grief are too varied and culturally specific to talk in absolute terms about what constitutes a legible or appropriate response. However, writing through and about grief intersects with your relationship to control. That relationship is subject to artistic binaries. Coldness, sentiment; distance, intimacy. Knowing what you think and all you feel. Often when we are talking about sentiment, we are talking about a contamination of feeling. A closeness to the subject that precludes your ability to see it honestly. A loss of control. Anxieties about self-pity and subjecting others to the arcane nostalgia of remembrance, about whether your subject, especially one like death with which everyone has intimacy, can be rendered in a way that is particular and liberated from private baggage that only matters to you. 

The question of whether anyone will care is more fraught when you are in the state of supreme caring that is grief. Lorde writes that the subject of illness was well-trodden territory, but she embraced being part of a creative continuum and set forward to be specific in her contribution. That question of specificity is hugely important to the grief narrative, not just because of the commonality of the subject, but because everyone’s experience with it is hyperspecific — as any bereaved person, besieged by other people’s generalized or hyperspecific advice, can tell you. Lorde’s specificity in rendering the mourning of her health and breasts is a harnessing of feeling, of craft, and a surrender to that aforementioned unswerving stare. Her story is not a general one. It’s a document of a woman with breast cancer, and she is explicit in how that illness intersects with her Blackness, queerness, and relationship to art. More specifics result — how those facts inform her thoughts about and interactions with straight and non-Black people; how they inform her relationships to the institutions where she is meant to receive help. 

It is worth noting who is afforded enough humanity to grieve. Whose grief we affirm and whose carnage we are immune to. Grief narratives of marginalized people often intersect with the violence of the state. On the day my father died, it was not just a confrontation with that death, but with my government; with history and its resonance in the reporting, and in the tenor of the conversations about the reporting, that Black and elderly people were especially vulnerable. On that day, I took the phone call and went promptly to check the Covid map for my mother’s neighborhood. 

To insist on specificity can be an insistence on personhood, an act of preservation by embracing the way sentiment orients you toward noticing, or toward the sentimental business of lingering. Across these texts, writers linger and take notes, spurred on by the porousness of memory. Didion notes the tactfulness of the conversation in which she was asked to sign off on donating her husband’s eyes. Lorrie Moore, in “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” depicts a mother beset by directives to “take notes” as she is grappling with her baby’s cancer. Danticat notes the contours of her mother’s body as the coroners took her away. The morning my brother was to be collected, I also noticed the coroners. They came as a pair and were cartoonishly opposite, one young and nervous, the other old and unflappable and unmoved when my mother said in a numb voice, “1970,” my brother’s birth year. Noticing in this way sometimes opens you up to the strangeness of things. Those moments around death that are nearly too symmetrical for any credible narrative. Moments that feel magical in their coincidence. A year to the day after my father passed from Covid, I caught it myself, alone in a hotel in London, where I had too much time to wonder what it meant. 

There is also, of course, a current of utter mundanity running alongside that magic: normal rhythms that resist mythmaking, details that are boring or potentially unflattering, whose omission or inclusion poses ethical or aesthetic questions. Hsu writes about this in Stay True, contemplating the influence of his grief on his inclination to “flatter the narrator” and force “grace and intention onto every stray meaning.” In my own writing, I’ve thought about these questions and the responsibility not just to represent the story of a life truthfully, but my narrator’s place in it. I mourn my father and also engage with those complexities of his character that rebuke any attempt at hagiography. His life as a con man, for instance, and the three-year estrangement I count as the first time I buried him. I mourn my brother and remember those moments where his imminent death was not so sacred that we couldn’t every now and then have petty fights. I revisit these facts knowing I too am compromised by grief, ego, and a desire to assign to narrative. Narrative itself is compromised by the nature of grief, the self-absorption and incurious behaviors that make a person (and the things they make) deeply limited. 

What feels true is the wildness of the cumulative. The planes that fall when the sky is clear. Laughing when you are mourning. The process of grieving and dying is often a primal confusion that moves you inevitably toward contradiction. Fixedness and fluidity. Specificity and universality. Terror, magic, and mundanity. Setting out to represent it in all its complexity is a way to honor it, to acknowledge what is gone and what of you is gone with it, to give that loss life by coming with clear eyes to the ways you are changed.