Giving my gold medal away

Yesterday, I cried in a bookstore in Copenhagen. The sky was gray and turning grayer and my fingers were pink from the cold. There are very few hours of true daylight in Denmark in January, which sounds like a bad thing but isn’t. 

My crying was like that too. In that it sounded bad but wasn’t. The tears were warm and gentle and they felt something like coming home. Like taking off a heavy backpack and feeling my shoulders float with relief. 

Loren and I were standing near the entrance to the bookstore in Copenhagen, with an old friend of his who I’d met for the first time that day. The friend had kind eyes and a wife who is seven months pregnant. When I asked him how he was preparing for fatherhood, he replied that it mostly involved going to therapy. This struck me as a very good answer. I liked him right away. 

Nothing happened, really. The sky stayed gray and the books were mostly in Danish. I told a new friend that my mama died this summer. I cried when I said it, which I almost never do. 

**

In the seven months since my mama died, I’ve developed a reputation for talking on the phone. It’s a well earned reputation, as I’ve talked on the phone a lot recently, often in moments that are objectively inopportune: while I order a coffee, board the subway, shampoo my hair. 

This is another way of saying that it’s been difficult, in the seven months since my mama died, to sit alone with myself in my head. I talk on the phone and I read obsessively, filling empty spaces with someone else’s words. 

In fact, I have become an olympic gold medalist at filling empty spaces. I move into a new apartment and I fill every room. There are dining room chairs to be chosen, bed frames, carpets. There are paintings to be hung and then rehung, this time three inches to the left. I start a new job. I work longer hours than I should, volunteer myself too often, fall asleep and wake back up writing excel formulas in my head. I read 97 books and in the moments left over, I talk on the phone. 

There has been very little time to feel, to grieve, to cry. So I almost never do. 

I almost never write either. In fact, I can not think of a better way to describe what writing requires than “to sit alone with oneself in one’s head.” 

**

I’ve only told one person at my new job that my mama died this summer. I won’t tell you her name, but I will tell you that she is 28 years old and she learned last month that her fiancé has breast cancer. She tells me this during a meeting when we are supposed to be reviewing a deck of Google slides. Her eyes look like wells I could fall into. 

Sometimes, in the rare moments I have failed to fill, I find myself thinking about this coworker whose fiancé has breast cancer. I think about how I want to cook her entire pots of homemade chicken soup and deliver them to her desk. I want to buy her gift cards for 90 minute massages and run her a hot bath. I want to sit with her in a phone booth, close the door behind us, and hold her while she cries. I’m probably projecting, we’re really not very close. 

This is the extent to which my mama dying has entered my life at my new job. Bizarre fantasies about caring for a distant coworker. 

If you have hopes of becoming an olympic gold medalist at filling empty spaces, I’d recommend getting a new job and telling essentially no one that you work with that your mama has died. I’d recommend becoming a new person each time you take the elevator to your desk on the sixth floor, a person who is not wracked with grief. A person who almost never cries.

**

In the months before my mama died, I wrote down as much as I could. I’d speed type through meetings with her oncologist and hospice nurse, recording direct quotes about her liver function and pain levels alongside details about the weather, our seating arrangements, the color of the sky. 

Several times a day I’d open the Notes app on my phone to write about a feeling I was having, a conversation I’d overheard, something my mama had said or done. The months before my mama died felt precious and scarce and I treated them as such, observing them with a fine tooth comb, trying to make them permanent by writing them down. 

This is a note in my phone from June 20^th, which was 10 days before my mama died:

“Mama says ‘It’s always been a pet peeve of mine when people have weddings on holiday weekends. I refuse to have my funeral on July 4^th. I can’t live like this through the weekend though. I need to die before.’

Laying between my moms in their bed. Light out late. New yellow duvet. Mama in dog pajamas. 

Something about how this moment hurts like hell and is genuinely funny. Something about how that makes no sense but does. Things that are awful somehow have beauty too.”

I can recognize in retrospect that by taking these notes in the months and weeks before my mama died, I was forcing myself to pay attention. I was refusing to dissociate. Instead, I took impossible experiences and integrated them into my body, moved them through my fingers, translated them into words on a page. 

This act of noticing made life unbearably hard and unbearably beautiful, all at the same time. It was all those little details, I think, something about the sheer number of colors that can appear in the sky. 

***

If you have hopes of becoming an olympic gold medalist at filling empty spaces, I would not recommend going to an artist residency in Virginia to write for ten days.

An artist residency is a big fat empty space on purpose. Its entire intention is to create time to sit alone with oneself in one’s head. I brought eleven books with me, four different sized knitting needles, and plans to write about anything but grief. I was quite literally terrified of how much space I’d have to fill. 

This will not come as a surprise given this is the essay you are reading, but I couldn’t fill it. Grief rose up, trickling in at first through cracks and crevices, and then expanding like water, filling the vastness of the space. There were multiple days where I sat at my wooden desk, walls of books stacked behind me, and cried. There were multiple dinners where I sat beside other residents and talked only about pain and death. There were multiple moments where it felt truly, heart wrenchingly awful.

But things that are awful somehow have beauty too. And I’ve shocked myself in learning that this emptiness I’ve been so afraid of, my mama lives inside it. And like her, it is so very very beautiful. 

Sitting in this emptiness, I’ve felt closer to my mama than I have in months. I’ve watched videos, listened to old voicemails, scrolled through notes and notes on my phone. For the first time since she died, I’ve allowed my thoughts to land on my mama, and while technically I’ve spent a lot of time alone in my own head, it’s felt a little like she’s in there with me. 

I don’t want my gold medal anymore. I want to give it away.

***

There are very few hours of daylight in Denmark in January and the sky rotates through shades of grey. In response the Danes light candles. Everywhere I look, there are soft orange flames. 

I was standing in a bookstore in Copenhagen yesterday, telling a new friend that my mama recently died. I felt her gone-ness, the emptiness that’s been left in her place. I cried. 

Then I pulled out my phone and wrote this note:

“Crying in a bookstore in Copenhagen. Sky is gray. Somehow the crying feels like being me again. I actually really like the color gray.” 

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A note: My time at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts was so special. I feel so grateful for the time to think and feel and write, and for the other residents who encouraged me to do so.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing essays that I wrote during my residency. From the very bottom of my heart, thank you for reading and following along. This Substack has been a place to hold all colors of feelings, and returning to it also feels something like coming home.