Close and Far and Close

Seven years ago next week, someone I loved very much was killed in a drunk driving accident. For the entire week after that, I had my first taste of acid reflux and would lie on the couch in my parents’ bedroom feeling like my esophagus was on fire. My grandparents were visiting that week, but after one disastrous attempt to get me to come to dinner, my mother relented somewhat and I retreated to numbing hours of “Law and Order” at the other end of the house. Even after a couple of months, I would sometimes lie down on the floor, with my cheek pressed against the carpet, and try to reconcile the enormity of Ben’s dying with the everyday experience of living: trying to find a relative place for the frustration of traffic next to the trauma of loss.

A friend of mine has a video of our group from our sophomore summer of college. We passed around the camera while drinking wine and eating a fruit tart in her room at her sorority. When the camera came to me, I became enchanted with the zoom function. I can be heard narrating: “Chris! Close and far and close and far… Mo! And close and far and close and far…” It’s dizzying to watch as I haul the focus forward and back, but I certainly sound like I’m enjoying myself.

Now, though, my shifting focus is just giving me heartburn.

Here are things that are true:

I like my job. This is somewhat miraculous in light of the fact that less than a year ago, I had another job that ground down my confidence and sanity on a daily basis. I live in a very cute apartment, which is on the perfect route for my commute. I have fantastic friends, and I am in love with a very good man. I know a really good recipe for corn-meal encrusted tofu and have a pack of Diet Dr. Pepper on top of my fridge, which is always nice to come home to.

Here are other things that are also true:

I am engaged in a Cold War with my mother, which is something we have never done before and is remarkably painful. My uncle is undergoing treatment for cancer, as is my paternal grandfather. Someone I love is facing massive and frightening uncertainty in her life, and I can’t do anything about it. I live in constant fear that someone I love will be taken suddenly, or slowly, away from me. An essay I wrote just got rejected from the New York Times, and I have gained twelve pounds in the last year.

If you’ll pardon the lack of eloquence, how the fuck does a person make sense of all of this?

The short answer is: I have no idea.

When Ben died, I imagined that I had this cruel little rock inside of me—like a small, jagged chunk of obsidian—and if I could turn myself inside out, and sort through my organs, I could find where the pain lived. I could take that rock, and look at it, and understand where the screaming was coming from. I could point at it and say, “Here. This is where it lives.”

Now I spread my insides out on the table and look at the collection. My losing Ben has been worn down a little smoother now: a dull ache rather than a scraping pain. I’ve tucked my grandfather’s cancer under an obscuring organ, because I’m not ready to look at it full on, full time, and I know there will come a time when I won’t have a choice. When I think of my uncle, my mind automatically deflects itself to think of his son, my cousin, whom I love like a brother—I’m shoving one more degree of separation in between me and the reality. My fight with my mother has left a raw patch in my chest, and the rejection from the New York Times felt like an unwarranted sucker punch on top of that ache this morning.

It’s sort of a wonder how my joys spread themselves out amongst the sorrows, like insulation, guarding the hard parts from one another so that they don’t come together and become unbearable.

Lately I find myself experiencing a kind of emotional vertigo that leaves me dumbfounded and profoundly useless. My brain struggles to keep up: do I sum the hurts and the happiness? Is there a sliding scale, or are there points categories? Illness is less than death but greater than having wet socks all day? Is a personal hurt greater or less than one with a greater, for instance familial, context? And where do I fit Egypt and Yemen into this, if I do at all?

Is pain a cumulative phenomenon, or is it exponential? And happiness? Happiness is just as complicated as grief. The daily barrage of changing magnitude frightens me, because I know the stakes are only going to get higher as I get older. I zoom in and out of focus daily, and all of these things exist simultaneously inside me: a galaxy contained in reluctant skin and blue jeans. The looming threat of my grandfather’s illness exists right next to an almost intolerable smugness that I got flowers for Valentine’s Day. What upset me today? That I am having a relationship-altering fight with my mom, and my boyfriend’s cookies that I sent haven’t gotten to him.

And it’s very, very difficult to try to figure out how to feel all of those things at the same time and not go stark-raving bonkers.

I wondered aloud once to a friend why I can’t think in more solid terms about global warming. Make no mistake, I’m incredibly nervous about it; I recycle, and I take the bus, but I felt like I should be more worried about it more often. My friend, who probably studied psychology or environmental science, surprised me by shrugging and telling me that the human brain wasn’t built to face biological demise 24/7. Meaning, to a certain extent, that denial (or a least firm muffling) is hardwired into us. I wasn’t entirely convinced, since many of my friends spend their professional and personal hours actively trying to change our environmental destruction, but it certainly made me think.

Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to fully grasp the relativity of the things in my life: how large and small it is and isn’t. The enormous good and bad things and the tiny good and bad things have to live all together, inconsistently and impossibly, within me because for better or worse, they’re mine. Taken as a whole, rather than a sum of very disproportionate and confusing parts, maybe this is just the human condition. People have been losing loved ones and stepping in puddles and finding five dollar bills and overthrowing dictators forever, and many of them have not lost their minds. Perhaps at the end of the day you just keep moving and always remember the ultimate truth in Robert Frost’s great and overarching theory about life:

“It goes on.”