The Proportionate Heart

When I was a freshman in college, my oldest sister would send me postcards to my school mailbox.  On one of them sometime during the fall, she described a medical appointment she'd had and expressed her dry disbelief that having a small hole in her heart was not in fact a very big deal, according to her doctor.  This postcard was how I found out about her apparently not-emergent heart condition.

I had a meltdown right there in the greasiest dining hall on campus. 

Here's the immediate background:

When my parents and I had been driving to New Hampshire to install me in my freshman dorm, we had stopped in Michigan to visit my sister and newborn niece.  The day we were going to leave, we were sitting in the family room when my usually hyper-articulate sister began stumbling on her words.  She looked bewildered, then terrified.  She was having what's called a TIA, which is a type of stroke.  Her blood pressure had been off the charts when she'd been pregnant, and a small clot had gotten through the hole in her heart, which no one had known about, to her brain. 

As it turns out, if you're going to have a stroke, a TIA is-- odd though it may sound-- the best kind of stroke you can have.  My sister suffered no lasting physical effects, and the hole in her heart was deemed not dangerous enough to merit surgery.

But here's the deeper background:

Seven months before my sister's TIA, my friend Ben had been killed in a drunk driving accident.  Ben had been my senior adviser when I was a freshman in high school, which doesn't sound likely as the foundation for the kind of bond I had to him.  The thing is, when I moved to California and was more lost and alone than I had ever been, Ben was my lifeline.  When he called me to set up our first advisee group outing, we ended up talking for two hours.  He was so exceptionally kind and generous with his love, and I think it would be impossible to overstate what that meant to me at that time in my life, and how grateful I've always been to him since then.

Even now, I refuse to say that he died.  He was killed.  He didn't leave-- he was taken.  I don't know why that language was, and continues to be, so important to me.  But it was, and is, and when I found out he had been killed, I thought I would break in half from the grief.  I had never lost anyone in my life up to that point, and the fact that he was no longer out there-- no longer in the world-- made me want to scream.  I think I actually did do quite a bit of screaming during that winter and the spring the followed. 

Ten months later, when my sister casually mentioned on a postcard that she had a hole in her heart, my own heart did some very basic math:

If losing a friend-- a marvelous, loving friend-- had made me want to turn myself inside out to escape the pain, then even the possibility of losing my sister terrified me more than I had thought I had the capacity to be terrified.  It was a terror that completely swamped my capacity for reasoning: I think this is what people mean when they say "scared out of your mind."

I called her the day I got the postcard, crying hysterically and frightened literally beyond words, and she couldn't understand my reaction any more than I could explain it at the time.  I was beyond reason, and that's the only language she understands. 

When we were both home for Christmas that year, and (as usual) a fight between us had become all the fights that had ever been between us all at once, she told me pointblank that she thought I had over-dramatized Ben's death.

Even ten years later, the impact-- the violent collision of her words against me-- makes me flinch.  And though we've come a long way in our relationship, I don't think I will forgive her for that.  I also don't think I have any desire to do so, and I think that's okay.

When I think about the progress I've made towards becoming the most adult version of myself I can manage, one of the things I'm most proud of is being able to articulate the things I wasn't able to before.  For instance, and importantly, I think the first thing I should've said to my sister was that she should waste no time in fucking off, as she had no idea what the hell she was talking about.  She had never lost anyone before, much less at as young an age and as violently as Ben had been killed.  Her judgment, outside of being unbelievably cruel, was also completely uninformed. Hence: fuck off.  Immediately if not sooner.

Recently, I wrote about my fantasy of traveling back in time to comfort my younger self in times of grief or pain.  In this case, when I imagine going back to myself, I wrap myself protectively in my own, older arms before turning on my sister and really letting her have it with an additional ten years' worth of honed expressive abilities. 

This is all well and good-- the anger, the articulation, the perspective-- but none of this is by any means resolved.

Last week, I found out that a friend from college had been killed in a car accident.  Again: she did not die, she was killed.  As when Ben died, I could not understand how everyone on earth did not feel it the moment she was taken.  Surely the molecules and atoms and photons should've simply stopped-- appalled that someone so energetic and charismatic and intensely loving as this woman was just suddenly gone. 

As I thought about her-- the texture of her voice, what it felt like to be in a room with her (it felt incredible, by the way)-- a horrible, familiar doubt came to me:

Am I over-dramatizing this?

Am I making it about myself?  Is my reaction proportionate to our level of closeness?  Is my reaction attention-seeking?

To put it bluntly, questions like these really fucking suck, whether they originate externally or internally. 

This may sound strange, but I wish I could just grieve, and not ask myself these questions (proportionate grief-- seriously?).  After all, in terms of a life lost, such questions are neither here nor there.

Because my friend was amazing.  She lit up any room that was lucky enough to have her in it.  I found out this week through memories shared that she made a habit of flirting with her friends in good faith-- I had thought for years I was just flattering myself and imagining it.  I have to tell you, I'm straight, but that woman's flirting was one of the most delightfully flustering and gratifying experiences I have ever had.  She was vibrant and hilarious and so intensely, purposefully herself that you couldn't help but be more sure of yourself in her presence.  I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, but I had this blithe certainty that when we saw each other again, we'd do a hollering tackle-hug by way of greeting.

And the fact that she is no longer on this earth makes me want to scream.

Maybe at a certain level it is possible to over-dramatize or make a loss about yourself.  But when you lose someone you love, someone who indisputably raised the awesome quotient of the world for the time that he or she was in it, you have to let yourself have that loss.  There's no proportion or formula: that's the thing about love.

Obviously, this is still something I'm working on, and when my thoughts turn to self-doubt, I'm trying to turn them back to the friend who was effectively the cure for self-doubt and unhappiness. 

Because ultimately what's most important and absolutely beyond any judgment is as simple as the fact that I-- we, the world-- may have lost her, but goddamn, it is a fine, fine thing to have loved her.