“Life is more painful now than ever before. No dawn is innocent.”
I wrote those words in the original manuscript of Even if you don’t, nearly two years after Kailen’s death. People will invariably find that timeframe surprising. How could it still be so painful after so long? What about the old adage, time heals all wounds?
While that hackneyed mantra contains tendrils of truth – time does possess healing properties – it speaks to the overarching societal misperception of loss.
The problem lies in our limited intellectual understanding of grief. Our minds prefer chronological processes; they appeal to our indwelt senses of rationality, order, and control. As a result, our natural instinct is to linearize everything. But as I’ve discussed in previous posts (See: The Invisible Colors of Grief) grief journeys are usually anything but straight.
In reality, grief is metronomic. It oscillates and sways. It’s a journey riddled with unpredictable and overwhelming emotional undulations. Grief is so fluid, in fact, the griever will oftentimes find himself or herself asking these same questions:
Why does this still hurt so badly? I felt fine two days ago.
Why hasn’t time healed my heart yet? They promised it would.
What’s wrong with me?
We as a culture are morbidly infatuated with timelines. We want to know exactly how long to date before we get married; we want to know exactly how long to wait before having children; we want to know exactly how long to work before we retire.
Our preconceived notions about timing govern (or more aptly, dictate) almost everything we do. Which is, at least in part, why we get so frustrated with our inability to predict grief timelines, both for ourselves and others.
Christina Rasmussen, author of Second Firsts, a groundbreaking book on living life after loss, takes it a step further. While I’ve been arguing that there is no legitimate answer to the question – How long does grief last? – Christina notes that the question doesn’t (and shouldn’t) even exist to begin with.
Instead, she suggests asking a better question – the real question:
How do you balance your new life with your old life? (See: Second Firsts Blog)
That is the question we must answer before we can continue living our story. But, you might ask, if grief is so fluid and unpredictable and follows no material timeline, how do I know when my old life ends and my new life begins?
The answer is something I call “milestone moments.”
As I’ve said many times, grief is a journey that never truly ends. I don’t believe I’ll ever wake up and suddenly be done grieving; I’ll miss Kailen forever. But that isn’t to say my grief journey is terminal and hopeless. Quite the contrary!
Grief is indeed an unending journey, but there are many crucial destinations along the way. These destinations, these milestone moments, help us identify and understand the transition from our old life to our new one.
For me, my old life ended on a cold sidewalk in Rochester, Minnesota.
During our battle with cancer, Kailen and I made eight trips to Mayo Clinic Rochester. Though our time at Mayo was often arduous and unpleasant, Rochester itself possessed an almost ethereal quality – like a second home we never knew we had. It was equal parts quaint and quirky, and seemed to welcome us in the casual, unassuming way you greet an old friend.
In the book, I describe Rochester this way:
“Though we often experienced it during trauma, Rochester was sort of magical. It felt like an enchanted land disjointed from the rest of reality, like we had gotten on a plane in Louisville and accessed a parallel universe. It was the Mayberry of the North, more a state-of-mind than an actual place.”
We fell in love with Rochester almost immediately, but it wasn’t until we discovered what Kailen called “Rochester’s hidden treasure” that it truly became magical.
That hidden treasure was, of all things, a Barnes and Noble. And before you say there’s a Barnes and Noble in every major city in America and there’s nothing special about that, let me assure you – this one was special.
Here’s another book excerpt as proof:
“This Barnes and Noble occupied the Chateau Theater, which first opened its doors as a vaudeville house in 1927. The cornerstone was laid by Dr. Charles Mayo himself. With a timeless art deco exterior, coupled with deep blue, star-filled ceilings, walls meant to emulate a medieval French village, and numerous castle turrets surrounding a prominent proscenium arch, the Chateau Theater was just as magical to us as it had been to movie-goers in the 30’s and 40’s.”
The Chateau Theater embodied every fairytale we had left. Which is precisely how it broke my heart.
Six months after Kailen died, having just endured the loneliest winter of my life, I decided to take a trip back to Rochester. I landed at the same airport, made the same drive into town, and quickly realized that nothing was the same.
It seemed Rochester and I had a lot in common – we were both hollow skeletons of our former selves.
The air was cold and the streets were vacant. But lucky for me, I knew a place that would brighten my spirits, the very place that had already comforted some of my deepest heartbreak.
But when I got to the Chateau Theater, the door was locked.
Strange, I thought.
Then I looked inside.
Our Barnes and Noble was empty.
My jaw fell slack and tears stung my eyes. I fumbled for my phone and did a quick Google search, which confirmed my fears. Our Barnes and Noble had closed on December 31st, 2015, just over two months after Kailen took her last breath.
I stood there alone, a cold northern wind pressing at my back, and stared into that empty building for a long time.
Eventually I understood. When Kailen went, the magic went with her.
In that moment, I realized the empty theater was a microcosm of my life. Nothing was the same; I had entered the wasteland, a version of the world in which I no longer belonged. I had lived, died, and now somehow lived again, captivated by the fleeting images of a life already come and gone.
I had lost most of my friends; I was angry; I was sad; I drank to numb the pain; and I spent the majority of my time alone.
Put another way, my theater was still empty.
But then came the milestone, the moment my old life became new:
That empty theater taught me that magic can’t be recreated. But Kailen taught me there’s magic hiding in the dust. And staring into that dusty, abandoned building, I realized she was right – my fairytale wasn’t over.
That empty theater didn’t, and doesn’t, define me. Just like it doesn’t define you. No matter what tragedy you’ve endured, it doesn’t have the power to end your fairytale.
There’s magic in the dust, remember?
Though it may feel like it right now, your heart is not an empty theater. In fact, it might be that your best show is just about to begin.
So go ahead…pull the curtain.
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