The "Awful Leisure" of Loss

There is a very good first-person article today in the “Perspective” section of the Denver Post. Headlined, “What it means to have been born on Sept. 11, 2001,” it is the perspective of a young woman who was born on this day 15 year ago, and how people react when she tells them that, yes, she was born on 9/11.

I have another perspective of this day, one that I would title, ““What it means to have your beloved sister pass away on Sept. 11, 2015.”

One year ago today, I was in the middle of interviewing for a new job, one that would allow me to work remotely full time. This was a goal for me, ever since my sister, who had been in declining health for several years, finally was going to need to move in with me so I could look after her. And, because she couldn’t live with me in Colorado (the altitude), we had decided to move to California, where she could enjoy the benefits of living at sea level (and I could finally realize another goal I had of moving back to the Central Coast).

The interviews (there were three in total) had been going very well, and I was confident that I was going to be offered a position. I was looking forward to telling Colleen the news that very morning one year ago today. I was also hoping that she’d be awake and alert enough to take my call; she had gone into the hospital unexpectedly just four days previously and was having a rough go of it.

Unfortunately, she passed away before I could tell her the good news.

Jonathan H. Ellerby, in his book, “Return to the Sacred,” said this: “After the body is removed, the room is cleaned, and the funeral ends, life will eventually snap back into place. No one at the grocery store will know what’s in your heart, and no one at work will see your sadness. No one will ask you to give voice to the words you haven’t found yet.”

When a loved one passes, time begins to pass differently as well. For the person left behind and left to grieve, it’s as if we’ve entered another dimension, where time is measured not in days, hours, or minutes, but in another, more surreal, less measured way. Those who shared our sadness or grief, those who offered condolences, went back to their unchanged lives. But the person left behind will never have the same life to go back to.

Not long after a friend of mine passed away in 2001, an article titled, “Maybe We Do Not Speak Of It,” serendipitously appeared in the Rocky Mountain News. I cut it out of the paper and framed it next to a photo of my friend because it captured, far better than I could, that surreal feeling of time.

And, so many years later, on the anniversary of my sister’s passing, it still says in a few words what I feel today. I offer it to all of you, in memory of my sister, Colleen Lorraine Graham.

“Maybe we do not speak of it because death will mark all of us, sooner or later. Or maybe it is unspoken because grief is only the first part of it. After a time it becomes something less sharp but larger, too, a more enduring thing called loss.

Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event, there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continual presence of an absence.

“An awful leisure,” Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death.

The landscapes of all our lives become as full of craters as the surface of the moon. And I write my obituaries carefully and think about how little the facts suffice, not only to describe the dead but to tell what they mean to the living all the rest of our lives. We are defined by who we have lost.”