Hi Amanda. I’m dying of cancer at 39. Yes, it’s very sad, thank you. My husband, and love of my life, Jason, is finding himself very much afraid of the crippling grief he expects will follow my death.
Feb 4, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Amanda Palmer
This was so beautiful. My uncle died of a heart attack a few days ago and I am currently bearing witness to my aunt's grief. She is in her late sixties and has dementia. So she is continuously forgetting and remembering that he has passed, which is a special sort of hell. When she remembers, and is wracked with grief, I hold her hands and we cry. Then it gently turns into half-remembered stories of their adventures. She describes to me the best she can with her flailing mind how much she loves him, and it feels even more honest and true and visceral because she cant find the right words. As if there simply are no words to describe the depth of their love and her grief. Thanks for helping me make sense of the role I've taken on. ❤❤❤
I read this as I too am a ‘Jason’ in the most literal sense. My husband has stage 4 cancer, and is slowly dying. I was not, nor ever will be ready to face this fact at age 42, that one day in the future, I will be alone. That I will be navigating my life alone.
Thank you Amanda for choosing to respond to Penny’s letter, and for our sound advice. Thank you to Penny for being vulnerable at a time you could choose to be selfish and thank you Jason, for holding space in a relatable way that seems only few understand.
If you don’t mind I’m going to speak directly to Penny. Penny I don’t know where you live; I live in LA- you tell your Jason if he ever wants to talk or text or email or scream if he would like to have a total stranger who understands what’s happening best she can to be a witness,tell him I will be here.
I lost my 19-year-old daughter just over three years ago. I live in a different world and nothing will ever be the same. But I am trying to learn how to be here, how to best most purposely live in this old unfamiliar world. Nothing will ever be the same after you go for your Jason either but maybe it can still be something. Something with purpose maybe a little joy.
He figured out how to find the love of his life Penny. I bet you he’ll be OK.
My mom was diagnosed with brain cancer right about the time that Covid hit and passed away the day after her birthday, last year.
When she became bedbound, her phone was her lifeline and she would call everyone multiple times a day. Twenty, thirty times a day. All hours of the day and night. I couldn't always answer, so she would leave voicemails.
The voicemails were never long. She would say hi, and tell me about the weather or the show she was watching or what color she wanted to dye her hair, or what tattoo she wanted to get.
I saved them all.
And after she passed, when I was missing her terribly, I would play my favorite ones. Just her talking about normal everyday things and her saying she loved me.
So... to help Jason when he is broken hearted and the rest of the people who love you.... record your voice. In a voicemail, or video, a Tick-Tock... wherever.. because hearing you say you love them can get them through some really hard days.
I lost the love of my life to cervical cancer in 2019. The diagnosis was quick, and her death even quicker. Her name was Mary, and she was the finest soul I ever hope to meet.
Amanda, your advice about witnesses is spot-on and brilliant. I had very little of that after Mary died, which made the witnesses I did have feel so much more precious.
I still struggle with the suffering, and as the pain slowly lifts, the loneliness seems to increase. (The pandemic certainly hasn’t helped.) I wish you, Penny, rest and comfort, and I wish Jason all the love and connection he needs to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
One of my first jobs as a priest was working as an on-call chaplain at a funeral home. My specific job was to do the funerals for people who didn’t have anyone else to do their funerals. These were folks who had been abandoned by the church. My job was forensic in nature because I was having to write eulogies for folks I had never met; I had to get to know them through the people who loved them.
When I would get the call from the funeral director, I would then begin calling family and friends to try and discover who this person was.
One of the very first funerals I ever did, the daughter wouldn’t call me back. I was terrified. The day of the funeral approached, and I had nothing but a very generic piece written up. I figured I would arrive early, try to pry out whatever I could from her the day of, and wing it.
When I got there, the funeral director pointed me in the direction of the daughter. She was a long, stoic-looking woman with silver hair. When I approached her, she immediately said, “Father, just get up there and read verses and say whatever you must but don’t make my mother out to be a saint or cute. Everyone will know you are lying.”
At first, I was mortified. But I sat with that experience for quite some time.
I think it taught more more about grief than almost any other experience before or after it. It taught me that grief must be authentic; we have to be true to who the person really was.
So often, we feel like we must go through the performance of grief and platitudes. It’s almost liturgical. Stand up, sit down, kneel: repeat.
Over the years, as I’ve lost people I loved, I’ve observed as others attached themselves to that loss. It was clear they didn’t know them, that their sadness was surface level, and their grief was for show. They didn’t know them, they didn’t love them, and some of them hated those people I loved. But suddenly, you would have thought they were best friends.
I had to find the Sams. The ones who knew, who understood, and as you said… it wasn’t always the ones you expected.
The pandemic has brought on more grief or loss than many of us have ever experienced. I would always end every funeral by saying, “there is no wrong way to experience grief, with the exception of not experiencing it.” I ignored that advice in my own life and let that pain bottle up inside. I was giving so much of myself into helping others with their own sadness and loss I didn’t give myself space to deal with it.
Last year, I finally let it out through my art. But it took me a mind time to get there. It hasn’t been easy, it’s profoundly painful, but it is important.
Thank you for this piece. My heart is with Penny and Jason. If there is anything I can do to help, please reach out.
This is a beautiful response. One thing I would add--please be aware of the inconsistent nature of grief. I mean, at first it's pretty consistent and all consuming, in exactly the way you might expect. What becomes harder is when the grief starts to slim down: you think, ok I've dealt with this, I'm ok, and then, BANG! Like a car running a red light and mowing you down, you weren't looking for it, you weren't expecting it, but suddenly you're under it staring up at its crushing weight and thinking, 'fuck.' And it's almost worse *because* it's been easier, because you've lost the grief-muscles you developed when you were carrying it full time.
Disclosure: my partner's daughter was murdered in 2008, and I've watched his grieving process as time has passed (because my grief is different from his, of course it is; losing a kid? FUCK!) And this is what it was like for him. He still gets bitten by the black dog (an image we only use because of Ian Dury's famous "banging nails" line; it gives him a mental image, an almost physical embodiment that allows him some kind of mental action). It's just good to let people know that grief isn't a straight line on the graph from prostrate------>healed. It's what I wish I had known when supporting him.
Wow. This first installment is nothing short of incendiary. I’m blown away by Penny’s leap of faith to ask for help from an untraditional source + Amanda’s compassion. Your ability to use storytelling to make advice feel accessible and manageable instead of a lecture or a prescription is so comforting. To Penny & Jason ; I hope you find an army of Sams.
This is a beautiful response, Amanda, and really resonated with me (and what a wonderfully caring thing to ask, Penny).
My husband died 3 and a half years ago, from a brain tumour, at the age of 36. My grief was, in some ways, different to how I imagined it might be (I don't think better or worse, but different). There was a lot of feeling absolutely unable to move from the sofa, of feeling alien and bewildered in supermarkets, like you described, Amanda.
The 'sams' in my life have been how I have got through it. They've helped me to feel I'm keeping John alive. And as well as the 'sams' who knew us together, people who ask me about John, who ask what he'd think of something, who wish they knew him. One of my 'sams', the best man from our wedding, is now my partner. When our relationship started, I questioned whether it was a terrible idea. I had a dream that doctors told me 'surprise, John's not dead after all!', and I had a hard time in my dream working out what to do with my old life and my new life... In the end of the dream we all three decided to live together (which is basically what we do, metaphorically). That's the best illustration I can think of, of how the support from someone who knows you two together, can help keep someone alive (and they don't have to become a partner, obviously- that's just how it worked out for me).
My other recommendations, to go with Amanda's, for anyone in this situation...(not anywhere near as beautifully expressed...)
I'd massively recommend reading Dr Kathryn mannix's 'with the end in mind'. It helped me so much to prepare for the actual dying process, and I was much more be able to feel like I was there supportively for John because of it.
I've also found Nora McInerny's podcast 'terrible, thanks for asking' and her books/Ted talk very helpful for understanding and processing my grief. It doesn't make grief any easier, but perhaps less scary when you know you're not alone.
I read this quote below from Richard Feynman at John's funeral. John and I did have a hell of a good time.
'It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures- these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come- it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.
The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference- the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, “But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years.” But that’s crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, “Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?- all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.
I am just sitting in my kitchen reading your words and tears run all over my face. I lost my husband Armin, my first love, the father of my son, when i was twenty. Two weeks before my son had his second birthday. He died of cancer at the age of 26. I remember all this fear before he died and the feeling in my whole body. I was so awake to inhale all the moments we got left. There was so much love there. I really find myself in all the feelings you talk about when you lost Anthony. I was so young and so lost and so sad with this two year old boy on my lab. It was so hard to connect with people of my age, because nobody knew how to deal with me.
The most comfort i found was the grandmother of my husband. She was almost 80 by that time. She lost a lot of people already in her life, but i knew she too was not prepared to loose her beloved grandson. But somehow she managed to grief and still be deeply thankful and grateful for the very loving relationship she had with her grandson. We shared our pain, mostly without talking about it. But we did talk a lot about Armin. He was so present in our daily routine and still so present for my son. This helped me a lot. The talking about him, the celebrating his life, the laughing about all the really funny times we had. It made me feel close to him even he was not physically there anymore.
Amanda i wanna deeply thank you for your words.
Jason & Penny i send you all my love for the way you have ahead of you.
Feb 4, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Amanda Palmer
Finding the people who will be there for Jason in the After is a wonderful way to help him because Amanda is right, you have no idea who can emotionally be there in the trenches when you’re grieving and it’s often not the folks you would expect to be there.
I lost my husband suddenly in 2020 at 47 and it’s been helpful for me to find support from fellow young widows/ers. When Jason is ready, we’ll also be there for him over at Club Wid. We’re a support group for young widows: widowsclubmembership@gmail.com
Oh, this brought me to absolute tears. I lost the person I loved a little over twelve years ago, when I was just 19 and she was two weeks and change away from eighteen, and this brought back so much of that. I wish I'd had this all those years ago, because it really spoke to my heart.
Ours was an online friendship (though we met in person several times, at the end) and almost nobody in my "real" life knew about it--or wanted to. I wish I had people I could talk to about her. She shaped so much of my teenage years--and grieving her obliterated my early adulthood.
I know I'm being so selfish in talking about myself here, but that's just to say how hard this hits and how deeply I feel it. <3
Feb 4, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Amanda Palmer
Amanda, thank you. I am currently writing an essay about the imminent death of my father, who I have been grieving preemptively for nearly 15 years as he wanders the doorstep of death. There is much beauty and richness here. My relationship with my father is extraordinarily complex which is to say, I have forgiven everything and because I have forgiven I find that I often have nothing left to say. Even my silence is part of the grief. I have walked the knowing, the sobbing, the urgency and the circulating at the foot of the bed. I find myself thirsting for the relief of knowing his suffering is over. At the same time, I am surprised at the paradox of his cancer - it is voracious and glacial. Sometimes I have become so numb to it that I wonder if I have simply run out of love for him. Your words and reminder about grief being a measure of love healed me a little - the reminder that my long grieving and my anticipation of the grief to come when he does pass, means in fact - I do love him. And myself. He is dying and there is a part of me that is also dying with him. At the same time, there is also a new part of me being born - and while I will do my best to impart the lessons I learned from knowing my father, this new part of me will also be free from it. That gives me hope.
For Penny - how strong your love must be that you are able to think of Jason with such concern and empathy. I think you see a trueness of people when they are suffering and that your trueness is your love and concern for him is beautiful to witness.
Feb 4, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Amanda Palmer
Dearest Penny and Jason. You are going through something that is indescribable to others in terms of how you both may be feeling at any given moment and I want you to know that I see you. Unfortunately, I can relate to you all too well in this experience. My husband was the love of my life, my best friend, my ride or die life partner and he died two years ago of cancer just a month after his 40th birthday. We were lucky enough to have witnesses of our life and our love around us when he died and Amanda is so on point that having those witnesses really does help. After my husband died, I found it hard to be around or spend time with anyone who wasn’t with us while he was sick and dying because it felt like nobody really understood. Our community that surrounded us, stayed with us, cooked meals for us, held us in their hearts and arms as we faced down death and grief together are the only people I felt could relate to me after my he was gone. It felt like we had gone to war together. I can tell you that the grief will be paralyzing and crippling at times. I still feel the breath catch in my chest in the most painful way when a random memory occurs, or I hear a song or I smell certain things that belonged to him. Tears are streaming down my face as I type this. As far as grief goes, feel it and don’t back away from it, really fully let yourself feel, it’s ok. It will be painful, sometimes grief feels more emotionally painful than you ever knew was possible. What nobody tells you is how physically painful grief can be; it’s like your soul, or whatever resides in the depths of our bodies, aches so deeply that you feel like you can’t endure it. My best advice is to connect as deeply as you can with one another while you can. Walk through it together facing one another, holding one another, and never look away from one another so Jason will have that connection and profound love to carry forward with him and keep him strong. It’s the love that keeps us going. The love here from Amanda and this community is beautiful and makes me feel privileged to be witness to. You are loved. Penny and Jason, I will keep you in my heart. xx
p.s. Edited to add, thank you for sharing and letting us all share with you, Penny and Jason.
This was so beautiful. My uncle died of a heart attack a few days ago and I am currently bearing witness to my aunt's grief. She is in her late sixties and has dementia. So she is continuously forgetting and remembering that he has passed, which is a special sort of hell. When she remembers, and is wracked with grief, I hold her hands and we cry. Then it gently turns into half-remembered stories of their adventures. She describes to me the best she can with her flailing mind how much she loves him, and it feels even more honest and true and visceral because she cant find the right words. As if there simply are no words to describe the depth of their love and her grief. Thanks for helping me make sense of the role I've taken on. ❤❤❤
I read this as I too am a ‘Jason’ in the most literal sense. My husband has stage 4 cancer, and is slowly dying. I was not, nor ever will be ready to face this fact at age 42, that one day in the future, I will be alone. That I will be navigating my life alone.
Thank you Amanda for choosing to respond to Penny’s letter, and for our sound advice. Thank you to Penny for being vulnerable at a time you could choose to be selfish and thank you Jason, for holding space in a relatable way that seems only few understand.
Dear Amanda,
If you don’t mind I’m going to speak directly to Penny. Penny I don’t know where you live; I live in LA- you tell your Jason if he ever wants to talk or text or email or scream if he would like to have a total stranger who understands what’s happening best she can to be a witness,tell him I will be here.
I lost my 19-year-old daughter just over three years ago. I live in a different world and nothing will ever be the same. But I am trying to learn how to be here, how to best most purposely live in this old unfamiliar world. Nothing will ever be the same after you go for your Jason either but maybe it can still be something. Something with purpose maybe a little joy.
He figured out how to find the love of his life Penny. I bet you he’ll be OK.
Buckets of love to the both of you
Margot
Findawayhome@gmail.com
PS thanks Amanda
Hello Amanda. Hello Penny.
My mom was diagnosed with brain cancer right about the time that Covid hit and passed away the day after her birthday, last year.
When she became bedbound, her phone was her lifeline and she would call everyone multiple times a day. Twenty, thirty times a day. All hours of the day and night. I couldn't always answer, so she would leave voicemails.
The voicemails were never long. She would say hi, and tell me about the weather or the show she was watching or what color she wanted to dye her hair, or what tattoo she wanted to get.
I saved them all.
And after she passed, when I was missing her terribly, I would play my favorite ones. Just her talking about normal everyday things and her saying she loved me.
So... to help Jason when he is broken hearted and the rest of the people who love you.... record your voice. In a voicemail, or video, a Tick-Tock... wherever.. because hearing you say you love them can get them through some really hard days.
Hi Amanda. Hi Penny.
I lost the love of my life to cervical cancer in 2019. The diagnosis was quick, and her death even quicker. Her name was Mary, and she was the finest soul I ever hope to meet.
Amanda, your advice about witnesses is spot-on and brilliant. I had very little of that after Mary died, which made the witnesses I did have feel so much more precious.
I still struggle with the suffering, and as the pain slowly lifts, the loneliness seems to increase. (The pandemic certainly hasn’t helped.) I wish you, Penny, rest and comfort, and I wish Jason all the love and connection he needs to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Love to you both,
Howard
One of my first jobs as a priest was working as an on-call chaplain at a funeral home. My specific job was to do the funerals for people who didn’t have anyone else to do their funerals. These were folks who had been abandoned by the church. My job was forensic in nature because I was having to write eulogies for folks I had never met; I had to get to know them through the people who loved them.
When I would get the call from the funeral director, I would then begin calling family and friends to try and discover who this person was.
One of the very first funerals I ever did, the daughter wouldn’t call me back. I was terrified. The day of the funeral approached, and I had nothing but a very generic piece written up. I figured I would arrive early, try to pry out whatever I could from her the day of, and wing it.
When I got there, the funeral director pointed me in the direction of the daughter. She was a long, stoic-looking woman with silver hair. When I approached her, she immediately said, “Father, just get up there and read verses and say whatever you must but don’t make my mother out to be a saint or cute. Everyone will know you are lying.”
At first, I was mortified. But I sat with that experience for quite some time.
I think it taught more more about grief than almost any other experience before or after it. It taught me that grief must be authentic; we have to be true to who the person really was.
So often, we feel like we must go through the performance of grief and platitudes. It’s almost liturgical. Stand up, sit down, kneel: repeat.
Over the years, as I’ve lost people I loved, I’ve observed as others attached themselves to that loss. It was clear they didn’t know them, that their sadness was surface level, and their grief was for show. They didn’t know them, they didn’t love them, and some of them hated those people I loved. But suddenly, you would have thought they were best friends.
I had to find the Sams. The ones who knew, who understood, and as you said… it wasn’t always the ones you expected.
The pandemic has brought on more grief or loss than many of us have ever experienced. I would always end every funeral by saying, “there is no wrong way to experience grief, with the exception of not experiencing it.” I ignored that advice in my own life and let that pain bottle up inside. I was giving so much of myself into helping others with their own sadness and loss I didn’t give myself space to deal with it.
Last year, I finally let it out through my art. But it took me a mind time to get there. It hasn’t been easy, it’s profoundly painful, but it is important.
Thank you for this piece. My heart is with Penny and Jason. If there is anything I can do to help, please reach out.
This is a beautiful response. One thing I would add--please be aware of the inconsistent nature of grief. I mean, at first it's pretty consistent and all consuming, in exactly the way you might expect. What becomes harder is when the grief starts to slim down: you think, ok I've dealt with this, I'm ok, and then, BANG! Like a car running a red light and mowing you down, you weren't looking for it, you weren't expecting it, but suddenly you're under it staring up at its crushing weight and thinking, 'fuck.' And it's almost worse *because* it's been easier, because you've lost the grief-muscles you developed when you were carrying it full time.
Disclosure: my partner's daughter was murdered in 2008, and I've watched his grieving process as time has passed (because my grief is different from his, of course it is; losing a kid? FUCK!) And this is what it was like for him. He still gets bitten by the black dog (an image we only use because of Ian Dury's famous "banging nails" line; it gives him a mental image, an almost physical embodiment that allows him some kind of mental action). It's just good to let people know that grief isn't a straight line on the graph from prostrate------>healed. It's what I wish I had known when supporting him.
Wow. This first installment is nothing short of incendiary. I’m blown away by Penny’s leap of faith to ask for help from an untraditional source + Amanda’s compassion. Your ability to use storytelling to make advice feel accessible and manageable instead of a lecture or a prescription is so comforting. To Penny & Jason ; I hope you find an army of Sams.
This is a beautiful response, Amanda, and really resonated with me (and what a wonderfully caring thing to ask, Penny).
My husband died 3 and a half years ago, from a brain tumour, at the age of 36. My grief was, in some ways, different to how I imagined it might be (I don't think better or worse, but different). There was a lot of feeling absolutely unable to move from the sofa, of feeling alien and bewildered in supermarkets, like you described, Amanda.
The 'sams' in my life have been how I have got through it. They've helped me to feel I'm keeping John alive. And as well as the 'sams' who knew us together, people who ask me about John, who ask what he'd think of something, who wish they knew him. One of my 'sams', the best man from our wedding, is now my partner. When our relationship started, I questioned whether it was a terrible idea. I had a dream that doctors told me 'surprise, John's not dead after all!', and I had a hard time in my dream working out what to do with my old life and my new life... In the end of the dream we all three decided to live together (which is basically what we do, metaphorically). That's the best illustration I can think of, of how the support from someone who knows you two together, can help keep someone alive (and they don't have to become a partner, obviously- that's just how it worked out for me).
My other recommendations, to go with Amanda's, for anyone in this situation...(not anywhere near as beautifully expressed...)
I'd massively recommend reading Dr Kathryn mannix's 'with the end in mind'. It helped me so much to prepare for the actual dying process, and I was much more be able to feel like I was there supportively for John because of it.
I've also found Nora McInerny's podcast 'terrible, thanks for asking' and her books/Ted talk very helpful for understanding and processing my grief. It doesn't make grief any easier, but perhaps less scary when you know you're not alone.
I read this quote below from Richard Feynman at John's funeral. John and I did have a hell of a good time.
'It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures- these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come- it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.
The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference- the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, “But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years.” But that’s crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, “Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?- all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.
We had a hell of a good time together.'
I am just sitting in my kitchen reading your words and tears run all over my face. I lost my husband Armin, my first love, the father of my son, when i was twenty. Two weeks before my son had his second birthday. He died of cancer at the age of 26. I remember all this fear before he died and the feeling in my whole body. I was so awake to inhale all the moments we got left. There was so much love there. I really find myself in all the feelings you talk about when you lost Anthony. I was so young and so lost and so sad with this two year old boy on my lab. It was so hard to connect with people of my age, because nobody knew how to deal with me.
The most comfort i found was the grandmother of my husband. She was almost 80 by that time. She lost a lot of people already in her life, but i knew she too was not prepared to loose her beloved grandson. But somehow she managed to grief and still be deeply thankful and grateful for the very loving relationship she had with her grandson. We shared our pain, mostly without talking about it. But we did talk a lot about Armin. He was so present in our daily routine and still so present for my son. This helped me a lot. The talking about him, the celebrating his life, the laughing about all the really funny times we had. It made me feel close to him even he was not physically there anymore.
Amanda i wanna deeply thank you for your words.
Jason & Penny i send you all my love for the way you have ahead of you.
annA
This bought tears to my eyes. Penny, I hope you can read this and know that we are sending our love to you.
On a somewhat lighter note: There is an insta call Grief Me Alone (https://www.instagram.com/grievemealone/) with awesome merch, just like Amanda suggested, where you can get a T-shirt about grief. (https://www.bonfire.com/store/grieve-me-alone/) Yes please normalise grief. We need to.
Finding the people who will be there for Jason in the After is a wonderful way to help him because Amanda is right, you have no idea who can emotionally be there in the trenches when you’re grieving and it’s often not the folks you would expect to be there.
I lost my husband suddenly in 2020 at 47 and it’s been helpful for me to find support from fellow young widows/ers. When Jason is ready, we’ll also be there for him over at Club Wid. We’re a support group for young widows: widowsclubmembership@gmail.com
Oh, this brought me to absolute tears. I lost the person I loved a little over twelve years ago, when I was just 19 and she was two weeks and change away from eighteen, and this brought back so much of that. I wish I'd had this all those years ago, because it really spoke to my heart.
Ours was an online friendship (though we met in person several times, at the end) and almost nobody in my "real" life knew about it--or wanted to. I wish I had people I could talk to about her. She shaped so much of my teenage years--and grieving her obliterated my early adulthood.
I know I'm being so selfish in talking about myself here, but that's just to say how hard this hits and how deeply I feel it. <3
Your letter to Penny is one of the most beautiful I've ever read. I shed tears too and felt your love and the love of the community. Thank you.
Amanda, thank you. I am currently writing an essay about the imminent death of my father, who I have been grieving preemptively for nearly 15 years as he wanders the doorstep of death. There is much beauty and richness here. My relationship with my father is extraordinarily complex which is to say, I have forgiven everything and because I have forgiven I find that I often have nothing left to say. Even my silence is part of the grief. I have walked the knowing, the sobbing, the urgency and the circulating at the foot of the bed. I find myself thirsting for the relief of knowing his suffering is over. At the same time, I am surprised at the paradox of his cancer - it is voracious and glacial. Sometimes I have become so numb to it that I wonder if I have simply run out of love for him. Your words and reminder about grief being a measure of love healed me a little - the reminder that my long grieving and my anticipation of the grief to come when he does pass, means in fact - I do love him. And myself. He is dying and there is a part of me that is also dying with him. At the same time, there is also a new part of me being born - and while I will do my best to impart the lessons I learned from knowing my father, this new part of me will also be free from it. That gives me hope.
For Penny - how strong your love must be that you are able to think of Jason with such concern and empathy. I think you see a trueness of people when they are suffering and that your trueness is your love and concern for him is beautiful to witness.
Dearest Penny and Jason. You are going through something that is indescribable to others in terms of how you both may be feeling at any given moment and I want you to know that I see you. Unfortunately, I can relate to you all too well in this experience. My husband was the love of my life, my best friend, my ride or die life partner and he died two years ago of cancer just a month after his 40th birthday. We were lucky enough to have witnesses of our life and our love around us when he died and Amanda is so on point that having those witnesses really does help. After my husband died, I found it hard to be around or spend time with anyone who wasn’t with us while he was sick and dying because it felt like nobody really understood. Our community that surrounded us, stayed with us, cooked meals for us, held us in their hearts and arms as we faced down death and grief together are the only people I felt could relate to me after my he was gone. It felt like we had gone to war together. I can tell you that the grief will be paralyzing and crippling at times. I still feel the breath catch in my chest in the most painful way when a random memory occurs, or I hear a song or I smell certain things that belonged to him. Tears are streaming down my face as I type this. As far as grief goes, feel it and don’t back away from it, really fully let yourself feel, it’s ok. It will be painful, sometimes grief feels more emotionally painful than you ever knew was possible. What nobody tells you is how physically painful grief can be; it’s like your soul, or whatever resides in the depths of our bodies, aches so deeply that you feel like you can’t endure it. My best advice is to connect as deeply as you can with one another while you can. Walk through it together facing one another, holding one another, and never look away from one another so Jason will have that connection and profound love to carry forward with him and keep him strong. It’s the love that keeps us going. The love here from Amanda and this community is beautiful and makes me feel privileged to be witness to. You are loved. Penny and Jason, I will keep you in my heart. xx
p.s. Edited to add, thank you for sharing and letting us all share with you, Penny and Jason.