Grief and Gratitude

grief and radical gratitude

November, 2022

When you are the grieving person around the holidays, it is my limited but quite recent experience that some well-meaning, caring people treat you as if you are about to walk through a house of horrors with knives coming out of the walls and demon clowns and a loop of Terms of Endearment on a jumbotron. While they, instead, will be taking the Harry Potter train to Shangri-La and blissing out on L-tryptophan.   The awkward, but caring glance, and then, “What are you doing for, well, Thanksgiving? It’s the first one….” Uncomfortable pause. It’s like I’m entering the depths of hell and they may or may not see me on the other side. 

After all, as my therapist has even said, Thanksgiving is a trigger-warning, rabid grizzly bear weekend for even non-grieving people (I may have embellished her words a bit…). There are those battling family of origin dysfunction, loneliness, addiction, financial insecurity, heartbreak…all trying to create some form of Hallmarkian holiday magic involving epic amounts of food and alcohol. Those poor folks are just left to fight the holiday depression demons on their own without the well-meaning check-ins and “oh-you-poor-unfortunate-soul” glances.

So, how was my first Thanksgiving without Owen? It was fun and sad and zany and exhausting and hard and not so hard and magical. It was all the things.  It was walking through the holiday light show with my family in Palm Desert and hearing Owen say “How much fossil fuel is being burned to power this thing? Are they at least connected to those windfarms?”  And then, in my mind, seeing him turn on a dime (as he often would) and run towards the lights and do his signature “crazy” dance, balancing on one foot and twisting, arms akimbo while loudly belting the bad holiday tunes. I felt him there.  And I laughed out loud. I turned to my completely insane and up for anything family and said, “Time to honor Owen - let’s all do his crazy dance!” Without hesitation or need for any explanation, they all followed my lead, twisting and turning and blocking a popular light structure and about 30 people trying to take photos of it. I didn’t care. My dead husband wanted us to dance. Their photos could wait 30 seconds.

Thanksgiving was also remembering him sitting in his favorite chair at my mom’s house just last year, his trusty iPad in hand, reading some profoundly depressing non-fiction, his favorite, while recuperating from being in the hospital days before, having had chest tubes inserted for a bilateral pneumothorax, or double lung collapse. It was talking to his mom and brother on the phone in Connecticut and feeling like we were all connected to him and by him.

It was also pouring him a glass of single malt scotch at dinner this year a la Elijah at Passover. (I would have given him a plate of turkey, but he was vegan, after all). It was going around the table and sharing favorite Owen stories from the past 15 plus years of spending Thanksgivings together in Mexico, as we had done up until 2020. 

And those stories. My god, those stories. Most I knew, but some I didn’t.  My nieces talked about Owen the sea monster who would rise out of the ocean and toss them far into the air.  We talked of ziplines and Cuban cigars and him running up behind my brothers, grabbing onto their shoulders, throwing his legs into the air shouting “catch me!” Over turkey, we shared 15 years of in-jokes and the craziness of travelling with small children and margaritas and mayhem.

The stories were everything. And I felt radical gratitude.

Over the last few years, the term “radical” has become, well, its own meme. Self-help articles guide you towards “RADICAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE!” “RADICAL SELF-LOVE!” “RADICAL BODY TRANSFORMATION!” 

Thanksgiving Day was five months to the day of Owen’s passing. What I have discovered over those five months is the difference between gratitude, and radical gratitude. Gratitude, for me, was always a lovely sentiment - Thanksgiving dinner toasts and yoga retreat themes and the rock on my desk with the letters “grateful” carved into it. But radical gratitude is the power to vacillate between profound despair and “why me” and “why couldn’t the treatment have worked” and “how is this even real,” to “thank god for that first date in December of 1989 and for our years in New York City as actors and for LA and our ‘family’ working at the Four Season Hotel and for the kids and the trips and the chaos and cooking and cuddling on the couch.” Radical Gratitude is knowing that I am the luckiest fucking person in the world to have had the life I have had for 33 years. Radical Gratitude is a superpower. And It’s free. But sometimes you need to be brought to your knees to truly find it.

Radical gratitude softens the edges of grief. It doesn’t make grief go away, it doesn’t speed up the process of grieving, it doesn’t bring Owen back. But it dulls those knives in the walls just enough so that I wrap my arms around all of it and breathe into the tears and laughter and pain. It even makes me nostalgic for the endless indignation about water usage in the Mojave Desert. 

It allows me to dance like an idiot at a light show in the desert on Thanksgiving eve and make it to the other side.