Solving for X: On the Pains and Pleasures of Grieving

It is the morning of November 27, 2020. My father, 82 years old, having been in declining health for the last few years, was admitted to the hospital 3 days ago. Only a few hours after finding out he had been taken there with shortness of breath, I received a call from my brother with alarming news. My father’s COVID19 test was positive, his oxygen had dropped, and the doctor said if they couldn’t get it up within half an hour, he would likely not survive. They were moving him to the ICU.

I was driving home from work when my brother called. I started crying on the phone and abandoned my plan to stop by the post office—I went straight home and called the nurse’s station, hoping to say one last “I love you, goodbye.” I live 10 hours away. There was no way I could get to Florida within half an hour, and even if I could, no visits were permitted for patients with COVID-19.

My father, because of a pre-existing condition, had advance directives requesting not to be intubated or given CPR. The doctors placed him on bi-pap and various medications, and he did not die in that half hour, nor was I given a chance to speak to him. In the past 3 days, when his family members have called, he has been sedated and the nurses have advised against us speaking to him by phone. We have received only rare, sporadic updates, because the ICU staff is very busy. This morning, I am waiting for an update. Things don’t sound promising, but we are still in a waiting condition. Anything could happen.

The first night after all this began, as you might imagine, I slept only fitfully, but the interruptions to sleep were sweeter than I expected. I dreamed of my father during my childhood, including times I had not thought of in years. In the past few days, this has continued into waking life—unexpected snippets of the past have accompanied my morning coffee, the washing of dishes, a card game with my son.

I remember him trying to teach me algebra, in his excitement perhaps starting a little before I was capable of understanding. He is a physicist and taught me science and math, worked into every opportunity of daily life. I attribute my love of these subjects to him. “Let x be…”, he began, and invariably I interrupted him with, “but what is x?” I don’t remember how many times this let-what? dance went on before my confusion won! But only for that day. Fortunately for both of us, eventually he was able to teach me to solve for x and much more. I do remember his earnest persistence, his confidence that he could make math sensible for me. It was an act of love, giving me the world of x and y and z.

If you have grieved, and almost certainly you have, this is all familiar to you, as are the periodic sudden sobs, also always unexpected, though predictable. What I am experiencing this week is anticipatory grief, a strange wavering state in which the loss is happening but not happening, a great maybe, an intense knowledge of probabilities, a metaphorical multiverse of the present.

The pain is obvious—but what about pleasure? Why would I say anything about the pleasures of grief? I think you know this as well. In this philosophy, I have said that pain is not required for pleasure to occur—each state is a real state, not dependent upon the opposite. There are pleasure neurotransmitters—there are pain fibers. But even though pain is not required for pleasure, and I would much prefer the pleasure of being with my father, solving for x, right now, with death a distant prospect, that is not the reality. The reality right now includes pain.

This philosophy is also not about deliberate denial of pain in order to achieve pleasure, although denial happens and is normal. I think there are at least some others like me who find that type of denial unsustainable. There have of course been moments this morning where I am intensely aware of the present. I gazed deeply at the colors in the sunrise through the bare branches off my deck, and I believe there was a moment when that was all there was. Most of the time has been a complex overlay of sensory awareness, memories, imaginings about the future, wonderings about my father’s present moment to moment experience, gratitude, and sorrow.

I am mildly synesthetic—many feelings and words have some color and taste—and complex emotions remind me of big chords spread across a keyboard, with the deep, solemn, mournful notes mixing harmonics with the middle and upper range. It is not that I need the mournful notes for the melody, but that the melody happens in spite of the rest. The harmony happens, and it has its beauty, profound and majestic.

What is this harmony? I believe it is meaningfulness. My closest relationships provide the strongest sense of meaning, a meaning largely ineffable. You who have loved will understand without any explanations. In times of grief, meaningfulness is the pleasure which makes the pain bearable, and although we still can enjoy, off and on, ordinary pleasures, it is meaningfulness we will return to most often.

I am listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary, because (of course) my father loves to listen to them. I am remembering how, when I was a kid, I noticed my knees were bony and knobby like his, and that I was glad. I am remembering sitting on the floor with him, playing card games, especially a fast one called “Spit.” I am remembering him caring deeply that I should eat eggs at least once a week, though I hated them, for my wellbeing, and the way he taught me to throw a football so it spun on its long axis, and how he taught me my times tables while we played ping-pong. I remember his glasses being taped up from handball games with the other physicists, and that once he stapled his pants together where they had ripped. I am remembering a couple of years ago after a difficult period in my family’s life, that he got up haltingly from his chair, walked over to where I was sitting, bent over and took my hands and said “You have had a hard life sometimes, and I am so sorry these things have happened to you”, although I had not complained and we weren’t even speaking about these events, and I remember the tears that came to my eyes as I said “thank you, Daddy, I love you, it will all be ok.”

Because of phone changes and because I usually answer right away if he calls, I have only one voice mail remaining from him, from last year. It is him calling to ask me, before a visit, if I want him to get half and half or heavy cream for my morning coffee. I have played that message several times a day this week, just to hear the sound of his voice, which by then was already slow.

Some people will say this kind of love is attachment. They will say we are always dying anyway—our atoms are being constantly replaced by other atoms—and so the father I knew last year is not the same father I knew the year before that, nor am I the same person. That in fact, because we are constantly interchanging parts with the environment, there is no fixed boundary to call a self—we are interdependent. That the nature of life is constant change. That there is not even anything, in a single instant, to label securely as self, that our sense of self is an illusion and maybe even a delusion. And if we experience the truth of this, we will see that there is nothing to grieve.

I find this to be a category error… if it helps you, though, use what you need to use. Of course, transience and interdependence are real. The experience of self seems to be brought about by particular networks in the brain, subject to contingencies of past events. But just because a self is formed of components and is contingent, ever-changing, and interdependent, does not mean it is unreal. At the practical level of experience, I am a person, with my experience of the now layered by the past, and my father is real, and we have met, we have encountered each other in the midst of this (incomprehensibly marvelous and strange) flowing stream of particles and energies over time, and we have struggled over letting x be whatever x is, and we have loved each other. My love for my father is not like my love for any other person—it is specific for him and for the whole of who he has been, from stories about his childhood to his dying or not-dying, alone in the ICU, right now.

You will have your own stories about the pains and pleasures of grief, and if you are moved to share them, I would be glad to listen.

*** the photo is of my parents, my infant sister, and me, standing by my mother, who died in 1986 at age 46.