Grief sucks

Everyone says you shouldn’t distract yourself from grief and that you need to work through it, but sometimes I think you just have to do something so you don’t collapse. I have been reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, a book that two different friends gave me for two different occasions. I read it all the way through when I first received it, and then gave it to another friend to borrow. When I was home in Santa Barbara for Carrie’s memorial service a fourth friend brought her copy and suggested I read the chapter titled “Ladders.” I started to read it there and came home to find my second copy here to finish the section. The first time I read the book I remember thinking “I like her writing style. A few interesting stories. I’m not usually big on Christian writers but she’s okay. I think my friend Daniel would get more out of this than I have.” Daniel is the friend who borrowed it (and still has it, but I have his David Sedaris book, so we’re good), and I think he did get more out of it. He seemed much more religious and spiritual than I felt at the time.

But this second time around, reading just the “Ladders” chapter- man, Anne knows her stuff. (I like to call artists and writers by their first name, as if I am friends with them. I know this makes me a nerd. Carrie and I used to do it all the time, especially with David Wilcox, known as David in our apartment, as in, “I love it when David says “[insert song lyric here].” It is habits like this that remind me that Carrie and I shared our lives in a pretty unique way, and this helps me to feel like she is with me.) Lamott writes:

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence… Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit… You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession… A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion.

Yup, grief pretty much sucks. I don’t think I’m willing yet to bear disillusion.

In an effort to distract myself, I finally jumped on the bandwagon and started The Da Vinci Code. I had resisted reading or buying the book because I don’t like to read things that are hyped up, and I now almost always refuse to buy hardcover books because they are heavy and very expensive. I actually have a lot of hardcover books and they were a bitch to move to Santa Fe, so I try to focus on paperbacks or finding things at the library. I also feel that Dan Brown doesn’t need to be any richer, so I decided not to pay $24.95 to read his sensationalized tale of a very interesting historical subject because my well-informed-on- conspiracy-theory brother could tell me more details anyway. But the book came out in paperback, both trade paperback for $14.95 and that other, cheaper, super-market-check-out-newspaper-and-small-print kind of paperback for $7.99, and I had a 25% off coupon for Borders, so I bought the book for $6. I started reading it Saturday night and spent much of Sunday morning in bed with it, and now I am on page 287 and have had dreams that I am involved with protecting the secret, and damn it Dan Brown but you have sucked me in. Yours is not a book where I re-read sentences because the writing structure is so beautiful or the choice of words makes me cry, but I must admit I am hooked. This book is one hell of a distraction.