Hi, friends.

This feels like a weird day for me to be writing, for reasons I’ll note below, let alone hawking my wares, but life’s gotta life, and the person I’m gonna talk about below knew that. So I’ll briefly invite you to register for my upcoming classes: There will be a new section of It's Writing Time! Sunday Eve Generative & Solidarity Writing Group starting 4/13. I’ll also teaching The Only Fact We Have: Writing About Death in the later spring. My full class listings are here, including a poetry and an essay class that start in a couple of weeks.

Death and kindness and Jim

Sometimes people think that since I’m trained as a death doula, I somehow intellectually or spiritually understand death more than others. I totally do not. If anything, being a death doula has led me to not believe anybody when they say they understand or even accept death. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Like how we can’t know a certain color we’ve never seen, I can’t comprehend how anyone would know. I’ve heard stories of Buddhist monks suddenly freaking out on their death beds, and with my own eyes I’ve witnessed folks who were extremely troubled suddenly become—I swear—some version of enlightened and utterly free in the days before their deaths.

My stepfather Jim, who was basically my father (even though I had a father who was for better or worse also a VERY SIZEABLE part of my life) died last week. He had Alzheimer’s, a disease whose existence makes me feel angry at the cosmos. It makes me do that thing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (randomly, one of my very favorite movies, and one that I used to watch with my real dad on repeat) does when he looks up to the sky and mouths the equivalent of things like, “Seriously, god? You’re choosing to do this thing?”

One thing that really gets me about death is this: On the one hand, it appears that the answer to all our social, personal, and political ills is to love and create radical relationships—and yet that if we do so, we eventually must lose each other and grieve. I regularly ponder (sometimes in awe, sometimes with utter rage) this cosmic set-up and the nature of the love-grief equation. I cannot reconcile it.

As my mother wrote in Jim’s obit, he remained gentle and kind in the face of this cruel disease. She is not wrong. It was astounding, the extent to which he remained gentle, somehow evading that heartwrenching and understandable symptom of aggression that dementia patients often experience. In all the comments and conversations remembering Jim, the number of times the words “gentle” and “kind” came up was noteworthy. Hundreds of times.

There is a lot more I could say or not say. How to tell of a person and a life and a relationship? And in a Substack newsletter, of all things? For now, I just want to say thank you to Jim, to express a sense of near-awe about his gentleness to everybody who will listen. Here’s a poem I read at his funeral:

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

There is one thing I’ve come to believe about death and grief. Truly just one thing. And it is that grief is healed in community, with a willingness to hold the multitudes of ourselves and others simultaneously. Death and grief are personal, cultural, social, political. Death is made—maybe, maybe—a little more okay through us holding each other close and with emotional bravery. Grief is healed with radical vulnerability and honesty, and it is healed through gentleness. I don’t mean some kind of kumbaya or convenient type of gentleness. I mean a radical gentleness. I mean a kindness which recognizes the true size of the cloth, like Jim’s did.

Thank you, Jim. I will miss you.

Love,

Carolyn