Originally posted March 11, 2022

I have developed a habit of taking the week before not-birthdays and deathaversaries off from work, with varying success over time. Each time, I create a “menu of activities” to provide some structure. Folding a horizonal piece of computer paper in thirds, I create three headings: self-care, home, and work. Under work I list all the undone things that are still on my mind from the prior week. In practice, this category exists to let my mind put those concerns down for a week – I rarely, if ever, do anything under this heading until work restarts. Under home I list all the things I rarely have time for in a busy work week – make dentist appointments, eye appointment. If I’m really on my game, instead of saying “make the appointment” my list will instead have the time and date. I often ignore this list too. Under self-care I list the things I’ve learned over time help me feel more restored and balanced, and this is the list I prioritize. Hiking, biking– long hard cardio is a must for me. Yoga and napping. Meditation and acupuncture. Journaling and writing. Listening to grief podcasts and reading a hardcopy book about grief. In year 1, it was Resilient Grieving. In 2020, after the pandemic started, it was When Things Fall Apart.

This 4th not-birthday, what is not Dad’s 72nd birthday, I read The Grieving Brain, on the neurobiology of grief by Dr. O’Connor, a clinical psychologist & neuroscientist. She starts with the description of how scientists have realized that grief is partially a learning task: when you put a blue Lego tower in the learning environment of rats (with sensors sticking into their brain so you can measure what’s going on), certain neurons (object cells) light up. When you take that blue Lego tower away, different neurons (object-trace cells) fire for where the tower should have been, and this persists for multiple days until the rat learns the tower is not coming back. This example appeals to me for multiple reasons: the love of Legos my dad, brother and I share(d) and the year I spent in undergrad helping with rats destined for these types of experiments. I also feel the satisfaction of feeling an image come into focus or a puzzle nearly solved; the book answers some of my “but why” questions about the grief journey.

I finally saw a picture of the dual process model of grief, which I’ve heard about on grief podcasts. We oscillate back & forth between loss-oriented efforts and restoration-oriented efforts (or reprieve from grieving). This felt true to my own experience of grieving while parenting a 2-year-old (to start), where laughter at antics could interrupt tears.

Another gem from The Grieving Brain was that avoidance takes more effort than facing grief. One of the things I’ve had to learn is how to make space for grieving amid a busy work schedule, when rescheduling deadlines or meetings involves a huge amount of effort. The best advice I got about this was to schedule time every day for grieving – unfortunately, I got that advice in year 2 or 3. In the early days, I enlisted someone else to help with re-scheduling when I realized it wasn’t something I could do myself yet I needed it.

I periodically worry if I’m grieving “normally” or how my multiplicity of loss has changed me. Sometimes it feels like grief, and grieving, is massive; I feel like Stata working on a really gnarly large dataset and taking weeks to run instead of the usual few seconds or minutes. Other times, I think this grieving process is taking longer because I am grieving in aliquots of time off, between the interruptions of other losses and the avoidance required by work and parenting demands. I did not have the ability to process acute grief efficiently in the immediate months after.  

I liked how Dr. O’Connor pointed out that advice is useless in grieving, because we all must figure out what works for us in our particular context. Yet we need a large toolbox, and great flexibility, to meet the shifting demands of grief. One way to fill this toolbox is to get ideas from other grievers, what they use to cope, and to test anything that seems vaguely feasible or appealing, quickly releasing anything that doesn’t work without judgement. As Dr. O’Connor writes, “Rather than asking which are the best strategies, the more appropriate question might be whether using a particular strategy is counterproductive at a given moment or in a particular situation” (p134). I am, of course, tickled by this because it’s what I stumbled into with my menu idea, above, and before that, my method of tracking self-care activities and experimenting with life schedules when we lost childcare at the start of the pandemic. I’ve also re-learned this week that high and sustained stress dramatically reduces my ability to be flexible, which is why these reset weeks continue to be crucial investments years after the initial loss.

And with that, I’m headed off for a hike of reflection, wearing my dad’s old shirt and hat as has become my habit for not-birthdays. This morning Theo and I went through the short book of pictures I have of them together in those first two years. I watched the video of Dad talking about cycling from 9 years ago, and was able to smile even as I missed him sharing all the nerdy details about a bike ride and his gear. Tonight’s dinner will be grilled chicken, avocado, cucumbers in apple cider vinegar, and a “super salad”, Dad’s typical dinner and one he served me & Theo in our last visit with him. These are some of the ways I honor and evolve my relationship with my father, and between my father and my son.