So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief, and Other Grave Concerns

Introduction

For years, my mom would say, One day you’ll write a book about Jackie. Neither of us could have imagined it would be this book, a story of loss. My mom hadn’t yet been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and my little sister Jackie was still managing to get herself intermittently sober, between increasingly frequent stints in and out of detoxes and rehabs. I think my mom wanted me to write Jackie’s story so that she wasn’t dismissed, as so many alcoholics are, as somehow weak or unworthy of love. I wish this could be about my sister’s triumph over her addictions and my mom beating cancer. I wish both of them could read it, but they can’t. They’re gone, and I, like so many others, live with those losses every single day.

Another one of my mother’s firmly held beliefs was this: Honey, sometimes you just have to laugh. She didn’t mean laugh while I was watching something objectively funny, like Meg Stalter TikToks or videos of pugs dressed as Baby Yoda. My mom was a fierce advocate for the cause of finding humor in the darkest of times. Over the years, I’ve adopted this belief as my own. It’s become especially helpful in recent years, when I’ve had to process living a life without her, and without my sister.

Learning to live with deep grief has changed my life. I don’t walk around in a black lace veil and weep throughout the day (well, not every day). I haven’t covered the mirrors or stopped the clocks, as they did in the Victorian era. Still, even if I’m at a park with my son, or out with friends, that veil is always there in some form. Accepting that fact, and figuring out how to manage the emotions and thoughts that come with it, has been the most difficult part of this journey. If you’ve experienced loss, whether recently or years ago, you probably know all too well that living with grief becomes an ongoing, maybe even lifelong tug-of-war. Hopefully, eventually, it becomes less of a battle, and more of a gentle push and pull. But that takes time.

In a 2019 study about grief and loss, 53 percent of people surveyed said they had met someone who assumed their grief should have an end date. Of that group, 58 percent said they felt pressured to recover from grief within three months. If you’re grieving the loss of a favorite pair of shoes, maybe, but a person? Even an animal? Someone you love deeply, and who you now find yourself living without? The day you stop grieving is the day you stop loving, and, for better or worse, that day will never come. That doesn’t mean the initial crush of pain will remain forever. The pain transforms, each day, each year.

Renowned grief researcher and author Pauline Boss writes in her book The Myth of Closure, Continuing to use the term ‘closure’ perpetuates the myth that losses and grief have a prescribed time for ending—or never starting—and that it’s emotionally healthier to close the door on suffering than to face it and learn to live with it.

In the moments after finding out that my mom and then my sister had died, I couldn’t understand that over time, my relationship with each of them would not actually end, but that it would evolve, and I would adapt and find ways to keep them in my life. I have no control over what has happened, so instead of waiting for some imaginary day when I’ll find closure, I ultimately accepted that my love for them, my grief, would become part of me, instead of something I had to conquer.

When Jackie died unexpectedly, in the winter of 2021, less than three years after my mom passed away, I had read my share of grief books, many of which I cherished for their ability to make me feel less alone in my pain. Eventually, I longed for a book about grief that would also allow me to, if not laugh, then at least crack a smile, or just feel a little lighter, and lift some of the heaviness I carried. Humor is an ancient survival tool, as crucial as the ability to outrun a predator or spear a woolly mammoth. Many archeologists believe early humans used torches to separate a woolly mammoth from the herd before steering it into a trap, which is a fact I just learned because I do not want people coming after me with torches and yelling, Humans didn’t spear woolly mammoths, you fool! The point is, as my mother knew so well, humor, like traps and spears, has helped humans endure for centuries, and although I understand that funerals are not prime time for punch lines, and that you are not always going to be in the mood to laugh, it can help. It helps me tremendously.

I’m telling my story, and sharing the insights of others in this book, not because I have a simple plan for getting over grief or because I discovered a magic formula to move on with life after loss. I don’t have any handy slogans to Band-Aid your sorrow. We’re not living in the cinematic world of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where you can pay a team of pseudo-scientists to erase painful memories from your brain. I’ve just tried my best to learn to live with grief. That’s all you can do, and it’s no small thing. That’s the push and pull that becomes part of everyday life.

It still sometimes surprises me that this is my reality. As I write this, it has been nearly four years since my mom died. Her clothes still hang in her closet. Her perfume sits on the bathroom counter. Some people might advise us to toss my mom’s Tom Ford Black Orchid Eau de Parfum or her favorite petal pink silk shirt because it’s unhealthy to keep them around, but we aren’t ready to get rid of the reminders, not yet. For now, I find it comforting to visit my dad and see her jewelry and shoes, and so do my sisters. We are not ready to part with her things, even several years out. If purging someone’s possessions helps you, do it. Burn them in a bonfire and set the ashes out to sea. No matter how you choose to grapple with it, grief gets into your bones. It’s not an easy state of being to settle into, but it can be a meaningful one.

I hope the stories in this book bring comfort when you need it, laughter when you’re feeling low, and a little bit of peace when the moment feels insurmountable. We can’t rewind time, or have our memories erased, as they do in the movies, but we can try, every single day, to live with this. We can attempt to let it propel us, instead of allowing it to tug us back.

Chapter 1

This Is Not a Detour

The second phone call that launched me into deep grief happened on a Monday night. It was March 1, 2021, and our plane had just touched down in Austin. I was with my husband Jerett and our three-year-old son Cole, coming back from visiting my in-laws in Florida. If you’ve ever flown with a kid, maybe you can imagine my state of mind at that moment: frazzled, tense, and teetering on the edge of releasing a bloodcurdling scream. My hair was a tumbleweed and I was covered in half-eaten snacks.

Adding to my stress was the fact that, before our plane took off that day, I knew my sister Jackie was in trouble. She was so often in trouble, in and out of detoxes and rehabs, picked up by ambulances after being found on lawns or sidewalks by her kind neighbors in Queens, who were two married ex-cops who had probably seen their share of people passed out all over New York. I never met those neighbors, but I talked to them on the phone, listening as they explained that she was drunk again. Incoherent again. On her way back to detox, yet again. I would thank these strangers for doing what I could not, from so far across the country. This type of scenario happened so many times over the years, with different neighbors or friends or random acquaintances of Jackie’s, that I cannot begin to count. Even so, she always managed to pull through, at least for a little while. I used to joke with my other sisters, Amy and Kathryn, that Jackie would outlive us all. She had nine lives, like a cat. It was our way of convincing each other, and ourselves, that she’d be okay.

This time around, while I was on that trip with my in-laws in Florida, Jackie had been missing for a few days, after nearly a year of sobriety. I was so relieved that she had finally gotten sober again right as the pandemic hit New York. During the winter of 2020, imagining her wandering through the streets and subways not sober, maskless, scared me.

Whenever Jackie disappeared in the past, it was usually a day or two, but she would always, without fail, contact our dad. She told him everything, and he always listened, never judging or scolding her, always trying his best to understand and encouraging her to get help. This time even he hadn’t heard from her and neither had her husband, Niall. Thankfully, the morning of my flight back to Austin, we finally got a call from the police, saying they had found her in a motel in a small Colorado town, where she and Niall had recently moved to escape the chaos of New York and start a new life. When my plane landed back home in Austin, that’s all I knew: They had found my sister. I figured the next call would be from my dad telling me that Jackie was back in detox. He would give me the number of the hospital so I could call her and tell her I loved her, and to please get help, again.

As the plane moved toward the gate, I brushed away some stray Cheerios and checked my phone. I saw a text from Amy:

I can’t believe this is real.

I need to call Amy, I told Jerett. My heart constricted, or at least it felt like it constricted. If you think that’s dramatic, the Old English word for grief, heartsarnes, means soreness of the heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a legitimate medical condition, is a temporary weakening of the heart’s main pumping chamber, which can make you feel like you’re having a heart attack. It’s also called broken-heart syndrome, and clinically referred to as stress cardiomyopathy. Some experts suggest that it is caused by a surge of hormones associated with the fight-or-flight instinct, such as adrenaline. Anyone who has experienced the sledgehammer of grief understands that your chest actually hurts. The physical pain can be shocking, the way our bodies process our emotions, pulverizing us, pinning us to that exact moment in time. I had felt this pain before. Like broken-heart syndrome, grief is not a simple thing to diagnose, but I recognized that heart-pounding dizziness when it came for me again.

Why don’t you wait to call Amy until we get home?

There was nothing casual about the way Jerett said this. His tone was tentative, a little too cautious. I didn’t even have to look over at him to realize that he knew something I did not. As Jerett tried to keep Cole from leapfrogging out of our seats while we waited for people to deplane, I stared at Amy’s text:

I can’t believe this is real.

All the forces in the world could not have stopped me from dialing Amy’s number. So I did.

You can’t believe what’s real? I asked before she could say hello. The police said they found her this morning, right? I knew, in my bones, what she meant, and what she couldn’t believe. I just wanted so badly to be wrong. I wanted nine lives for Jackie, ten, as many as it took.

Through tears, Amy explained that she and my dad and Kathryn had texted Jerett, telling him the news but begging him to keep it from me until we got home. Amy was so distraught that she forgot their pledge and texted anyway. We had been telling each other everything practically since the day she was born and I was three years old, and that’s a tough habit to break. The initial thought was that they didn’t want me to hear this news on an airplane, as if there is any good place to discover that your sister has died. Would a tropical beach with a mai tai in hand have lessened the blow? Maybe if I’d been on top of the Eiffel Tower at sunset, it wouldn’t have hurt as much? A claustrophobic plane with a feral three-year-old wasn’t ideal, but no place is. Amy said that they had found Jackie, but that hours later, they called back and told my dad, while he was at dinner with a friend, that his daughter, my sister, the third of his four girls, was gone.

When I got the call from the police officer, I didn’t want to believe what he said, my dad told me when I later asked about that night. My heart was pounding so much, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

Earlier that day, Kathryn heard from an employee at the motel that Jackie had checked out. They weren’t supposed to give out that kind of information, but Kathryn begged, pleaded, and explained the situation. So that’s all we knew—Jackie wasn’t there anymore. She’d supposedly gotten into a fight with Niall and left their apartment a few days before, and somehow wound up in this motel. When they told us Jackie had left, we thought maybe she’d gone to detox again, and that we’d get a call from her soon. That never happened, though. The police found her at the motel, but it took all day for them to investigate or do whatever they needed to do, and then hours later my dad got that awful call.

It was a terrible night, my dad said. "I remember thinking, How am I going to process this? After going through the grief of losing your mom, I was starting to get my emotions in check, as much as you can, I guess, and then this happened. I remember wondering how I was going to make it through, like how much can one person take in two or three years? I wanted it not to be true. I understood what the police officer said, but I was in a fog. It just knocks your emotions out of whack."

In the weeks to come, I would call that small-town police department a few times, imagining a small, musty detective’s office with files and papers scattered about, like a grainy 1970s film, or, for some reason, like the detective office in Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman. I imagined Jackie’s file tossed on a desk, too far away for me to touch. I left messages, and missed callbacks, but I never got answers. Jackie was just another body to them. To me, she was the baby sister who wanted to sleep in my bed every night when we were young. The one who was so sensitive and empathetic that as a kid she asked me to write letters for her, addressed to Jane Goodall, asking Dame Jane how Jackie Gachman, a six-year-old in Texas, could help save the chimpanzees. She was the teenager and then the woman who was made fun of for her learning differences and eccentric ways, and who went through hell fighting addiction for the majority of her short life. Her bone-dry sense of humor was a gift. She had an old Hollywood—type beauty, like Hedy Lamarr or Elizabeth Taylor, and her love for David Bowie was legendary. The people who found her would never know any of that, though.

As soon as I heard that Jackie was gone, I told Amy I couldn’t talk. Or maybe I mumbled some indecipherable syllables. It’s hard to say. I do remember that my phone tumbled out of my hand. Normally, seeing my phone lying on the floor of an airplane during a pandemic, I would have panic-lunged for the hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes, but I couldn’t move. I felt nothing, and everything at once. As we waited for our turn to exit the plane, I lowered my head and squeezed my eyes shut to try to control the emotions that were threatening to break the surface and roar to life. I didn’t care about the strangers surrounding me, but I knew what was coming and I didn’t want to scare my son. Jerett took my hand, I kept my head bowed, and I tried, as hard as I could, to breathe.

When we got home and put Cole to bed, I cried myself to sleep. I was trying to come to terms not just with the reality that my sister was gone, but that my dad and my other two sisters and I were about to do all of this again. Just when we were starting to feel almost halfway settled