On Presence of Absence, Grief, and Magical Thinking

On Saturday, January 13th at 5:48 p.m., our family group chat erupted with messages. My brother was sending updates about my grandfather who had been in the ICU for a week. The news was that his condition was deteriorating. Outside, it had already grown dark and chilly. I had just taken a shower after a stroll in the park and was sorting laundry and folding clothes.

“You should come over to the hospital,” my sister texted me in a separate message among the barrage of updates.

I glanced at my phone and continued to unload the washer. I placed the soggy sheets into the dryer, remembering that the dryer had recently started to take hours to finish a cycle, leaving the clothes damp. So, I made a mental note to call the repair service. Perhaps tomorrow.

My phone screen lit up again.

Surely, I thought, there was no need for me to leave right away; my grandpa would pull through.

When I visited him a few days earlier, I didn’t know what to think, or what to say. To him, lying there unconscious on a hospital bed in the sterile ICU, a flimsy, plastic curtain separating him from the others in pain. I don’t recall much apart from the nurse standing by the IVs beside his bed, bored and impatient for her cigarette break. The steady drips of life into his veins. The neon colors emanating from the monitor. My sister quietly reading Yasin from her phone, the sura recited to bring comfort to the sick and to the dead. My cousin and I just standing there, staring. At our grandpa’s frail form marked by the indignities of sickness–a diaper, swollen hands and feet, the invasive tube in his lungs. Staring at time, somehow almost palpable, dragging on and slipping away at the same time. Time passes, changing your mind and body irreversibly and you end up on a hospital bed intubated, with your granddaughters staring at you, not knowing to say.

My phone kept buzzing as I started the dryer, wondering when this cycle would end. I’d probably have to take the damp sheets out and hang them on the doors. My phone screen illuminated yet again. “The doctor said his heart has stopped, and that they’re trying.” It was 6:23 p.m. I didn’t have to check what the other messages were saying; I quickly packed up a few essentials and left.

At the graveyard on Sunday, I continued to stare. At his towering 6-foot frame now shrouded in a white cloth. Unfamiliar faces circling his grave. My brother and uncles armed with shovels. An imam wearing a long robe offering prayers in a language I don’t understand. Time passes, changing your mind and body irreversibly and you end up buried beneath the earth, with your granddaughters staring at who you had been, not knowing to say.

Back at my grandma’s, I watched her stare into space. Family and relatives and neighbors. Plates of rice and meat. Another imam speaking of life after death, his words without any meaning. Back at my grandma’s after the funeral, the rituals of mourning continued, and I attempted to make sense of it all, remembering Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)–which begins with the only words she could muster after losing her husband:

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

As Didion grapples with her husband’s unexpected, sudden death while their daughter is severely ill in the ICU, her prose breaks your heart into a million pieces, and you ask: how much loss can a single person endure?

“This is my attempt,” she writes, “to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

She continues:

I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Sometimes words alone fall short–even if writing is your lifeline and it is through words you understand the world and its discontents. I get this. I also get that writing the book was probably the only way Didion knew how to make sense of life and death, and anything in between. So, in her book she turns to research and writing, just like I tried to find solace in her words.

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature,” she writes, “Information is control.”

In a section where she discusses the various studies and theories about loss and grief, she concludes that grief can be categorized. There’s the “preferred kind,” the one that is expected, uncomplicated, and normal. The other kind of grief, aka “pathological bereavement,” which often leads to clinical depression and/or mood disorders, however, is more intricate. Reflecting on the literature she studied, Didion writes:

One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another. “Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure, support, or esteem?'” This was one of the diagnostic criteria suggested by David Peretz, M.D., of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occurred?

As she reflects on her responses to these questions, she writes the following words that undoubtedly resonate with every human who has experienced the loss of someone they love dearly:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to ‘get through it,’ rise to the occasion, exhibit the ‘strength’ that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

The concept of categorizing grief seems logical in theory, but as I sat on the stairs at my grandma’s after the funeral and in the days that followed, the distinction between the uncomplicated and complicated kinds of grief remained, and still remains, blurred.

It feels strange to articulate this, but the loss of my grandpa didn’t come as a shock to any of us. He was over ninety years old and became quite sick in the weeks leading up to his passing. But, as I’ve come to realize, grief—whether complicated or uncomplicated—reveals itself as an unfamiliar territory, “a place none of us know until we reach it.” That one is never prepared for the death of someone they love is not breaking news. It is when we lose them, or think of the impending loss, we are forcefully reminded of this truth. My grandpa suffered from dementia, which often left him disconnected during our visits. He may not have been mentally present all the time, but at least he existed in the form we understand it. What I’m trying to say is this: even though we anticipated his passing, the kind of grief that I’ve experienced has been complicated–particularly when I’m caught between “the unending absence,” and “the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself” and the meaningful moments that evoke memories of him. Perpetual, irreversible absence coexisting with memories that are very much alive.

The moment when I was seventeen, for instance, and at the summerhouse I was heartbroken, crying over a boy as my grandpa was ironing his pants while comforting me with effortless calm. The moments we would FaceTime when I lived in the States, and he would jokingly call me “American” but never once, unlike my parents, pressed me about returning to Istanbul, trusting the path I chose for myself. The moment when he teared up and cried when I was visiting him during the pandemic, sad over the fact that we couldn’t hug. The moments when I would admire his kind heart, his stories about his travels abroad, his vision as a secular man, his tranquil energy, his love for his cat Gülbahçe, him perfuming his well-kept beard, and donning his signature suits and neckties–no matter what the occasion was. The moments when I would wake up to the comforting cadence of his voice as he recited verses from the Quran in the early hours of the morning at the summerhouse, and it would always make me smile because I had yet to meet anyone else who practiced Islam in the way it ought to be, with respect, peace, love, intelligence, and understanding.

While I know that these moments will exist eternally– even beyond my own existence in the form we understand it, it is difficult to navigate the perpetual absence that will persist, alongside the memories. People often say grief does come in waves, but no one says anything about the essence of those waves, what they consist of. I realize now that it is because no one truly comprehends. And one question that comes to me in waves, along with grief, is this: How do we make sense of an absence that remains perpetually present?

On Monday, January 15th at approximately 5 p.m., I left my grandma’s to go home to check on my cats. The last few days had taken their toll, and it felt oddly surreal to return to the routine of daily life–feeding the cats, opening the windows, paying the bills, checking my emails–resuming life from where I’d left off. As I was unpacking, suddenly I realized that the dryer was still running. Pausing it to check, the sheets were still damp. I recalled the mental note I’d made a few days ago; this time, I wrote it down on a piece of paper and posted it on the dryer. I closed the lid, restarted the cycle, and watched the sheets circle in the dryer. Time passes, I thought, and your body and mind change irreversibly, and you just buried your grandpa whom you loved so much, but here you are–

staring.

At the sheets swirling in your dryer