“Why do you suppose it’s important to her that you talk about Gabe?”
He considers this. “I remember after Gabe died, Margo wanted me to talk about Gabe and I just couldn’t. She didn’t understand how I could go to barbecues and Lakers games and seem like a normal person, but that first year I was in shock. Numb. I told myself, Keep moving, don’t stop. But the next year, when I woke up I’d want to die. I kept my game face on but I was bleeding internally, you know? I wanted to be strong for Margo and Gracie, and I had to keep a roof over our heads, so I couldn’t let anyone see the bleeding.
“Then Margo wanted another baby, and I said, fuck it, okay. I mean, Jesus, I was in no shape to be a new father, but Margo was adamant that she didn’t want Gracie to grow up alone. It wasn’t just that we had lost a child. Gracie had lost her only sibling. And the house did seem different than it had when we had two kids running around. It didn’t feel like a kid house anymore. The stillness was a reminder of what was missing.”
John sits forward, puts the cover on his salad, tosses it across the room into the trash bin. Swish. It always goes right in. “Anyway,” he says, “the pregnancy seemed to be good for Margo. It brought her back to life. But not me. I kept thinking that nobody could replace Gabe. Besides, what if I killed this one too?”
John told me that when he first heard that his mother had died, he was sure he had killed her. Before she’d left to go to rehearsal that night, he’d begged her to rush home so she’d be there in time to tuck him in. She must have died rushing home in her car, he thought. Of course, his father told him that she died while trying to push one of her students out of harm’s way, but John was certain this was a cover story to protect his feelings. It wasn’t until he saw the headline in the local paper—he had just learned to read—that he knew it was true, he hadn’t killed his mother. But he also knew that she would have died for him in a heartbeat, just like he would have done for Gabe or Gracie and just as he would now for Ruby. But would he do it for Margo? He’s not so sure. Would she do it for him? He’s not sure either.
John pauses, then quips to break the tension. “Wow, this is getting heavy. I think I’ll lie down.” He stretches out on the couch, tries to fluff a pillow behind his head, and makes a disgruntled sound. (“What’s this filled with, cardboard?” he once complained.)
“In a weird way,” he continues, “I was worried I might love the new baby too much. Like I’d be betraying Gabe. I was so glad it wasn’t another boy. I didn’t think I could handle a baby boy without him reminding me of Gabe—what if he liked the same fire trucks that Gabe did? Everything would be an agonizing memory, and that would be unfair to the kid. I was so worried about this that I did research on when to have sex so you had the best chance of a girl—it was on the show.”
I nod. It was in a subplot with a couple who were later written out, season three, I think. They were always having sex at the wrong time because one or the other of them couldn’t control themselves and wait. I remember how funny it was. I had no sense of the pain that inspired it.
“The point,” John says, “is that I didn’t tell Margo. I just made sure to have sex only on the day that we’d have the best chance of a girl. Then I sweated it out until the ultrasound. When the OB said it looked like a girl, Margo and I both said, ‘Are you sure?’ Margo wanted a boy because she loved raising a boy and we already had a girl, so she was disappointed that first night. ‘I’ll never get to raise a boy again,’ she said. But I was fucking ecstatic! I felt like I could be a better father to a girl, under the circumstances. And then, when Ruby was born, I thought I’d shit my pants. The second I saw her, I fell madly in love.”
John’s voice catches and he stops.
“What happened to your grief then?” I ask.
“Well, it got better at first—which, in a strange way, made me feel worse.”
“Because the grief had connected you to Gabe?”
John looks surprised. “Not bad, Sherlock. Yeah. It was almost like my pain was evidence of my love for Gabe, and if it let up, it meant I was forgetting about him. That he didn’t matter as much to me.”
“That if you were happy, you couldn’t also be sad.”
“Exactly.” He looks away. “I still feel that way.”
“What if it’s both?” I say. “What if your sadness—your grief—is what allowed you to love Ruby with so much joy when you first saw her?”
I remember a woman I treated whose husband had died. When she fell in love a year later—a love all the more sweet because of the loss of her husband—she worried that others would judge her. (So soon? Didn’t you love your husband of thirty years?) In fact, her friends and family were excited for her. It wasn’t their judgment she was hearing—it was her own. What if her happiness was an insult to her husband’s memory? It took her a while to see that her happiness didn’t diminish her love for her husband—it honored it.
John tells me he finds it ironic that Margo used to be the one who wanted to talk about Gabe and John couldn’t; later, if John made a rare reference to Gabe, Margo would get upset. Would their family always be haunted by this tragedy? Would his marriage? “Maybe we remind each other of what happened—like our mere presence is some kind of sick memento,” John says.
“What we need,” he adds, looking up at me, “is some kind of closure.”
Ah, closure. I know what John means, and yet I’ve always thought that “closure” was an illusion of sorts. Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients learning to accept their own deaths. It wasn’t until decades later that the model came to be used for the grieving process more generally. It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life, as Julie is struggling to do. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should be getting to acceptance might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times all these years later”). Besides, how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.
The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.
But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.
“You’re both so alone in your grief,” I say. “And in your joy.”
In our sessions, John had dropped occasional hints of his joy: his two girls; his dog, Rosie; writing a killer show; winning another Emmy; a boys’ trip with his brothers. Sometimes, John says, he can’t believe that he’s capable of feeling joy. After Gabe died, he thought he’d never live through it. He’d go on, he figured, but like a ghost. And yet, just a week after Gabe’s death, he and Gracie were playing together, and for a second—maybe two—he felt okay. He smiled and laughed with her, and the fact that he laughed amazed him. Just one week ago his son had died. Was that sound really coming from him?