There is Nothing Profound About the Fourth Year of Grief
One of my favorite shows to re-watch is The West Wing. I’d argue it is a perfect TV series, a perfect cast, and a perfect mixture of parables on the human experience. This means it also comes in handy, because you can always pull right from the scripts of Aaron Sorkin when you’re on the hunt for the right metaphor.
Joe Quincy: “You know, I thought I heard what sounded like gunshots when we were talking before, but I didn’t…Did you hear the shots?
Josh Lyman: No, but I heard a brass quintet playing “The First Noel,” so I just assumed somebody somewhere was locked and loaded.
After Josh survives the trauma of an assassination attempt, he has music-related triggers that bring him back to the night of the shooting. And in that moment above with Joe Quincy (played by Matthew Perry), Josh isn’t hearing the active shooter, he is hearing music. The episode is conveniently titled Evidence of Things Not Seen.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that late-grief contains a lot of evidence of things not seen. And I don’t even know when I entered late-grief. Which makes me wonder if most people would even agree with the characterization when it’s been (only) four years. But there’s been a palpable shift. There’s less tangible things happening. I’m post- all the first holidays without. I’m post- first, second, and now third anniversaries. I’m even post-FBI case hanging over me (see, here). As they say, there’s less there, there.
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So what was an intensely concrete and upending experience of my life, has now become to everyone else, an abstraction. Which makes sense. This is probably really only resonate to others who are in their own state of post (or dare I say late) grief. The absence of something is kind of literally, nothing. And it means I’m also not walking through this year with a deep sense of what this all means for me and others like me today, tomorrow, long-term. Really any of it. It turns out that eventually grief can stop producing revelations, but that still doesn’t mean it stops producing more grief.
I, like my close and personal made up friend Josh Lyman, also still get triggered. I lost my brother to an overdose. The epidemic of overdoses is still very much ongoing in the United States and around the world. Most prominently, I think about how the world lost Matthew Perry a few months after my brother. I was dealing with a loss in my immediate family, and the very public overdose story of Matthew Perry was splashed across the headlines in those same early months. It was, oddly, almost comforting. Everyone was grieving the loss of Matthew Perry, astonished at the shock of having their world turned upside down. It was like the world was grieving my brother, too.
But time passed. And then the noise of these major moments ended up sounding more like static. Despite the downward trend in overdoses, they not only persist, but remain pervasive in the media. There’s too many of them. It’s hard for me to miss local stories about overdoses (like when eight people overdosed in DC this summer), or the spectacle of the what-if when a celebrity death goes viral (like the way the news has been covering Hayden Panettiere). For me it’s right there, poignant, and impossible to ignore. Yet, an active public catastrophe can become completely culturally abstract. I’d argue it’s happening across more than just the epidemic of overdoses (climate change, mass shootings, insert other tragic topic here). This is sort of how we cope with tragedy at high-speed.
I choose to share a window into grief and what it’s like living with the collateral damage of overdose every August, because August 31 is International Overdose Awareness Day. This is a community for collective action on overdose that has made critical progress on a global scale. And to reiterate what they put so perfectly: the truth is we shouldn’t need this day, but we do.
An epidemic does not stop being an emergency just because it stops commanding our attention. You may not know anyone who has overdosed. But people are still dying when the headlines move on, when one overdose story blurs into another, when the news cycle finds a newer catastrophe or set of chaos each week. The quiet is not evidence that the crisis has ended. Sometimes it is only evidence that we have learned to live beside it.
So I keep writing about my brother. I keep noticing the stories. I keep marking August 31. Not because I have arrived at a point where I have some deep wisdom and understanding of grief, or because I can make an abstraction feel concrete to everyone else again. I do it because attention is one of the few things I can still choose to give, to my grief and what caused it, and to others.
There is nothing profound about being in your fourth year of grief. My brother is still gone. The epidemic is still here. And I still believe that both of those things matter, even when fewer people can see them.
