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QuickTake:
Lauren Kessler’s “Everything Changes Everything” — her 15th book — explores topics of love and loss, written after the death of her husband and her daughter.
I didn’t walk for adventure — although I had one.
I didn’t walk for exercise — but boy, was it ever.
I walked, solo hiked 500 miles, because my life had suddenly and dramatically changed.
And I didn’t recognize it. Or me. I had been a wife. Now I was a widow. I had been the mother of three. Now I was the mother of two.
I walked to figure out who this new person was and to forge a path forward into whatever this new life might be. Really, this trek was about giving myself the time and the solitude and the silence to begin imagining that there would be a new life.
“Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk” is the book that emerged from this. It’s my 15th book and by far my most personal.
My book braids together three stories — the 500-mile Camino Frances, one of the eight official Camino de Santiagos, my husband’s death, and my daughter’s overdose — and explores how grief and beauty can somehow coexist in the same step.
It is about love and loss, resilience and challenge, friendship and family, wounds and healing.
Sore collar bones, loud snoring, and a gorgeous Frenchman. All of it. Not a pity party. Not self-help.
Here’s an excerpt:
Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk
(Balance, 288 pages, $30)
Chapter 5
“I’M SO SORRY FOR your loss.”
That’s what people post on your Facebook page when you announce that your animal companion of five or fifteen years has died. It is a sad event. I do not mean to trivialize it. But it is also what people will post when they discover your sister has died, or your father, or the person with whom you’ve spent the last 30 years, father of your children, co-adventurer, co-conspirator, the one who still thought you were funny, the one who (literally) whistled while he worked, the one who got excited about compost, the one who made the best tofu in hot meat sauce, the one who bicycled with you on the shores of the Baltic even though he hated bicycling, the one who loved that chicken chop place in Chania even more than you did, he who played the monster in many a Z-grade middle school movie shot in the woods behind the house, he who calmed the waters, he who saw the vulnerability you effectively hid from all others. And never outed you.
In the weeks and months after Tom’s death, I was on the receiving end of many “I’m so sorry for your losses).” I knew the words were meant to comfort, and I understood the good intentions of the senders. I had uttered such words myself without realizing, as I realized then, that they might sound hollow, formulaic, generic. But I doubt there were any words that would have soothed me. I don’t think we know how to express or extend solace to others. And that’s because we don’t talk about death until it’s at our doorstep, until it knocks. And we don’t want to hear the knock, and then we don’t want to open the door. And when we do, we are unprepared. We are speechless.
We knew how to talk about death when it was all around us, when death was expected, when, in the late 1800s, the life expectancy was 39 years old, when 350 out of 1,000 children died before their fifth birthdays, when infectious diseases like tuberculosis, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, and scarlet fever galloped through the population and claimed millions of lives. In those days, people saw a lot of dead people and went to a lot of funerals. They were fluent in the language of death, grief, and solace.
Today, in the U.S., life expectancy is near 80. Only 7 out of 1,000 children die before their fifth birthdays, and vaccines have eradicated once-deadly diseases. We expect to live longer. We’re surprised when we — our friends, siblings, partners — do not. Even when the elderly die, at ages where death is expected, we are shielded from this because, in the U.S., the elderly don’t often live among us. If they can afford it, they sequester themselves behind the gates of retirement communities. Or they live in 55-plus trailer parks or nursing homes or memory-care facilities. Their deaths don’t touch our lives in the same way as if we lived in multigenerational households, with birth and death part of the rhythm of our days. Death itself, in our modern culture, is often seen through a medical lens, with such discussions confined to doctors and health care workers. Death is about DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) orders or advance directives. Death is seen through the legal lens: estate planning, power of attorney. Death is their business, literally, a business, and not ours.
With a severely limited vocabulary, lacking a cultural context to support us, with little direct experience, afraid of saying the wrong thing, we say nothing at all or stick to homilies. But mostly, we don’t engage in the conversation at all. Mostly, we avoid thinking about what to say because someone else’s death reminds us that we also will die. And we do not want to think about that. There is a theory in psychology called the terror-management theory. It posits that when we’re faced with the idea of death, this triggers “existential anxiety” — no definition needed there — and we defensively turn to things we believe will shield us from death, protect us from the emotional impact of the topic. Avoidance and denial are top of the list. Using those familiar homilies (“I’m so sorry for your loss”) also works. It may be that expressions like this actually insulate us from feeling too deeply.
You would think that the pandemic would have taught us something about the language of death. But those first three years, instead, made the conversation about statistics: How many died in each state, in each month, in each age group, in each vaccination category. The numbers were big — considerably more than a million people have died in the U.S. — but numbers are their own language, and it is not the language of empathy. Numbers often do not open conversations; they close them. And close us off, emotionally. This is called, in the world of psychological research, statistical numbing. So, as we lived through this time, we tracked the numbers. We talked about the numbers. If the conversation wasn’t about infections and deaths, it was about numbers of days to stay isolated, how many feet was a safe social distance, parts per million of infectious droplets breathed in in how many cubic feet of space, how many minutes we should stand in front of a sink and wash our hands.
The language of numbers also became, and reinforced, the language of ageism. COVID killed mostly older people. Of the 1.13 million COVID deaths in the U.S. reported by the CDC in the first 3½ years of the pandemic, more than 80 percent were among those older than 65. Do you remember the conversation? They would have died anyway.
Crueler still was the viral spread (pun intended) of “boomer remover.” The callousness of that, the anesthetizing statistics, the confusion and anxiety of the time, the lockdowns, the Zoomification of life: Where was the space to talk about death?
