loss and grief

to plunge is to live

amybiancolli Figuring Shit Out (the book), loss and grief 9 Comments

fso coverLately I’ve been proofing and putting the final touches on my book, and it’s madness. I’m cracking up: fixating on punctuation, agonizing over details, doubting every choice.

Then again, writing a book is madness. If you’re not crazy when you set out to write it (Hey! I know what I’ll do with all my free time! I’ll sit on my fat ass and try to squirt cogent thoughts out my ears!), you’re crazy by the end. Because, as I’ve said before and will probably say a shitillion times more, you never really finish a book. You just stop writing it. It’s the hardest thing one could ever possibly do with one’s time, and that includes: running a marathon; running a business; running a political campaign; running a carnival midway; and running a country. Please note I have never done any of these things, so you might well accuse me of talking out my ass (were I not actually sitting on it at the moment).

What’s made all of this harder than usual is the fact that my book revisits a not-so-carefree period in my life: the first year or so following my husband’s suicide in the fall of 2011. In many ways I’m still grieving and always will be (closure is twelve kinds of bullshit, you know that?), but working, re-working and re-re-working the manuscript has forced me to go back there, down there, WAY, WAY down there, far inside the stinking, brackish sinkhole of snot-infested early mourning. Am I mixing metaphors yet? Not quite? OK, well howzabout I throw in a nice lobotomical reference: Whenever I do something with the book, even if that something is as small as adding a comma, I unscrew the access plates on my skull and spoon out my deepest wounds.

But it’s good. Yes! It’s all good. I’m grateful to be doing this. And yes, that’s batty. Just as you have to be crazy to decide to write a book, you have to be more than a little crazy to embark down that career path at the start (“Mommy! Mommy! When I grow up I want to specialize in a recondite, intensely isolating and time-consuming field with almost no hope for financial recompense!”). But once you’re there, once you’re hunched over a keyboard in some attic or basement, you know what? Writing is not a bad way to figure shit out. It equips you well for the process of long-term crap evaluation that takes up an awful lot of life. Sticking around in this perplexing mortal realm means having to sort through everything that happens while we’re here, and that’s true no matter what you do for a living.

As I writer, I just have a habit of putting it down in writing. And it helps. It helped after I lost my parents and sister during a short, awful run in the early ’90s. Writing “House of Holy Fools” allowed me to frame what happened to them, turn their stories into narrative with paradigms and some poetic sense. I saw them as beautiful and brilliant eccentrics; I saw myself as richer for having known them, more alive for having told their tales.

I’m richer for having known Chris. I’m more alive for having told this tale — his, mine, our children’s.

And so, in these last gasps of proofing and editing my small, strange memoir of grief and pushing forward, I grieve and push forward again. Again I comprehend all that I lost when my husband jumped to his death; again I mourn his passing; again I look up, into the light of this moment, this day, this belated but radiant spring, and thank God for the gift of being here. Grief won’t die, but hope won’t, either.

two moments, one sister

amybiancolli family, loss and grief 11 Comments


Odd, how memories are linked. Even the most disparate ones, removed by time and distinct in feeling, can conjoin in the strangest ways.

Consider these two: one brutal, one loving.

My sister Lucy and I were driving along a winding Connecticut road late one night, early one summer, en route to visiting our parents. I don’t remember when it was exactly, sometime after her first suicide attempt. 1989, maybe? 1990?

I was at the wheel of my old Toyota Tercel. Good car. Ugly car. We were blabbing, probably about men, which was normal for us. I had a crush on a guy named Ian. It was around 11:30 or midnight.

And then up ahead, blitzing toward us from around a curve, came a small coupe chased by a police cruiser.

Oh my God, I said to Lucy. I hate high-speed chases. Too often they end with some innocent passerby getting killed.

We started chatting about this. I started telling her about the statistics I’d read on the subject, the news stories I’d written about crashes. But I only started, because less than a minute later, I looked in the rear view mirror and saw that same little coupe screaming up behind us from the opposite direction. The chase had turned around and backtracked.

I looked ahead and saw a blind curve.

That’s when the coupe passed us straight over the double yellow line and into the blindness, and as it did, a second car whipped around the curve from the other direction, and again I said, Oh, my God, and I pulled onto the shoulder, and the cars screamed head-on into each other, launching upward, upward, the smashed metal firing sparks into the night. And they sounded like a bomb.

The oncoming car rocketed through the black and crashed behind us.

The other, the coupe, took its time. It hung in the air forever. When it landed, the ball of steel rolled toward us, still sparking, and for a split second of ghostly calm I watched and wondered if it would crush us. It finally came to a halt about 15 feet ahead, spraying the windshield with shattered glass.

The cops arrived. Then the ambulance. Then the barefoot woman running down the road, yelling, “My husband! My husband!” Then more cops. Lucy and I spoke to the new ones, who separated us and took our stories, then compared their notes and returned looking ashen.

Turned out the first cops had been called off the chase but kept going anyway. The young guy in the sports coupe had been drinking. They had his plate. But they wanted to nail him that night, driving those double-yellow roads in the blackness.

The innocent passerby died.

Months later we spoke to an investigator on the defense team of the sports coupe driver, who’d had too much to drink. He survived. But not whole. Not with the cognitive ability to stand trial.

I think about that night, sometimes. I once got bumped from jury duty on a case with a high-speed chase; I had to confess my bias. That’s the deadliest trauma I’ve ever witnessed firsthand, and I’ve wondered since about people at war who see so much. The terrible and pyrotechnic vision replays in the same slow motion as it did a quarter century ago.

Yet what I remember most, after the accident itself and that poor, distraught, shoeless woman running through the night, was the conversation I had with Lucy as we drove away.

“Ame,” she said.

It happened so fast, I said.

“We didn’t die.”

No, I said. No, we didn’t.

“I guess it’s not my time,” she said. “I guess I’m supposed to live a little while longer.”

Yeah. You are. You will.

And she did, for a little while. Long enough to see me get married. Long enough to be my maid of honor.

Long enough to sit beside me at the altar, reach for my hand in a moment of quiet and squeeze it with love.

I have no more violent memory than that head-on collision. I have no sweeter memory of my sister than her gentle touch at my wedding. But I can’t remember the former without remembering the latter, because she couldn’t have held my hand if she hadn’t survived.

The extra time with her was a gift. That moment at the altar was a gift. It hangs in eternity, too.

the skin of life

amybiancolli gross stuff, loss and grief 5 Comments

Lately I’ve been thinking about scars. I have my share of them, both internal and external, literal and figurative. Some I’ve had since childhood. Such as: that half-inch scar on my chin from the time I fell in front of a roaring fire and said hello to the living-room floor.

Then there’s the faint gray spot on a vein in the palm of my left hand, the imprint of a pencil that I dropped in fourth grade and then, as I reached down to get it, hit the floor eraser-first at a precise 90-degree angle and bounced straight up and stabbed me. (And I ask you, what are the chances?) The school nurse at Washington Primary informed me that, first of all, I was not going to die of acute lead poisoning, as pencils were made out of graphite, thank God, and second, I would bear the scar of this traumatic episode throughout my life. Of course she did not in fact use the phrase “traumatic episode,” but the sight of that school-bus-yellow Number 2 dangling from my innocent appendage stuck with me for perpetuity, along with the scar.

Of the marks and defects acquired since adulthood, my favorites trace back to my eight years playing soccer and my three rounds of pregnancy and childbirth, as I’ve derived too much joy from both; I’ll never rue the day I earned those scars.

Another flaw I love is the thin white slice on the back of my right hand, below and between the knuckles of my pinky and ring finger. That one I got in the summer of 1991, just before my wedding to Chris, on the day I lugged all my worldly crap out of my triple-decker apartment in Somerville, Mass., and packed it into a U-Haul for the move to Albany.

While woman-handling a file cabinet into submission, a drawer slipped out and gashed my hand. It was deep. The blood spilled out with fulsome gore. But because I was young and cheap and also stupid; because I had paid the one-way rate; because I had to get the damn truck back to damn Boston that same damn night, dammit; and because the clock was already ticking, and I was already late, and did I mention that I was young and cheap and also stupid, I trundled off into the morning and onto the Pike with a plentifully bleeding hand. I grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from my load of worldly crap and spent the trip to Albany dousing it while driving. Don’t ask me how I managed to drive and pour without the acquisition of a third hand. I don’t remember. I just remember pulling up to Chris’s apartment at the intersection of Park and Delaware in shorts soaked with blood and alcohol.

You can see why I love this scar: It marks the beginning of my life with my late husband. I can’t regard it without remembering that day, that man, that life; I look at the closed wound, and the skin that formed around it, and recall our 20 years together.

My biggest scars show no outward trace. But in the the two and a half years since my kids and I absorbed the sudden blow of losing Chris, a rough but healing dermis has formed around that wound, as well. A whole lot of life has occurred between then and now. The grief is still there. We can put our fingers on it, feel the bone beneath it, see the pucker of skin around its glossy ridge. It never fades, not completely — and it can hurt like hell during a flare-up. But our lives have grown around it. And thank God, they just keep growing.

what i have

amybiancolli friends, loss and grief, random philosophizing 12 Comments

After any loss, we fixate on the absent. I do this. I did this on Monday, when I first got the news that Pam had died. I’ve done it every moment since. I’m doing it now. I’ll do it tomorrow, zeroing in on everyone I ever lost.

They’re all there, gathered around a blazing fire pit in some grand backyard, having a high old time without me: My best friend. My husband. My sister. My father. My mother. My second mother. And so on. And so on. And so on.

But I can’t always focus on the departed, no matter how dear they are. I need to tally up my blessings here and now. And not just the good things; I have to include the annoying things, the meh things, even the bad things. Because when life shakes out in the end, whenever that end may be, the good and the bad will have muddied and merged, and we won’t know the difference — or we won’t care.

So, just for a moment, I’ll aim to be grateful for everything that put me here, keeps me here, makes me Amy, makes me sane.

What do I have?

I have my three children, indelible, spirited, compassionate and brave.

I have my family, so large and so loving, whether related by blood or not.

I have my friends: each of them individually; all of them as a whole; the possibility of new ones tomorrow.

I have a bad habit of apologizing too much for everything.

I have a foul mouth. You’re shocked by this revelation. I can tell. Sorry. Continue reading →

Pamsadoodle

amybiancolli friends, loss and grief 18 Comments

Tonight I have too much to say and no right words to say it: I just lost my best friend, Pam, one of the brightest gifts in the long arc of blessings that illumined my way. She helped me through my husband’s death. She helped me through my sister’s death, becoming my sister, too. She was the sweetest, humblest, kindest, funniest person I knew, with the most infectious laugh, and the thought of moving forward without her boggles my mind and breaks my heart.

But I know I will move forward. Because I know she’ll be helping me and everyone she loved and loves still. I know she’ll be laughing with me, though I won’t hear her wild giggles again until I’m a cranky old fusspot and I die in my sleep and she finds me in the crowd at the pearly gates, eyes crinkling, sidling up with some wacky story of some weird guy in the line ahead of me. Someday we’re going to double over again with laughter, and heaven’s occupants won’t know how to handle it. We’ll make too much noise. They’ll have to send us back.

I just saw her a little over a month ago — and sure enough, after eating subpar sushi on a Saturday night, we fell into a bout of laughter that left us with aching bellies. “Amesadoodle,” she used to say. “Amesadoodle, wait’ll you hear this. I have a funny story to tell you.”

She always did. She will again. I’ll be waiting for it.

So tonight, in Pam’s memory, I’m asking you — whoever you are, be you friend, family or random stranger — to call up the person in your life with whom you laugh the most radiantly and contagiously. And let it rip, the both of you.