Chains

“The chains that bind us the most closely are the ones we have broken.” 

– Antonio Porchia

I have come to imagine my grief like an iron weight I carry around with me, chained to my body, that I cannot seem to break free from or set down. Over time the weight has begun to feel like a very part of my anatomy, somehow embedded into my cells, always present though sometimes sitting dormant until something happens that brings it all to the surface – those long-suppressed feelings bubbling up, rising and crashing. What most often reminds me that it’s still there, what makes me realize I cannot carry it for one more second, is walking with someone else in their grief, holding space for them as they navigate the darkness of their particular, personal loss. Empathy, by definition, requires us to tap into our own well of pain so that we can connect with the other person – feeling for them, with them – and, as we do, we are forced open ourselves up to some of the darkest emotions we may have locked away. I found myself experiencing this seven years after I lost my sister, Cathy, when I was forced to face many of my own unresolved feelings of grief and loss, the emotions I thought I had successfully pushed away and moved beyond. Watching someone I loved experience a loss eerily similar to my own, I chose to climb down into someone else’s pit of grief to sit with them in their darkness.

Hana – Hanička to her friends and family – was only 24 years old, a beautiful young woman who had spent years working as a model to finance her move to Brno, a city in the Moravia region of the Czech Republic where she was attending university. She was the youngest sister of Radek, my boyfriend at the time, and I’d met her only once while visiting their small hometown of Šumperk, three and a half hours east of Prague, the year before. On a wintery January evening in 2008, she had accepted a ride home from a school friend rather than taking the long bus ride from the university campus to her apartment on the outskirts of the city. Nestled in the warm back seat of the car, Hana had napped during the drive after a long day of classes, her head leaning against the cold glass of the car window. As I imagine that drive now, I hope she remained asleep, blissfully unaware, as the car she rode in lost control on the winding dark road, crossing into oncoming traffic. I hope her eyes stayed closed to the flash of headlights, to the violent swerve of the car as her driver overcorrected, flipping the car into the deep embankment that ran alongside the road. Can I hope she wasn’t awoken when she was thrown from the car as it somersaulted through the air and came to rest on top of her, pinning her lithe body beneath its massive weight? She died in the hospital the next day, never having regained consciousness, never waking from what I can only pray was a peaceful, painless sleep. 

I was sitting at my desk inside the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in DC when I got the news. It was January 28th, a few weeks into the new semester at the school where I worked as an undergraduate academic advisor while taking classes in the evenings towards my Master’s degree. It was mid-morning, and I was looking through personal email on my computer as a way to distract myself from the fact that my scheduled student appointment was already 15 minutes late. Radek had flown to the US from Israel a day or two earlier as part of a school trip in which he was visiting New York City, DC, and Boston, meeting with scholars and political leaders. His mother, who I had met during my visit to Šumperk the year before, had sent me an email that morning. In her broken English, she asked me if I knew how I could locate Radek. She hadn’t been able to reach him by cell phone and had no information as to where he was other than “in the US.” While I would later learn the horrifying details of what had happened, would even stand in the ditch where Hana’s body had lain crushed beneath the overturned car, her mother’s limited English would not allow for such a detailed explanation in the email. Instead, it simply ended with, “Hanička had accident. This morning, she is died.”

My mind reeled as I read the words. Panic rose up in my throat and I felt my hands and feet tingle with the pins and needles of anxiety, a physical memory of the day I’d heard my own similar news about Cathy seven years before. I pushed down the feelings of loss, disbelief, and disorientation that rose up as my memories of losing Cathy intermingled with this news of Hana’s death. I focused on the immediate issues I needed to figure out, like how to find Radek and give him the news. While I didn’t know the itinerary for the trip he was on or even where he was staying in New York City, I literally ran from my office at E Street and 19th Street in Washington, DC, to Union Station to catch a train to Manhattan. I spent the entirety of the train ride trying to compose a way in which to tell this man that I loved that his sister was dead. I remember praying to God for the wisdom and compassion to bear up the news in a way that respected the loss of this family. I also prayed that I would find a way to keep my own feelings of grief from overwhelming me, preventing me from really showing up to support Radek in his grief. The similarities in our situations, though, made it difficult: both of us far from home in a foreign country when we learned the devastating news that our sisters had been suddenly, unexpectedly torn from our lives. I knew the path that lay before Radek, the kind of pain he would face, the questions and regrets that would plague him as he navigated this loss. I struggled to keep my own emotions – the ones that were welling up and threatening to overtake me – at a safe distance. 

For the time being, I was able to do just that. I had several imposing, practical tasks at hand to keep me distracted from my own deep feelings of pain. For starters, I had to find Radek. After many unsuccessful attempts at tracking down the professor in charge of the trip, I was finally able to contact her husband in Boston who provided me with an address of where the group would be having dinner that evening in Manhattan. As I arrived at Grand Central Station in New York at the peak of rush hour, I realized that I didn’t even have the foggiest idea of which side of the street to catch a cab. That became a moot point as I further realized there was no chance of getting a cab anytime between then and the next two hours. I’d have to find another way. I stopped a woman rushing by me and asked her which way I should walk to get to the address written on the paper I gripped in my hand. She looked at the address, looked at me with a look of confusion and exasperation, and said, “You’re not from here, are you?” Taking pity on me, she steered me through the throngs of people waiting outside the station to the stairs leading underground. I had no subway pass, so she used hers to get me through the gates and onto a train. While we rode, I told her the story – who I was, who I was looking for, and why. Tears quietly fell from both of our eyes as she sat listening, holding my hand. She explained to me where I needed to go, gave me her extra subway pass, and even located another kind stranger on the train who was heading in the same direction to lead me to the next train I would need to take. From the last subway stop, it was a 15-minute walk to the office building in which I would find Radek. When I reached the security guard at the foot of the building, he wouldn’t let me in, but instead called upstairs to the young man who was chaperoning this group of international university students. I quickly and succinctly explained the situation to him: Radek’s sister is dead; I need to talk to him privately. Within minutes, the young man was ushering Radek through the large glass doors under the pretense of having a chat with him outside while he smoked a cigarette. Upon seeing me waiting there, Radek’s eyes lit up. “What are you doing here? Come up, meet my friends, have dinner with us!” My heart sank at the joy on his face, the realization that he believed I had simply taken the train up to surprise him in New York.

“Radek,” I said slowly, “I have some news. It’s Hanička. There’s been an accident.” His smile was slowly fading but still there. “What happened to her? Is she OK?” he asked with pleading eyes, still not understanding the gravity of my standing before him instead of simply calling him with the news. “No, Radek. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, she’s not OK. Radek, she’s dead.” And then the moment that I knew all too well: the moment of recognition. The body recognizes the reality before the mind does, I think, and it takes over. His knees buckled slightly as his massive frame began to sink. I caught him as best as I could as he began shaking his head. “No,” was all he could say over and over and over. Then, just as I had done seven years before, he began rationalizing, questioning. “Are you sure? Maybe you misunderstood. My mother’s English is not that good. Are you sure? I think it must be a mistake. Hanička is not dead. She can’t be dead. I just spoke with her the other day. She’s only 24 years old.”

I had him call his mother because, really, what else could I do? After she confirmed what had happened and explained the details of the accident, she asked him if he planned to come home for the funeral. She did not want him to cut his trip short – “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity! Hana would want you to stay!” – but was willing to wait a week for him to return to his hometown to say goodbye to his little sister. Even though I could imagine, could remember, exactly the feelings that were swirling in his mind – the questions, the denial, the bargaining, the what-ifs – I wasn’t sure how to support him without letting my own feelings resurface, so I did what others had done for me in the wake of Cathy’s death. I took care of things. I made arrangements to get us back to DC –  a freezing, four and a half hour-long bus ride from New York City in which our bus ultimately broke down on the side of the highway during rush hour just outside of Maryland. I focused on taking time off of work and coordinating with my professors so that I could accompany Radek back to Šumperk for Hana’s funeral the following week. I scheduled our flight from DC to Prague, paying for our tickets with the money my incredibly generous friends and coworkers had pooled together for us. After the drive from Prague to Šumperk, I held Radek’s hand as we visited the site of the car accident and heard Hana’s boyfriend describe her final moments. His mother and older sister thanked me profusely for being there for Radek, for traveling to find him so that he could receive the news from someone he loved, someone who had at least met his little sister. As I sat quietly next to Radek while he spoke with his family and childhood friends for hours in a language I could only barely understand, hoping my presence alone could somehow convey my empathy and support to them, I wondered how long it would be before the feelings that I had been holding at bay finally pushed their way in. 

Those feelings came flooding over me after the funeral, after I’d sat in the small viewing room at the funeral home with Radek and his parents, looking at Hana’s beautiful but bruised face lying against a satin pillow as if she were still sleeping; after I’d watched Radek stand before the crowd of mourners at the funeral and cry as he eulogized his baby sister; after I’d listened to the songs that their mother had chosen to be played, songs that had been found saved on Hana’s phone, as we all filed past the collection of photos displaying this beautiful young woman who had had so much life left ahead of her; after I’d laid flowers on top of the soft dirt that now cradled her remains and said goodbye to this girl I hardly knew. I finally felt the crash of those waves of emotion that I had been resisting as I flew back to DC from Prague, alone – a flight that felt all too similar to the one I had flown seven years before back to California from Prague, alone. 

Climbing down into that dark pit of grief to sit with Radek and his parents, to hold space for them and feel with them, had required me to reopen the door to that closet in which I had shoved away all of my darkest, most painful emotions after Cathy died. I had thought I could open the door just a little, just enough to allow me to feel empathy, to connect with them in their pain. But the door kept threatening to swing all the way open, spilling the entire contents of the closet out on top of me, and it was as if, during that week with Radek and his family, I had been trying with all of my might to keep that door shut, the weight of it straining against my back as I tried desperately to push it closed. As I sat in the quiet dark of the airplane flying over Europe, I felt my body finally give up its fight against the inevitable as the door to the closet came crashing open, and I was wracked with sobs I could no longer control. I felt the waves of loss and sadness and hopelessness wash over me. It was all of my pain over losing Cathy and the sadness of watching Radek’s family mourn their loss combined with a million other losses and hurts and regrets I had been keeping locked away for so long. I cried until I fell into a deep sleep that carried me all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Dulles Airport. The first call I made when I landed was to my Mom back home in California, my tears immediately returning as she asked me, “but how are YOU doing with all of this?” I was so grateful for her knowing affirmation that everything I was feeling was to be expected, that of course all of these emotions would return as I experienced Radek’s grief alongside him.

The experience was painful but was also a gift. It gave me a glimpse at what it means to hold onto grief. I used to think that grief was a process – stages we proceed through in order to reach acceptance after the death of someone we love. I knew that the grief I held within me after Cathy’s death would never go away completely; I expected it to resurface from time to time. But I came to understand with Hana’s death that the grief I was holding in me wasn’t this one, singular pain. Instead, I think grief accumulates within us almost like sedimentary rock, new layers deposited with every loss, slabs of pain forming on top of one another, big and small, layer upon layer, and solidifying over time into a solid mass of rock, a rock that can ultimately form the iron weight and chains that will drag us down without us even realizing it. Every new form of grief, whether small or enormous, mixes with the old, with the pain of all of our previous losses and traumas over time. The thing you thought you had left in the past – that relationship that ended in a painful break up, the friendship that quietly imploded and crumbled away, your parents’ divorce you survived as a child, the earlier death of a loved one you thought you had grieved fully – is suddenly painfully immediate. And when you finally look at it, notice this massive rock you’ve been carrying, the heft of its weight, the enormity of its size, can be shocking, making you wonder if something is wrong with you, if perhaps you’ve gone a little bit crazy. Because when the grief resurfaces, when we are forced to acknowledge what we’ve been carrying, the scope and depth of the sorrow so often just doesn’t feel like it matches whatever event that triggered it. And that’s because it probably doesn’t. This is the cumulative grief you’ve been holding, unprocessed, in your body all this time, reactivated by this new loss, this new pain, reminding you that it was always there.

And so, with Hana’s death, I came to realize that I would continue to carry my grief inside of me and that it would rise up to the surface with every subsequent loss I experienced. And while I wasn’t ready at that time, wasn’t even yet equipped, to really sit with the pain (that would come later, with a different subsequent loss), it was the first time I fully saw and acknowledged the ways that grief can and will resurface over and over again throughout our lives, especially when the grief remains unexamined and unresolved. 

Even now as I continue to process my grief and pain – through therapy, through prayer, meditation, and reflection, through conversations with my family and close friends, through reading, and even (especially) through the writing of these very essays here on this blog – I am beginning to see that while the grief I still carry within me can cause me pain, it can also be a source of strength and joy. It has become a part of my very being, of who I am and how I show up in the world. The depth of my grief, I think, is reflected in the depth of my empathy. I see my ability to show up for others, to sit with them in their pain, to feel with them, to not shy away from conversations that can be difficult or uncomfortable, as one of my greatest strengths, and I know that ability has largely been a result of my own experiences with pain and sorrow. 

There is a certain freedom in choosing to see our emotions as an asset rather than a liability. Just as grief can often serve as a reminder of the love we shared with the ones we lost, we can also choose to see our grief as a power, one that we can choose to practice as love, connection, kindness, and compassion for others. And in that way, I believe, we can carry our grief not as an iron weight, a chain that will continue to drag us down, but as a different kind of chain, one forged in empathy that can link us and bind us to others.