Grief Is for People

“The day Russell died, he posted a picture of wildflowers on Instagram. ‘Rudbeckia running rampant along the north side of the barn,’ he wrote. I suppose it’s a sign of our times that his last written words are in the form of a caption. Rudbeckia running rampant. What a pleasant series of sounds. It’s tempting to connect the photograph with what happened later that evening. That way the subsequent horror is not so out of the blue. The way the extraordinary has an on-ramp. It’s tempting to reach through the screen, place a palm against the barn wall, and whisper: Don’t. But it’s just a picture he took before he left the house.”

After the fact of Russell’s death, his actions and other occurrences take on heightened meaning for Crosley in her attempt to not only understand what drove Russell to death by suicide but also discern whether she or others missed hints that this act was forthcoming. At times, such as when Crosley reads the caption of a final social media post that Russell made, she realizes that his actions were not likely fraught with the kind of significance she wishes they were. This kind of acceptance is an important step in the stages of grief for Crosley.

“The burglary is a tornado, ripping up insecurities, exposing their roots. This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn’t, to people I shouldn’t […] I promise to change. If only someone will take away the mental block that keeps me from solving this one mystery, from answering this one question, I promise to move forward.”

Crosley’s beliefs about why the burglary occurred are rooted in emotion rather than logic. At a later point, she acknowledges this, but in the moment, her attempt to assign responsibility to herself is a means of obtaining control. Though emotional, the brain also wants to believe that it can actively prevent bad things from happening in the future.

“There are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don’t exist. I’m sorry your house blew up but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don’t know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won’t judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in tangible ways. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight.”

The memoir’s title is taken from this passage as Crosley delineates between the mourning that occurs for her stolen jewelry and the mourning that occurs for Russell. Her emotions surrounding the theft frustrate her because she feels that it is socially unacceptable to appear to be attached to inanimate things. In reality, what truly upsets Crosley about the jewelry’s absence is its connection to Russell, who is also gone.

“I once interviewed Mariel Hemingway about a documentary she’d made about her family’s history with mental illness. She counted seven suicides off the top of her head, including her grandfather. She said that when her sister died, she was scared she would be next, not because she was suicidal but because she felt suicide was sentient, not just familial. It needed a host body. I didn’t compute this at the time. But now the idea of suicide as contagious, as a baton pass, comes naturally.”

Much of what Crosley was unable to understand emotionally about suicide makes a kind of sense after Russell’s suicide occurs. Crosley’s inclusion of bits of research about suicide and outside anecdotes is a way to make larger connections—to demonstrate that there are larger, societal notions surrounding suicide that inform how she responds to Russell’s death.

“Only as I button my shirt do I mention the suicide, as if [the doctor] already knows.

‘How will he know you loved him,’ she asks, ‘unless you try to destroy yourself?’”

When Crosley begins having panic attacks, the connection between these physical symptoms and the emotional angst she feels due to Russell’s death becomes clear. The doctor points out that by inducing physical suffering in herself, it is as though Crosley is attempting to punish herself for Russell’s death or empathize with whatever pain he was experiencing that led him to death. The doctor hints at the impossibility of this, speaking indirectly of the truth: that Crosley’s actions cannot bring Russell back to life.

“I don’t need a hug. All I need is to follow this trail. Because if I can get these items back, I can get my friend back. I would sooner be separated from this logic than from my own skin.”

As Crosley becomes increasingly obsessed with reclaiming her stolen jewelry, she recognizes that a shift occurs and that the search for the jewelry is actually an effort to bring Russell back to life. She understands, either on some level or in retrospect as she writes the memoir, that the return of the jewelry will not accomplish this goal. Still, a part of her feels better in tricking herself into believing that she has the agency to reverse Russell’s suicide.

“Part of the frustration of suicide is that it undermines our sense of fairness. If someone can snatch themselves out of the world, it seems only right that we should be able to snatch them back into it. There’s a reason the guidebook on suicide feels broad or written on the fly, attacked more from an ethical, social, or philosophical standpoint than a practical one. Because it is not shaped like ‘normal’ loss, the idea of reversibility is at once preposterous and inherent in the act: If suicide is humanity’s loophole, maybe the loophole can go both ways.”

Crosley is frequently frustrated by the way in which her grief over Russell’s death—because his death was intentional on his part—does not follow the “normal” stages of grief. The taboos surrounding suicide make it difficult for her to know how best to face the trauma that results from Russell’s death. Her philosophizing about this via a memoir is a means to understanding.

“So much of the burglary is about blame. It’s about looking for the bad guy, about the desire to have this person punished. Because in the case of the burglary, there is a bad guy, there is potential for restitution, and there is a potential for fairness. Not so for a suicide. So I aim the guilt closer to home. My friend was telling me something and I didn’t listen. For how long had he been telling me?”

As Crosley identifies an increasing number of parallels between the burglary and Russell’s death, it is frustrating when the two events fail to mimic one another. Dealing with the burglary becomes a model for Crosley to approach Russell’s death, and when the model does not apply, she finds herself at a loss.

“To mourn the death of a friend is to feel as though you are walking around with a vase, knowing you have to set it down but nowhere is obvious. Others will assure you that there’s no right way to do this. Put it anywhere. But you know better. You know that if you put your grief in a place that’s too prominent or too hidden, you will take it back when no one’s looking. This is why I spend my nights looking into the restaurant. I fantasize about keeping Russell in front of me for a little longer, asking him questions, knowing nothing either of us says will change the outcome. Each time the restaurant closes. Each time he drops me off at my door. Each time he walks off into the dark.

And then he’s gone. And I am still holding this vase.”

Crosley uses the metaphor of grief as a vase to convey that grief is heavy (i.e., a burden) and fragile (i.e., she fears that by working through her grief, she risks forgetting about Russell). Though grief is unpleasant, not grieving is also uncomfortable, leaving the narrator in a kind of limbo.

“Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse—delicate things made out of solid materials.”

Throughout the novel, Crosley utilizes jewelry in multiple ways. Its theft is a central element of the memoir as she draws a link between this event and Russell’s death. Here, she highlights a contrast between people and jewelry. In constantly reusing and re-envisioning the associations of the jewelry, Crosley points to the complex and contradictory journey that is grief.

“What gruesome work suicide makes of grief! Sometimes I conflate blame and action, sometimes I separate them as if in a moral centrifuge, sometimes I think it doesn’t matter either way.

Into all this comes the necklace. I am wedging this piece of fossilized tree sap into chaos. That will stop the wheel from turning. There is no logic at work beyond that. During this time, I believe, as much as I believe in my own reflection, that Russell will know the necklace is in my possession. And then what? It wasn’t his stupid necklace. It wasn’t even his favorite. But my brain cannot be bothered with pedestrian questions like ‘how’ or ‘why.’ It only knows ‘must.’ It knows only that it must stop the bleed. If the necklace can come home, then everything will be just as it used to be.”

Part of what frustrates Crosley about her grief is that there is little action that can be done to “fix” the sadness she feels. She longs for an opportunity to be proactive, and the search for the necklace tricks her into believing that such a thing exists. She finds a sense of purpose and distraction while simultaneously working through her grief, though indirectly.

“In a funny way, [Russell] reminded me of my grandmother. Aside from the projectile pearl bracelet, the other gift she gave me (while she was alive) was an onyx bracelet. This was after my mother informed her I’d become the editor of my high school literary magazine. A loop of black beads arrived in the mail. No note. It’s no coincidence that both these items were presented on occasions of academic achievement. It’s also probably no coincidence that they are black and white, symbolic encouragement to free myself from the gray area, to escape the middle, to protect myself from the ordinary. To go be special. But that was their priority, hers and Russel’s. Their deathly fear of the reverse.”

When Crosley comes to believe—in large part because the events occur exactly one month apart—that Russell’s death and the theft of her jewelry are linked, she continues to search for and create connections and parallels between Russell and specific pieces of her jewelry. Forging this parallel—no matter how tenuous—is a means of justifying the lengths she is willing to go to.

“What I never told Russell was that in the same way his specialness had found an annex in great authors or inanimate objects, mine had found an annex in him. For those precious weeks when he was still around but the jewelry was gone, I wanted it back because it was mine. But once they were both gone? I wanted it back because it was him. Because I could no longer picture it without picturing the times he held it, without associating it with his approval. I had stored everything I liked best about myself in Russell.”

Crosley later acknowledges that not all her thinking about the connection between Russell and her jewelry is logical. Here, too, she is so consumed by her sadness over Russell’s death that she temporarily believes that her own self-worth is bound up in Russell’s existence (and, thus, that it is impossible to even be a person in the world once Russell is absent from it).

“Russell never got an obituary. He was not an editor and he was not famous. Book publicity: thankless until the last stop. Russell’s partner was too overwhelmed with grief to contact newspapers, and by the time the rest of us campaigned for an obituary, it was too late. The window had closed. Or maybe we didn’t try hard enough. A half dozen current and former publicists and this was the story we couldn’t place? But we were beaten by the nature of the beast. Suicide, itself such an isolating death, wants its mourning to be solitary. It wants you to scatter and shrink, for everyone to curl up in their respective balls.”

Crosley laments the way in which the traditional practices that follow a death—such as the publishing of an obituary—did not happen after Russell’s death. This is largely the result of the unexpected nature of his death and partly the result of the taboos associated with suicide. In retrospect, Crosley feels guilty for this oversight, saddened that Russell did not receive the honor that he deserved in a public announcement of his life and accomplishments.

“It took a small army to get it through my skull that people needed to mourn, and not just Russell’s five favorite people. A few more than that. They needed to sit in an auditorium and listen to speeches and poems, and some of those poems might be Auden. This is not actually about Russell. More to the point, it’s not about me. I am not the sole protector of this man. If he were here, he could manage the guest list, but he’s not here. The needs of the living are more important than the wants of the dead. Can’t I understand?”

Crosley is initially disapproving of the proposed memorial service that is planned to take place approximately three months after Russell’s death. She is certain that the event is not something that Russell would take solace in nor approve of. However, in time, she realizes that the purpose of a memorial service is to provide comfort and solace through ritual to those who remain alive.

“This was on the one-year anniversary of his death: July 27, 2020. A curious thing about the anniversary of a suicide is the increased likelihood for premeditation. This is not just the day that a person you loved died, it’s the day they knew they would die. You wake up in the morning and think: Maybe he didn’t know yesterday or the day before, but he probably knew today. He probably knew tonight. It’s a strange comfort. With each passing moment, I found myself feeling closer to Russell than I had all year.”

An important part of the journey through grief for Crosley is obtaining a sense of understanding—as much as it is possible—of Russell’s mental state near the end of his life. Her stressing the important of the one-year anniversary of his death is in keeping with the emphasis she places on dates throughout the memoir—Crosley regards dates and parallels between them not as mere coincidence but as holding a meaning.

“Typical insomnia has an apologetic feel, like it doesn’t want to be here any more than you do. Like it knows you have a big day tomorrow but it can’t help itself. Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds. Who promised you that? Get your money back. Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out loss. Usually, this is a good thing. So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident. But every so often, there is such a thing as regular life.”

Crosley’s grief causes her to be unable to sleep, and here, she describes the particularly brutal form that this insomnia takes. In the thick of it, she does see an end in sight. Being honest and direct about this pessimism is important to the narrator.

“At least I felt granted permission to let the depression curl up and sleep next to me. I’d dedicated so much time to negotiating with loss time everyone assumed I was using for what the fitness instructors call ‘active recovery.’ At least now I didn’t feel out of step with the mood of the city. That’s right, everyone get on my level.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic occurs only a few months after Russell’s death, Crosley feels that the timing is appropriate. The emotional state of the larger world now mirrors her own, and she feels relieved that she is no longer under pressure to “get on with” life—the implication being that her mourning should be brief and that grief should occur in a finite time frame.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live […] So begins the embraced-to-the-point-of-asphyxiation Didion passage from The White Album. The line continues with: ‘We look for the sermon in the suicide.’ If there is a sermon to be found in what happened to Russell, it’s that he needed to be told stories in order to live. He approached his life through the lens of fiction. It was how he divided the world into villains and victims, how he diagnosed those closest to him, how he diagnosed himself.”

In her ongoing effort to make meaning of Russell’s death and attempt to understand what led him to choose to die by suicide, Crosley turns to well-known writings on the topic of death and suicide, as well as the idea of storytelling itself, particularly as it affected Russell’s life. In doing this, she contributes to a larger, cultural conversation about this topic—Crosley is clear elsewhere in the book that she does not seek to judge nor condemn Russell for his actions.

“Because we did not know when the pandemic would end, only that it would get worse, the depression did not feel like something to surmount or snap out of; it felt Sisyphean. This feeling was at odds with the chaotic visual and cinematic history of New York […] To be depressed among these stories is a reminder that you are not retreating from the world, you got left by it.”

Because the COVID-19 pandemic follows shortly after Russell’s death, it compounds Crosley’s grief. As she is overcome by the depressive phase of grief, she is pessimistic about the future, unable to foresee a time when her feelings will be manageable and her spirits uplifted. Her notion of the city as abandoning her suggests a feeling of helplessness and inaction.

“Sometimes I imagined a folded universe in which the pandemic and burglary overlapped. The burglary wouldn’t have happened. It just wouldn’t have. I barely left my apartment, which was conducive to some types of theft (packages were stolen with such regularity, calling UPS became part of the delivery process) but prohibitive to home invasions. […] But there was never going to be a version of the story in which it wasn’t my missing jewelry and my dead friend. You can ignore grief. You push it around your plate. But you can’t give it away.”

The trauma of the burglary continues to impact Crosley during the year that follows. She longs, at times, for the ability to travel back in time and redo the past, but she is coming to accept the reality of both of her losses. This indicates a shift in her character as she gradually moves toward a kind of stasis.

“I need to get as far away from them as possible, to a place where no new people can bloom. A place free of association, where you yourself have never set foot. And when I get there, I need to peer into an abyss. To see something of what you saw.”

As Crosley explains her desire to jump into the ocean from the 36-foot-high cliff near Sydney, Australia, she acknowledges that her motivation is to simultaneously get away from Russell and put herself in his shoes. Because everything at home and in New York City carries with it some kind of reminder of Russell, going to Australia is a way to run away from the pain of his death. In a paradoxical manner, however, Crosley feels that an important step in her grief is to understand—as much as she can—Russell’s mental and emotional state in the moments leading up to his death. This is not a desire to die herself, per se, but a desire to empathize with him in a way that she feels she otherwise cannot.

“When the existence of this book is announced on social media, strangers respond, saying they are sorry for my loss. I am desperate to ask them: So, you agree then? You agree he’s dead? Why would you share this broken heart emoji if he were not dead? How come you get to know, instantly, what took me all these words to know? I find I cannot have an interaction with a new person, a person you would have adored, without wondering if I’m meeting the friend you needed. Is this the person for whom you would have lived just a little longer? Is this the person who would have shown you how to keep going? What if I was the wrong friend for you? What if we were all the wrong people for you?”

Crosley’s “relapse” into denial about the reality of Russell’s death is proof that the stages of grief are messy and do not occur in a linear fashion. She marvels at how difficult it has been for her to arrive at a place of realization of the truth of his death. Similarly, at times, she continues to blame herself, in a manner of speaking, for Russell’s decision to die, as though his friends and family failed to provide him with something that would have prevented him from choosing death.