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Christopher

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100 AC

Page from journal, Dec 24, 2019

One hundred days after Charlie.

There’s so much you should know about this kid - he was such a brilliant, kind, curious soul, and one of the big things I’ve learned this year is that while it’s important to talk about his death, it’s better to talk about his life.*

But today is 100 AC. And so today I want to talk about that number.

Lately I’ve noticed people use “AC” to mark the before and after of Coronavirus. I get it: the world feels different now. We’re all looking for a way to wrap our heads around it. But I felt a pang when I first heard AC in a post by someone who was forced to stay home and miss spring break and how it was “the worst thing ever.”

No, sorry: it really isn’t.

Then today I learned a crazy fact. The New York Times timeline of the pandemic begins with the government in Wuhan China confirming cases of coronovirus on… Dec 31 2019.

The same day Charlie died.

Which means we’re ALL at 100 AC.

This is spooky and strange and does nothing to relieve the temptation I feel to conflate Charlie’s death with all this craziness. It’s hard not to feel like whatever caused his accident is also responsible for all the current chaos, misfortune, and unease. It feels like something’s been knocked out of place in the foundation of things and the whole Jenga tower is teetering.

Of course the two things have nothing to do with one another. Charlie’s death was sudden, definitive, senseless. It came out of nowhere. It was singular. It was like the crack of a tree branch on a windless day.

This is different. The pandemic is ominous, looming, amorphous. We can see it coming. It’s happening to all of us, all over the world. And for most of us, it’s preventable. We stay in our homes and hunker down inside our tight protective pods. We tell ourselves: we’ll get through this. A lot of us are itching to get back to “normal.”

But it’s feeling more and more like there’s no normal to get back to. There’s no erasing or recovering from a shift this big - there’s only learning to live with it.

And learning to feel it.

The author and grief expert David Kessler was interviewed this week about this moment. Our days feel unreal and scary. Something horrible happened and everything is the same and eerily different. Death feels close.

In moments like this, Kessler says it’s crucial to name the feelings and let them come:

“So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.”

Boy, can I relate. Over the past 100 days I’ve learned a ton about feelings about feelings.

I feel bad about feeling normal. The world goes on. I’m in it. But then in a second the loss comes rushing back and I’m struck with the overpowering sense of: how can I - how can anyone - just go on?

Other times I think about Charlie and it hurts, physically. I clench up. My throat tightens. I feel acid creep up the back of my throat. Call it Grief-Flux. I learned a word from the flight medic who treated Charlie on the helicopter that took him off the mountain: AGONAL. It describes a pattern of breathing and brainstem reflex. It’s involuntary. It happens after the heart stops beating. I can’t get that word out of my head. And then I feel bad about feeling bad.

And then there are times I feel OK, good even. The truth is that over the past 100 days I’ve been connected to the world and the people I love in ways I never have before. Sunsets have been more vivid, jokes have been funnier, conversations have been deeper and more vulnerable. So many good people have shown up, people I haven’t seen in ages, laying themselves bare, opening up about their own losses.

And then I feel bad about that.

But Kessler is right: there’s no use ranking our losses or feeling bad about how we feel. We’re better off riding the feelings as they happen.

Right now people in New York and Italy and elsewhere are banging on pots and yelling from windows every night to honor emergency response workers. I hear that some are taking the opportunity to release howls of grief and shouts of frustration.

I like this idea very much. A lot of us could use a good primal scream right now.

In crisis there will be moments of normalcy, boredom, heart-wrenching agony and intense connection and satisfaction. The only way out is through.

It’s too early to talk about how we can all come out better from this - trying to frame this is as a “growth opportunity” feels offensive or worse, a betrayal. The loved ones we lost don’t get to “grow.”

But at the same time I’m hoping that my friend Michaela is right - the other day on a Zoom call she said what’s happening around the world now feels like “a hard reset.” We’ve unplugged, stopped moving, powered down. We’re taking walks, cooking for ourselves, doing the dishes, holing up with our nearest and dearest.

And from this semi-quarantine I send out my sincerest hope that we’ll all emerge from 100 AC with a deeper appreciation of life and what comes after.

* Among the stories I keep thinking about: the time Charlie gave a campaign speech at Harvard Westlake about how the entire student government system was a sham. Or the time he had a heart palpitation while working in a robotics lab at UC Berkeley, and how he befriended the cardiologist who treated him, and how he ended up getting an internship in that cardiologist’s lab. The time just before surgery to repair his heart condition, as the drugs were flowing through the IV, he said again and again, “I must retain my faculties!”