Blog
Grief
And Then There Were Three: S, N and Y
I had a blog post all ready, but then the news popped up in my Facebook feed. News that was both expected and a shock: David Crosby died.
From time to time over the years I’ve written about the experience of grieving a celebrity, someone you’ve admired and loved but never met. Some people are taken aback by the depth of the grief they feel, and that’s understandable. They’re grieving for someone they’ve only known from a distance. So they wonder why they feel that loss so deeply.
The easy answer is that the celebrity represented an important part of your life. Maybe their music was playing while you were in bed with someone you loved. Maybe their TV show was “must see TV” with your Mom. Maybe watching them perform in person was something you shared with your closest friends. All of that could be true for people now grieving David Crosby. But there’s a deeper reason for me.
Those Were the Days, My Friend
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I graduated from Nerinx Hall, a Catholic girls high school in Webster Groves, Missouri, run by the Sisters of Loretto, in 1970. That means my 50th reunion was in 2020. Except COVID-19 had other ideas. That first year, it seemed like a small sacrifice that was disappointing but not tragic. In an effort to support the seniors who had much better reasons to be disappointed - no prom or graduation ceremony - we wrote letters of encouragement to them. Heidi Keibler Stevens wrote about that project in the Chicago Tribune.
Last year, we were beginning to get vaccinated, but the school wasn’t hosting large gatherings, so we put off the reunion another year. At the beginning of this month, we finally met. And a song that came out when we were seniors kept popping into my head:
Those were the days, my friend,
We thought they’d never end.
We’d sing and dance forever and a day.
We’d live the life we choose,
We’d fight and never lose,
For we were young and sure to have our way.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (not a typo)
My last book - Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community - took a lot longer to write than I expected. It wasn’t because I had writer’s block, or that my research was hard to compile. I had two major setbacks that I could not have predicted.
I started on the book in earnest in the fall of 2015. The first year of working on it was a whirlwind: interviewing women, doing deep dives into little-known corners of the HIV/AIDS community, revisiting those dark early days of the epidemic. I had so much help, from two small crowdfunding campaigns and incredible leads from friends and strangers alike. People were excited about the book and I hadn’t written a word.
This is Not A Year-End Review of 2021
I’m kind of tired of those year-end review articles and blog posts.
I’ve always considered Labor Day the start of a new year. That’s when school starts, and in the performing arts, when the new season begins. Other than changing calendars and getting ready to do taxes, I guess living on a school year timeline still rules my life. That’s why I decided I wanted to take this opportunity to look forward to 2022, not back to 2021.
One skill I’ve improved the past two years is the willingness to pivot. I’m not perfect at this: there are still times I rage against changing plans. But flexibility is more important than ever, and that’s why I’ve made plans for 2022 (and beyond) that are fairly easy to adapt. What’s in the works, you ask?
Friend Grief and COVID: Pandemic Stories
As I’ve posted before, I got the idea for this book a year ago. I’d decided to update and rework the six little books in the Friend Grief series into one book, which was my original plan ten years ago.
But I realized pretty quickly that those few stories would be insufficient. People faced new challenges, including the inability to grieve normally due to enforced isolation. They lost coworkers - and their jobs. They watched friends in high-risk demographics suffer the most. People who’d been in the HIV/AIDS community for decades, like me, were triggered by what was now their second pandemic - while the first one still raged.
Before You Write Your Story, Make Sure You're Not Alone
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Since at least 2013, when my first books were published, people have asked me how to go about writing their own book. They’ve asked about publishing, they’ve asked about writing groups, they’ve asked about how to get the courage to write. Many of them want to write a memoir based on their experiences in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
For a long time, I would offer unabashed encouragement and suggestions for how to proceed. I let them know I would answer any questions they had along the way. Some of them took me up on that offer; not all of them followed my advice. That’s okay. The important thing was that they were telling their stories.
When the COVID pandemic began, I joined online writing groups of long-term survivors in the HIV/AIDS community. Some were already published authors; many had never been published. A few of them were considering going that route, but others were mainly interested in recording their feelings and experiences during what quickly became their second pandemic.
Friend Grief and COVID - Coming 2022
I published my first book - Friend Grief and Anger: When Your Friend Dies and No One Gives a Damn - in 2013. The first of six small books in that series, it fulfilled a promise I made to one of my dearest friends before she died: to write a book about people grieving their friends. Now I’m working on an ambitious, full-length collection of stories from people who have grieved a friend who died during (but not necessarily from) COVID.
Grieving Friends During a Pandemic
When I first started working on the Friend Grief series, I Googled ‘grieving the death of a friend’. I went past the normal first page of responses, to check out the first hundred. Many of the responses dealt with how to support a friend who’s grieving; important, but not what I was looking for. In the end, there were less than ten that actually addressed the experience of grieving the death of a friend. There were more that addressed grieving the death of a pet.
My writing has always been a niche. People have written memoirs about the death of a friend, but other than a textbook, my books were pretty unusual.
Last fall, when I was deciding whether to rework that series, I took a hard look at what was going on around me. Early in the pandemic, people had urged me to add a book to the series, one about losing friends to COVID. I resisted: as far as I was concerned, the series was finished. And frankly, early on, the stories I heard were just too similar to warrant a book.
By September, that changed.
Warning: Grief Anniversary Ahead
This time it wasn’t Facebook Memories that reminded me. It was my friend, Ken.
A year ago, the world was experiencing a devastating and profound change. Our way of life was about to be altered in ways no one could have predicted. A year ago today, I arrived in New York City for the beginning of a four-week East Coast trip. I had book signings scheduled in several cities. I had an advocacy conference to attend in Washington. I had lunch and dinner dates set with friends, along with book-related meetings to discuss future events.
When I left Chicago, I told my husband I wasn’t sure when I would be back. It depended on how serious all of this turned out to be. My trip lasted only six days. And though I ate indoors in NYC several times, when I got back I refused to eat inside a restaurant. In fact, I’ve only done that once in the past year. The anxiety I felt in that almost deserted restaurant wasn’t worth it.
When It Comes to Writing, Everything Old is New Again
I mentioned in a previous blog post that I was returning to the Friend Grief series. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my Fag Hags book. I have new, exciting plans related to that, so now would be a good time to sign up for my newsletter. In the meantime, I can tell you why and how I’m going back to the stories of people grieving their friends.
I finished the Friend Grief books in 2016, almost a year after I had started working on my next book. In doing so, I kept the promise I made to my friend Delle Chatman in 2006, to write a book about people grieving their friends. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she was enthusiastic and supportive. Six months later she was dead.
Making Plans for 2021: A Leap of Faith
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The bottom line was that I wanted to diversify my writing and writing business. I didn't want to be overly dependent on any one activity, whether it was public events or book sales. And that meant I had to learn new skills and upgrade the ones I already had.
Reflection on COVID-19 - More from Trudy James
As I said last week, Trudy James is one of the most remarkable women in my book, Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community. Her advocacy and activism - in HIV/AIDS and the death and dying communities - was recently honored by AARP Washington. She had so much to say about facing a deadly pandemic, that I decided to share more of her thoughts. I hope you find them comforting, too.
In addition to the “Speaking of Dying” film and workshops, I often give presentations, workshops, and consultations on the subjects of grief and loss. For many people this is new information. In these “Excited States of America” we have never...
Reflection on COVID-19 - Guest Post by Trudy James
If you've read my book Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community, you were probably surprised by the story of Trudy James, a hospital chaplain in Arkansas in the late 1980s. I know her story surprised me, too! She is now a leader in the field of death and dying, as well as grief and loss awareness. In the first of two guest blogs, Trudy shares an email she sent out on March 30, not long after the lock downs began:
I was enjoying a long-anticipated vacation in Italy with my friend, Jane. We were visiting my son and daughter-in-law who were planning to live in Umbria (mid-Italy, not...
Passing on the Lessons of the AIDS Epidemic
When I was writing Fag Hags, Divas and Moms: The Legacy of Straight Women in the AIDS Community, I sometimes heard the voices of the women whose stories I was sharing. It was more of a feeling that they were in the room, reading over my shoulder. I’d had something very specific in mind when I began, but that idea changed, in large part because these women guided me. They made it a much better book.
Many of the women are no longer alive, so they don’t have to face another worldwide pandemic. But I realized that they and the ones still with us have a lot to say.
Dr. Molly Cooke, on facing...
My Second Pandemic
It might have been the word ‘pandemic’.
It might have been ‘only certain people will get this virus, not me’.
It might have been stories of meal deliveries left on porches, or recommendations that counters and doorknobs be wiped down with disinfectants.
It might have been a Republican president indifferent at best to the suffering of those whose lives he did not consider important.
It might have been the blame, the pointing fingers, the demonizing.
It might have been the insistence of many people to carry on their lives as usual, no matter...
Remembering Absent Friends
Yesterday was Halloween, when children and adults dress in costume, many as ghosts and skeletons. We sit in cemeteries at night, waiting for ghostly apparitions, or maybe just the Great Pumpkin.
Today is All Saints’ Day, when we remember the saints and their importance in church tradition.
Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day, when we reflect on the lives of those we loved.
Day of the Dead.
Guy Fawkes Day.
Lots of loss for one week, isn’t it?
Once again, I’m sharing information on a unique festival taking place the first week of November in Scotland: To Absent Friends.
Scotland has a tradition of storytelling, especially at this time of the year....
When Friend Grief Hits Home
Betsy Ebeling was a suburban Chicago woman whose death was noted because of who her best friend was: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though the obituary made clear that she was loved and admired by everyone who met her, the friendship that began in 6th grade was the one that defined her in the public eye.
A few hours after this story broke, while I was making dinner, my phone chimed with an incoming text message. It was from one of my oldest and dearest friends. The text was about his health and was not good news.
The details are not...
Friend Grief and Pride
This year was a special one: the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Some call it a riot, though there’s some debate about whether the resistance to yet another police raid at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969 fit that definition. But it was momentous.
It was a time when being arrested in a raid at a gay bar meant not only legal hassles, but the likely prospect of your name being reported in the local paper the following day. And since you were most certainly closeted at the time, that publicity could get you fired, evicted or worse.
The LGBT community has come a long way, so there was a lot to celebrate at Pride parades around the world last...
Another Celebrity Friend Dies
When David Bowie and Prince died, the tributes went on for months. People shared their favorite songs and what the music meant to them. Some even changed their avatars, in honor. I suppose that was understandable: Bowie and Prince were superstars, well-known around the world, with long, ground-breaking careers. So it surprised me this week when the death of a lesser star provoked almost equally strong sentiments.
Peter Tork was part of a 1966 phenomenon: The Monkees....
In Memoriam
My mother died in March, but I’m not alone in experiencing that kind of grief this year.
There was Peter’s father and Sandra’s mother. John’s mother and Sarah’s mother. Jackie’s father and Fred’s mother. Kathy’s cousin and mother both died within two weeks time.
My husband is...
