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When In Doubt, Please Show Up

When In Doubt, Please Show Up

How many times has this happened in the last two months? I’m not sure, but every time it still catches me off guard.

In this particular moment, I was on a conference call when we took a break from the work and started talking about our summers. At some point, I just couldn’t keep pretending this summer was like any other. “My brother killed himself,” I said, “on the first day of July. So, summer changed after that.”

I owe Chuckie that, it seems — not to pretend he didn’t die, and not to lie about how it happened.

The discomfort was immediate. They were so sorry, they said. I know them to be good people, and I believe them. They knew about Chuckie, one of them added, but they weren’t sure if it was right to bring it up. I believe this, too. Before it was my family’s turn, when we were lucky, I didn’t always know what to do.

Now, I do. No luck involved.

There are people who are uncomfortable with death, period. They don’t know what to say, or what to do. Having held the hands of both of my parents as they took their last breath, I learned that one needn’t have the right words to do the right thing. For years after their deaths, I was apologizing to people who’d had a right to expect better of me in their times of grief.

Suicide is different. Even those accustomed to sending sympathy cards and attending wakes and funerals, stumble. What words could possibly help?

Well, here’s my short list of what doesn’t:

Don’t tell us survivors that if only our loved ones had prayed harder to Jesus, they would still be alive. My brother did pray, as did all of us who loved him, and still he died. We blame alcohol and depression, not him, and not Jesus.

Don’t immediately tell us that our loved ones are in a better place, unless you can show us the brochure. We are in shock. We can barely breathe. We don’t need you pretending to know more than we do.

Don’t ask us how our loved ones killed themselves. If you don’t understand why, please just stay away. This job is not for you.

I am not writing this column to make anyone feel bad or to chastise those who didn’t reach out. I am writing to affirm those who did, and to keep my silent promise to the thousands of survivors who, since my brother’s death, have shared their stories about life after a loved one has committed suicide.

So much grief hidden from public view, so much pain compounded by secrecy, shame and unwarranted guilt.

“For forty years, we’ve never talked about it,” one man wrote about his father’s suicide. “And for forty years, this hole in my heart hasn’t healed.”

Here’s what helps, they tell me.

Mention our loved ones, please, if you knew them. In texts and emails, or in person, say their names. Not a day goes by that we aren’t thinking about them. It helps to know you are, too.

If you have a story about them, please share it. How our loved ones died is the hardest thing about their deaths, but the least meaningful thing about them. Every new detail we hear about them breathes life into the people we want to remember.

If you don’t know what to say, say that. Much of the time, we don’t know what to say either. Even if we’ve feared, for years, that this day would come, most of us never really believed it would happen, which we only discover after it does.

As I write this, a tower of handwritten notes leans next to my computer, on the right. I will never get rid of these letters. A handwritten note is that extra mile we were raised to believe in. Seeing a person’s handwriting, and running our fingers across its loops and indentations, makes us feel less alone.

Again, no matter how you reach out, remember: If you don’t know what to say, just say that. We’ll know what you mean.

I am reminded of a text message from one of my former students, sent from hundreds of miles away.

“I don’t know what to say,” he wrote, “but you always told us it’s important to show up. So, this is me, showing up. I’m sorry you lost your brother.”

For just a moment, I fell apart, for all the right reasons.

 

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two non-fiction books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. Her novel, “Erietown,” will be published by Random House in Spring 2020. To find out more about Connie Schultz (schultz.connie@gmail.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Sheryl Sandberg Finds Her Way Back

Sheryl Sandberg Finds Her Way Back

Like so many people, my past 30 days have been full of the usual mishmash that makes life so crazy normal.

I wrote two letters to my 7-year-old grandson, covered a peace march through the streets of Cleveland and cut dog hair out of the vacuum roller. I watched LeBron lead the Cleveland Cavaliers into the NBA Finals, cooked a few dinners from scratch and fought tears the first time I saw my beloved friend smiling after major surgery that saved her life. I planted basil, scheduled a haircut and giggled as my husband drove us home with a car full of mandevilla and a dog who acted as if it were perfectly normal to be surrounded by vines in full bloom.

In those same 30 days, Sheryl Sandberg was clawing through the fog of a widow’s grief. One moment her husband, David Goldberg, was exercising. The next moment he had collapsed on the floor. He was 47 and the father of their two young children. Even if we know nothing else about them, we can comprehend the magnitude of this loss. But only if we dare.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of the best-selling book Lean In, which spawned a movement. On Wednesday, at the end of sheloshim, a Jewish rite that marks the end of 30 days of religious mourning for a spouse, Sandberg posted on her Facebook page an essay about what this loss has done to her. It is as raw as it is hopeful, and if you’re on Facebook, you’ve most likely seen a link to it. When I began to write this Wednesday afternoon, nearly 76,000 had already shared it, and numerous news organizations had linked to it, too. Twenty minutes later, that number had climbed to nearly 85,000.

I’m drawing attention to Sandberg’s essay in case you aren’t on Facebook or are afraid to read it. I understand that fear; believe me. We’re talking about to-the-bone grief. Most of us want to avoid feeling any part of that for as long as we can.

“I have lived thirty years in these thirty days,” Sandberg wrote. “I am thirty years sadder. I feel like I am thirty years wiser.”

She offered glimpses into what her life has been like in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. Those who love her stepped up fast for this woman used to being in charge but paralyzed with grief. “They planned,” she wrote. “They arranged. They told me where to sit and reminded me to eat.”

She attended a parents’ night at her children’s school but averted the eyes of others. “I looked down the entire time so no one could catch my eye for fear of breaking down. I hope they understood.” She encouraged her closest colleagues, their faces full of fear, to ask their questions and share how they feel.

A hundred people could read Sheryl Sandberg’s essay and find a hundred different reasons to grab the arms of their chairs and try to remember to breathe. For me, it was this passage:

I have gained a more profound understanding of what it is to be a mother, both through the depth of the agony I feel when my children scream and cry and from the connection my mother has to my pain. She has tried to fill the empty space in my bed, holding me each night until I cry myself to sleep. She has fought to hold back her own tears to make room for mine. She has explained to me that the anguish I am feeling is both my own and my children’s, and I understood that she was right as I saw the pain in her own eyes.

I’m not a Buddhist, but I have long admired the teachings that emphasize the value of contemplating our deaths to fully experience the gift of our lives. After I first read Sandberg’s essay, I said a prayer for her and her family. Selfishly, my mind then raced to how differently I had spent my previous 30 days.

One person’s darkest days are another person’s ordinary jumble of life. This is a fact of grief, as immutable as it is confounding. Live long enough and each of us has that moment, those moments, when we look around in shock at the rest of the world, which just keeps on moving.

Without a hint of bitterness, Sheryl Sandberg is warning us to take it all in while we still can.

—

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including …and His Lovely Wife, which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. 

Photo via Sheryl Sandberg/Facebook

I Like The Real Jackie

Finally, we can hear — in her own voice, in her own words — what it was like to be Jackie Kennedy in the wake of unspeakable grief.

What a bold and generous gift to the American people.

What an unsettling development for those who want to cling to an earlier, easier version of one of America’s most memorable first ladies.

Four months after her husband’s violent death, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to record more than eight hours of interviews about her life with John F. Kennedy.

The recordings were sealed in a vault for nearly 50 years.

This month, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, released the unedited conversations, on CDs and in book form, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency.

Until now, the persistent narrative about first lady Jackie Kennedy has cast her as a whispery waft of eye candy, with impeccable taste in fashion and design and a sideshow talent for foreign languages.

Now, with the release of these recordings, some want to recast her as a shrew.

We have such demanding expectations of the women we will never be.

The New York Times got an early grab at the recordings before the official release last Wednesday. That single story, published last Monday, included snippets of her conversation. This was enough to trigger apoplexy.

Hours of reflection by a 34-year-old widow have been reduced to sound bites of bad behavior. Many of the early verdicts, rendered without making the effort to listen to the tapes or read the transcripts, are scornful.

Repeatedly, Jackie is criticized for finding no fault with her husband, whose assassination she witnessed only four months earlier. Numerous stories recount her sniping at Martin Luther King Jr., delivered in the wake of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s questionable claims to her and Bobby Kennedy that the civil rights activist spoke disdainfully about JFK’s funeral.

Other frequent mentions: Jackie called Indira Gandhi “a bitter prune” and Charles de Gaulle an “egomaniac.” She declared women unfit for politics, too.

Echoing many who rushed to uninformed judgment, the New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote, “So far in these tapes, Jackie doesn’t sound all that nice.”

It is a long-held tradition in American journalism to measure political wives by their usefulness to their husbands’ ambitions. We also tend to depict politicians as either heroes or charlatans, but versions of both often reside in the same human being. In politics, even the most principled philosopher must perform at the circus. The wife is a smiling sidekick.

The supposed shock over Jackie’s less-than-Stepford responses to Schlesinger’s often probing questions reflects a stubborn commitment to the stereotype. As a columnist married to a U.S. senator, I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised, that in 2011 we still struggle so with the notion that a politician’s wife might have opinions of her own, and that not all of them are gracious.

I am also grateful to Jackie Kennedy, and her daughter, for this attempt to whittle away at one of the most enduring icons of impossible standards. What a relief to discover that she was as human as the rest of us.

Jackie Kennedy was smart and in love with her husband, despite his deep flaws. She was also capable of making withering observations about the people trying to hold sway in his life. She sounds like many bright women I know who are married to powerful men. I laughed out loud when she described how some cabinet members and senators never stop talking about themselves.

She is far more nuanced than the quick jabs going viral on the Internet. One of her opinions — that women are not suited for politics — has been quoted out of context. Schlesinger asked about her husband’s efforts to avoid permanent grudges, quoting the adage that, in politics, “there are no permanent friendships or alliances, there are only permanent interests.”

Jackie’s full response, as transcribed in the book:

“Yeah, but he never got — I mean, I’d get terribly emotional about anyone, whether it was a politician or a newspaper person who would be unfair, but he always treated it so objectively, as if they were people on a chess board — which is right. I mean, how could you if you — if he’d gotten so mad at all these people, then you may need to work with them again later. So, it’s the only way to be effective — which is one reason I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.”

Surely, we disagree today with her conclusions, but her broader point — that women tend to take personally the attacks on those we love — still resonates.

Caroline Kennedy knew that her mother’s opinions would spark furious debate.

As she wrote in her introduction to the book, “(I)f my mother had reviewed the transcripts, I have no doubt she would have made revisions. … It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh. … (H)er views evolved over time.”

Still, Caroline trusted the American public, if not the pundits, to appreciate this richer portrait of her mother.

“As her child, it has sometimes been hard for me to reconcile that most people can identify my mother instantly, but they really don’t know her at all. … (T)hey don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

Sounds like women living anonymously all around the world.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and essayist for Parade magazine.

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