The Road

There’s a thing I do when I’m working on a new project…I “collect” books and movies that are relevant, in some ways. For example, when I was writing The Empty Room, I read tons of memoirs that, even peripherally, mentioned sibling loss. Same for movies. They help me think and process. I have a list going for Finding Ted, too.

I used to read voraciously. Now, between kids and job and pandemic ADHD, I don’t get that much time for it, nor can I focus as well. So, reading time is precious. As is time to work on this project. So, when I found myself with an hour or so to spare before dinner one night, climbing into the bath, I knew I should be reading a book on my list. Instead, I grabbed The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

The Road has been sitting on my bedside table since this summer. I gave it to my older son, Henry, also a voracious reader, at some point, and when he had to write a summer essay for school based on a book, he lit on that one. I’d read it before, a long time ago, and couldn’t remember it very well, other than liking the writing.

More memorable was the fact that I’d gone to see the movie version. It was 2009 and Luke was something like two weeks old when it came out. I went to one of those showings you can bring babies to (I think they were called Cry Baby Shows…) so mothers with infants can actually get out and do something once in a while.

And may I say, The Road as a feature film to which you bring an infant is a distinctly odd choice (for the theater and for me). Then again this was NYC and the east village, and I was sleep deprived.

If you’re not familiar with the story it is, in a nutshell, post-apocalyptic and unremittingly bleak. Pretty sure I staggered out of the darkness of the theater, baby strapped to my chest, Twizzlers and half-drunk diet coke in hand, thinking WTF?

But I digress. When I picked it up just now, having poached it from Henry, what I was drawn to was a line, thought by the main character. He said: “If only my heart were stone.” And I thought, word, dude. (My kids would tell me that makes me “so eighties,” btw.)

That line really gave me pause. I know I said I wanted this project to be more about life than about death and grief (for once) but….

The man utters that line right after a particularly vulnerable conversation with his son. What it made me think was how much it sucks to be a survivor, the one left behind, to make your way in the world. That landscape in the book—ashen, barren, devoid of growth. It feels like the topology of grief.

And yet he still feels, and it’s kind of a curse. Plodding, day after day in that landscape, stuck with emotions like hope and vulnerability. In that way, The Road is a good metaphor for what we often refer to as the “grief journey.”

I’m not a fan of the word journey in this context. I don’t like words that become ubiquitous like that. They become pat and meaningless. (Someday I’ll write a post about “closure”…that one really bugs me.)

But….there is something to this concept of a journey, if you try and strip the pat-ness off of the concept.

Once, years ago, my friend Nuna had a party and, as just kind of a fun thing to do, she hired a psychic to give readings. The woman set up in her daughter’s bedroom, and at some point most of the attendees rotated back there for a reading. When it was my turn she tuned into the loss of a male in my life right away, and I confirmed that I had lost a brother.

I waited for her to say something next, but it was a long time coming. Her face got red, and she started to shake, and then she burst into tears. She said, “He says to tell you thank you, that you had the harder road, going on.”

It had honestly never occurred to me before. My brother had, after all, lost his life. That seemed like a rougher road. And the process of trying to hang on to it as long as he had had not been an easy one.

But she was right. Having to be the ones to go on, in the wake of the destruction, is freaking hard work. This road, this journey, of being a survivor, we do it because what choice do we have, really? How we do it, however, varies. That does involve choice. Lots of them, actually.

At some point in surviving my brother, about when I went to college, I started to make choices about how I’d live my life in the wake of his loss, and with the grief. I tried to make them in accordance with the way he had lived, which had been ingrained in me but which I had yet (and have yet, as this project attests to) spent a lot of time really parsing out.

I decided, quite consciously, that in order for his loss to not be in vain, I had to do something with it that would make meaning of it, transform what would otherwise just be horrific pain and the abyss he’d left behind into something different. Something positive.

I honestly didn’t know how or what I’d do. I just knew that was the right path.

Sometimes I succeed, lots of times I don’t. Sometimes, though I feel that that part of my life should always be informing how I live, I forget, and find myself lost in meaningless minutia. It’s hard to keep the big picture and the mundane aspects of life in alignment all the time.

I keep trying, though. That I did learn from him. Meanwhile, I will confess, there are times that I do wish, like The Road’s protagonist, that my heart was made of stone.