On Monday morning, right after I stepped into my office, I received a phone call from a coworker to tell me that Daryl, our friend and coworker and an extraordinary counselor, passed away in the early hours of the morning from leukemia. In moments of sadness and grief, the poem “Michiko Dead” by Jack Gilbert is always quick to come to my mind. In the poem, Gilbert describes the experience of grief using the extended metaphor of a man carrying a heavy box: he can adjust his grip on the box but can never set it down.
“He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest.”Gilbert describes a person’s solitary experience bearing grief with such pragmatism, absent of any semblance of sentimentality. In his grief, the subject of the poem does not draw the curtains closed nor pull the blankets over his head. He does not shut out the world to dwell in his sadness. Instead, he simply manages.
That Monday morning happened to be the first day of the new winter quarter, and most everyone at the college had plenty to manage beside sadness. My initial reaction was to want to set actually processing, actually feeling sadness aside and conduct myself in a business-as-usual fashion, tackling one right after another of the items on my to-do list. Using Gilbert’s metaphor, I wanted to leave that box of grief sitting right there on the ground alone and worry about what to do with it–how to carry it, where to move it–later, at a more convenient time that conveniently would never really come around. Sadness set aside, most any task I manage if I am to manage it at all is with an impressive degree of procrastination, and everything still left on my to-do list for the start of the quarter on the day the quarter was actually starting was a strong testament to this.
I took a deep breath and rested my head in my hands in my dark office, outside of which students buzzed about in the tutoring center logging into their accounts, printing off schedules, entering access codes for online courses, and rushing in and out on their way to and from classes. I have an impressive ability to stop myself from crying if I’m firm in my conviction to do so. In a similar way I can manage to not be ticklish so long as I can fully focus my mental energy on repeating the mantra “I’m not ticklish” in my head. But the technique breaks down when I’m caught off guard or by surprise.
As quickly as the tears came to my eyes, Gilbert’s poem came to mind. I’ve read that poem, referred to it, taught it, contemplated it countless times before. When I visualize the action Gilbert’s poem narrates, I often imagine the subject of the poem in a minimalist, stick-figure style, like a figure in a New Yorker sketch. All his tangible human qualities, his muscles and bones, his flesh and feelings condensed into simple black lines across the empty expanse of a white page. But this time, something in my mind offered up a revision, a fresh new rendering of the poem.
This time, I imagined the subject not as a stick-figure man but as a student walking into Daryl’s office, and I heard his voice, distinctly his voice, say:
“That box looks heavy and like it’s about to slip. Here, let me help you adjust your grip.”
In Gilbert’s poem, the man carries his grief alone, and he manages all right, but not without having to make the necessary adjustments to how he carries the load, shifting his grip to let the “different muscles take over.”
Even though the subject of Gilbert’s poem does manage to carry, to shift and adjust how he carries his grief on his own, most of us need to rely on others to help us manage our grief. This is especially true for many of our students who are trying to manage their own grief and trauma and hardship at the same time they are trying to manage their academics and full time jobs and families’ well-beings and livelihoods.
As a counselor, Daryl was great at recognizing when a student’s grip was slipping or strength was giving out. As a counselor, he knew he couldn’t carry their grief for them. But he could help them adjust their grip. And he seemed to know intuitively exactly what muscles or coping mechanisms needed a rest, and what different muscles could take over for awhile.
For some students who had been carrying their boxes with sadness and despair for too long, Daryl knew how to get humor and even laughter to step in and do some of the work.
For some students, self-blame needed to be swapped out for constructively directed anger.
For other students, anger needed to yield to empathy.
And for me that Monday morning, the stress and anxiety that wanted to ignore that box, to leave it set off to the side, that despite its ample conditioning to perform under pressure, wasn’t strong enough to even pick up the box in the first place let alone carry it, needed to step aside to let the sadness do its work to help me lift up and experience the weight of that box. So in quiet contemplation and remembrance there in the darkness of my office, I shifted the weight to make room for that sadness. And surprisingly, with it came gratitude, compassion, and that certain characteristic joy that accompanies but never overshadows the sadness of losing a loved one.
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