Dear Susu #15: Heartbroken Friend

"How do I move on?"

Welcome to Dear Susu, my advice column where I answer your questions about life and writing and everything in between. In this month’s installment, I respond to “Heartbroken Friend,” who survived cancer, then lost a close friend, and doesn’t know how to move on. I’d love to hear your thoughts, your reactions, and your stories of lost friends in the comments section.

Melissa Carroll, Untitled I & II (2014)

Dear Susu,

I beat cancer over a year ago, but I lost my arm. I was still grieving my arm when one of my closest friends of over twelve years suddenly died. His loss made me forget about my every pain. I can endure anything, I could fight the whole world, but this is very hard. 

It’s been six months, and I am not able to accept that he’s not here and I’ll never see him again. I post his pictures on my social media accounts constantly as if he is still here because I believe if we stop talking about him, we will forget him. 

Nobody talks about how it feels when we lose a friend. I don’t know what I should do. I don’t know how to move on with his memories instead of him.

Lots of love,

Heartbroken Friend

Dear Heartbroken Friend,

My heart aches reading your letter. I sympathize and identify with so much of what you’re feeling—with the compounding losses, and how they disorient you, and how you just want to move on, but grief has other plans. The lines from my memoir Between Two Kingdoms that people write to me about the most are these: “Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten.” I understand the impulse—to will yourself to remember.

I had never lost someone close to me until my first summer in the hospital. It was 2011, I was 22, and I had just been diagnosed with leukemia. Even though I was facing a life-threatening illness, I had not yet lost my faith in that old truism that everything would be okay. I was bolstered by youthful optimism and naïveté, Heartbroken Friend, and I did my best to make the best of the circumstances. On my first day in the cancer ward, I told my parents it felt like I’d just moved into my freshman dorm—and while I didn’t tackle the world lit syllabus I’d brought with me (no joke, I had packed War and Peace), I did make the kind of friendships forged in that peculiar crucible of experience.

I became close with two people in particular: Dennis and Yehya. Both were more than a decade older than me, but it felt like we were college roommates. We did our daily laps together, lugging our IV poles down fluorescent-lit hallways, and commiserated over bad hospital food. After our trays arrived with the food still frozen several times, Dennis decided to go on a hunger strike—though a couple days in, I got worried about the health implications and had delivered the most delicious chocolate milkshake in Manhattan, which quickly brought it to an end.

When I turned 23 that July, Yehya, who was Algerian and with whom I bonded over our North African heritage, had his wife go down and get me a painted plaque from the gift shop that said, “I’m such a big YOU fan!” But it wasn’t only me—Yehya was the walking embodiment of that plaque to everyone, from the custodial staff to the nurses to our fellow patients. When Yehya’s condition worsened and he was moved to a private room, he wept with gratitude because it had the most wonderful view of Central Park. Later, when I was in medical isolation, Yehya would come to my room, crack the door, give me a thumbs-up, and tell me Allah had my back. These two friends brought humor, adventure, and camaraderie into a space where there was so little of that. They made the whole thing bearable.

At the end of the summer, after tests showed the standard chemotherapy treatments weren’t working for me, my doctors sent me home to rest and gain strength in preparation for a clinical trial. I exchanged contact information with both Dennis and Yehya, but I was rehospitalized before I got a chance to reach out. As soon as I got settled, I asked my nurse how they were doing and when I could see them. She hesitated, then told me that they both had died.

Did you have tools for dealing with loss before your illness, Heartbroken Friend? And your dear friend’s death? I can tell you that mine were scant. I didn’t know what to do in the aftermath. I didn’t have rituals or healthy outlets. I don’t even think I was in therapy.

Soon after, I had my first panic attack, brought on by three intertwined but slightly different feelings. One was a sudden and profound understanding of how mortal we are. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Dennis or Yehya could die, and since they could die and I wasn’t any less sick than them, I could die. Close behind that was my first wave of survivor’s guilt—that gnawing question of why them and not me?

And the third feeling was gutting sadness that these incredibly funny, loving, vibrant humans were gone—but gone where? They were so good, and it seemed unspeakably unfair that such cruelty could befall them. With Yehya, who was generous and kind and religiously devout, who with his beautiful wife had worked so hard to establish a new life in a new country, I felt myself lose trust in the rhyme and reason of the universe. With Dennis, I felt a different kind of sorrow. That summer I was in the hospital with him, he’d had no visitors. He died alone, and that haunted me.

It took me a long time to tease all of this out, Heartbroken Friend. At the time, I was burying one grief as soon as the next arrived, sealing them off as if in catacombs. After Yehya and Dennis, it was my friend Anjali, whom I also met in treatment. Anjali had the same disease as me and the same doctor and also underwent a bone marrow transplant around the same time I did. She didn’t have any family, and when I learned her transplant had failed and there was no further treatment available, I stepped in as her caregiver. In my own paltry way, I was trying to right the wrong of Dennis’s final days. I deeply believed that no one should have to face death alone.

I was also channeling my grief into action. Even though it was unhealthy in certain ways—thinking I could forestall the pain and suffering of the world by running from one person’s hospital bed to the next, holding their hands as they endured the unendurable, running myself ragged in the process—there was a kind of hope in being of service. But it also took a toll. Long after her death, Anjali’s isolation stayed with me. Her pain stayed with me. The rage on her face when I finally called an ambulance to move her to inpatient hospice stayed with me. Her fear stayed with me.

I bring all of this up, not because I love taking trips down Sad Memory Lane, but because there’s a very particular thing that happens when you accrue so many losses. They start to feel overwhelming, and it’s easier to stuff them down or seal them off or otherwise ignore them. This is especially true with losses that aren’t as stark as death. Death has a way of shuttling everything else into the background. There may even be some relief in overlooking the lesser losses—in forgetting or minimizing your own sorrows, in telling yourself, “My loss is nothing compared to that bigger loss.”

But that’s not how grief works in the mind or the body. Over the nearly four years I spent in treatment, I lost count of the funerals of fellow patients I attended. Sometime after Anjali died, around the time another cancer comrade, my friend Melissa Carroll died, I came across a book called Unattended Sorrow, by Stephen Levine, a grief counselor. By that point, I’d been sealing off parts of my grief for a long time, both the larger losses and the relatively smaller ones, like the loss of my health and my identity and the possibility of motherhood as I understood it. But as Levine says, “Feelings of loss don’t go away; they go deeper.” Untended, they burrow down and come out in other ways—for example, as insomnia or anger or depression.

And that happened to me. In the year after I left treatment, I found myself in a deep well of depression, which was then compounded by a deep sense of shame. I had survived. Shouldn’t I be happy and grateful? I desperately wanted to honor my friends who hadn’t gotten that second chance at life by living mine fully, but I just couldn’t fight my way through. I couldn’t muscle my way to the happy, healthy, carpe diem existence I thought was on the other side of survival—at least not without tending to the sorrows first.

The way I did that was by beginning to examine them. I sat with them, and I wrote about them in my journal, teasing out the various threads and the more nuanced feelings behind the big, blinding ones. I also began designing my own rituals that made space for and honored the losses—from traveling to India to spread a vial of Melissa’s ashes at her favorite site to embarking on a 15,000-mile cross-country road trip with my beloved pup Oscar. 

Heartbroken, you say you don’t know how to move on without your friend. I would say you can’t—that moving on is a myth. We are marked forever by our losses, and while we can’t move on, we can move forward with them. In the last year and a half, since I learned of my relapse, I have missed my friends in an even more acute way, but I have tried to honor each by learning from them. With Melissa, it’s with watercolors. With every painting I make, I feel not just the sadness of losing her, but also the joy of remembrance and a deep well of gratitude to her for showing me a new way of coping.

With my late friend, the poet Max Ritvo, it’s through his words. I have always felt deep regret for not showing up for him at the end of his life in the way that I wanted—I just couldn’t bear the thought of losing him too. But this year, I got a chance to make a kind of amends. His teacher, the poet and playwright Sarah Ruhl, staged a play based on their correspondence, called Letters from Max, and she asked me to attend and read some of his poems. At the time, I was in a raw and low-down place: only one year out from my second bone marrow transplant, beginning to feel better physically, which meant the emotional and psychological toll had plenty of space to bubble up and seethe. The play broke me open, and at the end, all I wanted to do was leave the theater immediately and go nurse my grief in private. Instead, I stood on that stage more vulnerably than I’ve stood on any stage in my life, and I sat with that sadness, and though I hate crying in front of people, I wept as I read Max’s poems. Though it was painful, it was also healing.

You say no one talks about what it feels like to lose a friend—and you’re right. The idea of chosen family is gaining social currency, but we still don’t give friendships the privileged position we give to our biological or legal family. We expect people to get on with it; we find it discomfiting when people cling to that grief for too long. (That happens with other forms of loss too, of course, but I think it’s especially true of friendship.) So it makes sense to me that you want to post about your friend, to insist on remembering him in a public way.

But in a space as reductive and often superficial as social media, it’s really hard to convey the full breadth and depth of what someone meant to you. It’s also hard for people to respond in a way that feels fitting or somehow meaningful. And for me, the most comfort I’ve found is not through social media memorials, but in conversation with people who have suffered their own enormous, world-shattering losses, who understand the layers, who have the language and willingness to talk about it.

For a long time, I resisted the grief and loss groups that social workers were always suggesting to me. I thought that there was no way a stranger could help. But I promise you, strangers have a way of quickly becoming friends. If you don’t know anyone who has experienced anything like what you’re going through, I highly recommend finding something like The Dinner Party, which creates space for young people to grieve in community.

The last thing I want to encourage you to do, Heartbroken Friend, is to tend to yourself—to tend to those first losses with as much time and compassion and care as you tend to the loss of your friend, without sorting them into any kind of hierarchy. I believe you when you say you can endure anything, that you can fight the whole world. But you don’t have to meet each day with fight-the-whole-world energy. You don’t always have to be tough. You can be soft, you can be tender. You can direct your gaze to honoring your own needs, your own sorrows and joys. As impossible as it seems right now, you can even go to a party and you can laugh without forgetting your friend.

In solidarity and love,

Susu

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