On communication, professional and otherwise.
I hate Panera Bread because they don't serve beer, and when I'm having lunch between two travel soccer games in Elgin or Rockford or Crown Point, I want beer.
Also, I deserve beer.
And in conclusion, I will have beer.
All the kids on Scout's travel soccer team know this, because I tell them so.
But what these young fools don't understand, because none of them have ever been in a hospital, is this:
Originally posted in a few years ago. Posted again, for the people who lost this guy.
***
What do I know about grief? I know what everyone knows about it. And I've had a chance to see it lately, at close range and with sufficient remove.
Grief should be called sadness-induced insanity.
When you're grieving, every decision you make, you'll second-guess later, muttering, "What in the world was I thinking?"
You will walk into a convenience store with a porcelain coffee cup in your hand.
You will nearly get hit by cars, because your world has been so spectacularly destroyed that you can't believe everyone in Chicago doesn't know to stay out of your way. They didn't know the Hindenburg exploded? Have they been living under a rock?
Grief might also be called wisdom.
It's in grief that some acquaintances become your friends and your friends become your family, because you have been too distracted to sort those things out as you went along.
My college roommate became my best friend one afternoon in the basement of our house shortly after my mother died, by shooting fifty games of pool with me and asking me one hundred questions about what it feels like to have your mother die.
That very same week, it must have been, my girlfriend's mother became a mother of mine (and my mother-in-law eventually) by filling her wine glass all the way up, leaning back and asking me, "So, tell me about your mother."
(That was a good week!)
Grief might best be called God.
Grief demands truth from those suffering from it and those hoping to help, and it exposes their egos and their lies, white and otherwise.
Grief reveals everyone's limits—including those of the dead—and in doing so gives everyone one perfect shining chance to forgive everyone for everything. (They should take it.)
Grief reduces Donald Trump to his properly plain status as Someone We Don't Love, and grief exalts Everyone We Do Love, dead and living, to where they belong—up in the sky!—for however long we remember to hold them there, together, despite their madness and limitations and clumsiness and bad timing and vulnerable points of integrity and unfair judgement that finds us wanting, too.
Wanting, and beloved.
People appreciated my rare post yesterday about taking a knee. "Thank you for writing this," was the median comment. "I've been feeling the same way."
And just like you, this week I went back to work.
Already this week with the help of my colleagues I:
Created a webinar to help my customers deal with the coronavirus.
Got up at 6:00 and read Scout 30 pages of The Great Gatsby, because God knows I can't help her with chem.
Went for a four-mile run while playing the Star Wars theme on my headphones, which was a very good move. Try it sometime.
While I was on the run, received a text from my colleague Benjamine, who lives in Arizona. Green shoots! (Great colleague!)
A cousin sent me a poem called "Good Bones," because he said my post reminded him of it.
A speechwriter pal wrote to ask if I was OK.
I'm OK.
The funeral is Friday, in Cleveland.
I'll be on my way tomorrow—to be with people who I love, who are terribly sad. Wise people, who know well what Maggie Smith knew, when she wrote in "Good Bones," that "The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children."
Several years ago I helped an army officer who was dying of cancer write a book, for his three children.
"When someone on the team got tired, we stopped and we took a knee to rest," said the late Lieutenant Colonel Mark Weber in Tell My Sons. "When someone on the team got tired, we stopped and we took a knee to rest. But we always got back up, and we never quit . . . never. Just like those young soldiers, we can all take a knee too, but if we don’t get back up and move out, we’re likely going to die or fall to pieces in that place."
We'll take a knee.
And we'll get back up.
And we'll move out.