Two Lucky

When you’re grieving, any little thing can unravel you. All your senses are vulnerable. It can be a street sign, an old song, the touch of a man. Sometimes you know it’s coming, sometimes you don’t; either way, you try and pull yourself together. Stitch yourself up. Don’t make a scene, you say. Keep the drama inside.

The problem with keeping it inside, is that you rarely come back to it. You let life run on, occupy your days on the outside, happy - grateful, even - to anchor your thoughts on activities, errands that need to be done, not felt. At home, or at work, you arm yourself with lists, divide your time into sections of accomplishment. You tuck away your sadness like a flyaway strand of hair.

Much of what I’ve been doing since Rusty died has been exactly that. It’s not that I haven’t allowed myself to cry. I was, and continue to be proud of every single tear I give up to my love.

But after weeks and weeks of lying prostrate in your own pool of blubber, it gets a little too much. Emotional breakdowns are hard to endure. They drain the heck out of you. When you can’t seem to stop crying, it gets difficult even to breathe. You want to stop so you can get in a gasp of air. The day is just beginning; you want to shake it off, but here’s the problem: How do you shake off something when it’s coming from inside?

The quick answer is that you can’t. In trying to, I’ve ended up isolating my grief from myself. In trying to turn it into something separate from my existence, I’ve muddied my own attempts to heal.

Instead, I must make a map of my grief, to know its geography, understand its peaks and valleys. Acceptance can only come by allowing grief to become familiar - not to cling onto, but to hold gently. That is the first step to finding a path; it is my first step to becoming less afraid of this new world.

The English writer Daphne du Maurier, when her husband died, wrote:

“Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief from yourself. Little by little, just as the deaf, the blind, the handicapped develop with time an extra sense to balance disability, so the bereaved, the widowed, will find new strength, new vision, born of the very pain and loneliness which seem, at first, impossible to master.”

Little by little, I’m understanding the truth and necessity of her words. I’ve begun to pray, to meditate every morning when I wake up, and at night before I sleep.

When I close my eyes, I let my mind recall images of Rusty. I feel his skin, catch a whiff of his hair; there are times when I hear sobbing, only to realise seconds later that they are my own.

With each memory, I embrace it with all my heart. “Yes, I remember, I love you,” I say under my breath. I acknowledge it with a soft nod of my head, and let it pass. Sitting alone in my bedroom, I reach back into years of our life together.

When I next open my eyes, there is only a quiet stirring inside me. It’s been half an hour. My body feels lighter. For a while, my grief is at last silent, and at peace.

Concert review

Before I begin to address my newfound commitment to searching for inner peace, let me first pontificate on another aspect of this journey, one which I’ve started to think will be a valuable by-product of finding said peace: one’s inner fabulousness.

Last night, at the generosity and encouragement of Renee, Tami and Caroline, all good friends I met in college, I, along with what must have been half of gay New York, went to see Rufus Wainwright in concert at Central Park. The weather was dismal. It was one of those grey, wet New York days, the kind of day New Yorkers have learned the best thing to do is to just stay home, put on good bad TV and order in Chinese.

I was skeptical all evening. After two rather bland opening acts, Rufus was an hour late and I was losing my patience. So were the other hundreds of people who had risked their better judgment and had been waiting in the park even before the girls and I got there.

Umbrellas dripped on shoulders and already wet heads. Necks were strained; more and more people were lighting up. New York was not happy. Tami and I entertained ourselves with a quick trip to the food stand (the rain is a surprisingly tasty condiment to french fries - it adds to it a certain fresh, organic je ne sais quoi) but even that didn’t help.

We were all collectively getting progressively soggier. “Rufus had better ramp (Or did I hear tramp?) it up tonight for us,” I heard a man wail behind me. Even his voice sounded wet.

And right then, the magic began.

I’m happy to report that in the next two and a half sublime hours, Rufus exceeded all our expectations. He ramped and he tramped like he was the last Queen of New York. He was so fabulous he might as well have added his name next to the word in the dictionary.

The handsome waif kicked off the show with a colorful striped suit (”The whole band is dressed in stripes; it’s an homage to ‘Ah-ma-ree-ka,’” he slurred) and – after four costume changes - ended in drag with a tight black jacket, netted stockings, earrings, lipstick and heels a la Judy Garland.

He wooed the crowd with his characteristic offbeat humor (”I like the rain… it’s great… it means… basically… at some point we’ll all have something to drink…”) and disarming charm (”You guys have been great… You’ve been such troopers… Actually so have I,”) but most of all, he won everyone with his voice – that pining, reaching-for-the-galaxy quality of it – that so many of us have come to recognize as the sound of our hearts’ own soulful yearnings.

His fans were treated to familiar favorites such as “Beautiful Child,” “The Art Teacher,” and “14th Street.” Then, Rufus channeled Judy with “Foggy Day” and “Come On, Get Happy.”

Halfway through his repertoire of 21 songs, the rain changed. It took on a romantic, almost cinematic atmosphere, drawing Central Park into the stage itself and transforming the concert into an incredibly organic experience. I was thoroughly wet at this point, but I no longer cared.

I could smell the trees, feel the grass beneath my feet. The wind carried his voice into my ear; I cried, and the rain washed away my tears. I felt broken but renewed; sad and happy.

Throughout it all, I couldn’t help but think of Rusty. I searched in my memory for the feel of his arm around the small of my back. I wondered if he could hear what I was hearing, feel what I was feeling. I couldn’t help but think of his face, and I was surprised to see him smiling.

Then, I felt arms close around me from behind. In the rain, my girls – Renee, Tami and Caroline – and me hugged and swayed with Rufus’ voice and Rusty’s smile.

When the concert ended, I went home and had a thought: Finding one’s sense of inner peace may not be that different from releasing one’s inner fabulousness.

It’s about finding balance within your internal life, and then applying that balance to your life on the outside. That application is confident, secure and unapologetic, since its expression is the end result of a cohesive, harmonious internal agreement with oneself.

That is why I am going to devote my emotional time to finding inner peace. I need it so that I can begin to accept Rusty’s death; to hold that truth in my hands, and to let it go. I want to stop running. I want to face the world with a new, balanced sense of self. Even when at times that self may be dolled up in lipstick and heels.

Part of accepting what life hurls (or has hurled) at you is to locate a small space inside you where you can exist in a state of balance so calm it can only be described as grace.

This space can be very hard to find, and even harder to exist in. It is, as I’ve learned, the first impression of tranquility, the first true mirror to your soul.

In the past few months, I’ve spent so much time and money trying to feel, to appear normal that I’ve completely disregarded one pivotal aspect of making myself feel better: inner peace.

I have never been a religious person. Since Rusty was diagnosed, in the years by his side through chemotherapy, I’ve become adept at praying to many different gods, but the salvation I sought was never for myself. I prayed for Rusty to be okay, for him to survive this calamity, for a reprieve from all this fear, from the seemingly endless march from hospital to hospital, but not once did I pray for me to survive. 

I wasn’t dying. Of course I would continue to live should Rusty die. But I didn’t anticipate that living could be so difficult.  

As I’ve learned in the last few months, the outward expression of one’s daily busyness has very little to do with the truth of one’s mental and emotional health. I stupidly ignored what should have been obvious: That to heal internally, I would have to start from the inside. All my life I’ve been taught to be efficient, to be proactive and to manage my problems with cool aplomb; after all, isn’t productivity the best test of a person’s ability to grieve efficiently?

It seems daunting, if not impossible, to search for inner peace in the wake of your lover’s death, but I’ve come to understand that peace is unequivocally necessary, and fundamental for a person to truly honor the dead. That his death does not blind me to the love and beauty of life; in fact, it should increase my awareness of it, and give me the courage to seek it. I was lucky to have found Rusty; his life was a gift to me, and that gift, like his love, is immutable, even in death.

Searching for inner peace, I think, must begin in loving yourself. I don’t mean assuaging the ego in the form of buying new clothes, or treating yourself to nice meals in fancy restaurants (which is what I’ve been doing, though it hasn’t hurt). It’s not a realisation you can purchase from a store; it’s something more basic, more intrinsic, essential. Yet for all its simplicity, it’s also something you have to work on.

It requires effort, reflection, discipline. It requires that you struggle everyday with the one entity you know to be most strenuous to overcome: Yourself.

Since Rusty died, I’ve had only two moments of complete inner tranquility. The first happened in the morning of his burial in Virginia. I was sleeping in one of the beds at the family farm, and awoke to the song of birds and the cool, warbling brook outside my bedroom. It was a week after he had died, and peace had found me unexpectedly in an unguarded moment. 

The second happened about a month later, outside on the fire escape of our New York apartment. It was the cusp of morning, and again, I wasn’t expecting it. I had stayed up all night, and decided to climb out my window to watch the city stir in its sleep.

Each time, it was as if a deeper, more reasonable version of myself was trying to tell me I was going to be okay. But each time, I was too caught up in my own obsessive (selfish?) grief to recognise its value and what it was trying to tell me.

I’ve learned that I must now seek that voice inside me, and strengthen those moments into a familiar state of well-being. To accomplish that, I must first commit to making peace with Rusty’s death, and accept the cool violence with which he was taken from me. 

In so doing, I let go of my anger, my sense of injustice, my need to cling onto my grief.

In so doing, I can begin to recover myself, to pull myself out of this cycle of guilt, and finally - to forgive myself for living.

“The search for inner peace” is a concept that sounds completely vague (thus useless) to my ”big-city” Asian cultural heritage. My instinct is to covet what can be seen, assessed, put on a resume for the world (my family) to approve of. Luckily for me, that is not the only reality I know. Living in New York changed that. And even luckier for me, I know exactly where to start.

When Rusty died, in that instant, on the hospital bed, all I felt was a deepening hollow. Seconds later, a dam broke and the hollow was filled with an anguish so profound I fell to the floor shaking. Minutes later, I hunched over and held him in my arms. My hands gripped his body, his face alive one minute, lifeless the next, desperate to jerk him back to me. I didn’t want to let go.

Eventually I did, and a different journey began for me. In the preceding months I’ve done what I thought, felt I needed to do to get over Rusty’s premature death.

In the first month I was all efficiency: I took charge of Rusty’s funeral is his hometown in Loudoun County, Virginia; I organised the memorial service and reception in New York; I packed and dumped, and hoped the clearing of his physical objects would lead to a clearing of my emotional debris - the aftermath of a traumatic epilogue.

In the second month, I let my grief develop into full-length motion picture where I was the star, and the script a monologue of my sadness and isolation from the world. My head whizzed from thinking, obsessing from inside an emotional lockbox. My body whirred, buzzing with a lightness that only came from too little food and even less sleep. My heart, in its desperate loneliness, night after night sought out drunken fulfilment with drunk, faceless men in an attempt to replace what it had lost.

Nothing I’ve done has really helped me on this winding road. Part of this is because I think I’ve been entirely mistaken about where I actually want this road to take me.

At first, I clung to my grief as my only connection to Rusty. Grief was the one true expression of my love. “Moving on,” seemed impossible, if not irresponsible. They were two little, dirty words that would diminish the memory of our love, tarnish the purity of my pain, trivialise what I, what we, had gone through together as warriors against this unrelenting cancer.

At the height of my depression, however, all I wanted was to be able to move on. Life became the subsequent, more organic expression of that love, and so in the third month I busied myself with life, hoping that my now more conscious (and more conscientious) act of living would somehow prod my emotional self to move along with me.

It is only now, a subway ride ago, walking on 19th St in Chelsea in the summer heat, midway through my blueberry white tea, midway in the trenches of reaching the fourth month, that I realised I had missed a pivotal step going from emotional wreckage to embodying all the signs of a healthy, high-functioning individual.

I haven’t accepted what had happened. I still hadn’t let go.

Acceptance is a tricky devil. It can happen in a second, or it can take decades just to figure out what exactly you’re trying to accept. I don’t know if I’ve accepted Rusty’s death, and all that’s happened in the months and years leading up to it; I don’t know how long this step will take to reach, and complete; but I know, and I know it simply and absolutely, that at this moment, I’ve accomplished the first, most crucial act of acceptance: I understand.

In the past week I’ve had many recurrent dreams of Rusty. I don’t remember most of them, the specifics, the where the why I forget; it is the emotion I feel - my loss, our loss - I feel the strongest. Yet it is also the most evanescent, like a whiff of his scent in the apartment. It fades the harder I try to capture it.

In my young life I have two great love affairs. One is Rusty; the other is this city. In a way New York will always be the backdrop of my life. Here I found myself. Here I found Rusty. Now Rusty’s gone, and soon I will be too from here. This apartment, this life - I can’t help but wonder if my New York story will pick up again after I leave it. The city will still be here in five years, but when and if I come back to it, will it still be the same? Will I still be the same?

Change is a curious act of life. We spend so much time trying to control what happens to us - where we live, the work we do, the men and women we date - but more often than not, the real, the most difficult changes are the ones that come at us from out of the blue. It’s hard enough that we all have to try and navigate through life without a road map; we try and watch our step, but there is the inevitable wrong turn, or a sudden deadend that makes this journey so unwieldy. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have a traveling partner to help you find your way. You can even start over. But sometimes you don’t, and you can’t.

Despite all our effort, Rusty and I fell short on a future. I’ve lost him forever, and the life we envisioned for ourselves will never come to be. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel this ache, this ghost inside me. The change is irrevocable.

And yet I am sure this is neither a wrong turn, nor a deadend. I have felt lost, but only in moments of weakness. The challenge is to keep moving forward. Though the road ahead is unmarked territory, I am unequivocal I was on the right path, and continue to be. After all, in place of my loss Rusty has left me a beautiful legacy of love - one born of the same effort, and though he isn’t with me anymore, his love is the only road map I will ever need.

It’s taken me a month to find my way back to this place. In this time, I’ve lost myself again and again. Even now, I wonder if I’m all here, if I’m present.

I started on this new journey wanting to be strong, wanting to be able. And for a while I thought I was, until I learned that there’s actually nothing I can physically do to prove to myself that I’m okay.

I can sleep, I eat. I do the laundry, sweep the floor - all these are representations of living, but prove nothing of my emotional stability. I now realise that recovery comes in two parts, and sometimes the two do not connect.

Some days the challenge is to recognise what I need. Some days it is to understand what I am doing. Since Rusty died, I have methodically sought men out for company. Sometimes for drinks, other times for sex. My loneliness was crushing, and like a man about to drown, the quality of company made little difference to me. I was desperate to find a replacement for Rusty. As we lay quiet in the dark, it was easy to make believe it was him.

Strength, courage, and determination. These are words Rusty left me, words that have bolstered our fight against his cancer, words that I’ve willed myself to demonstrate in these past months. I have been strong for the funeral, for the memorial service, for the weeks that took to take care of his estate, but I really haven’t since then.

Truth be told, I’ve had no words. I’ve let time chip away at myself. I’ve let my grief fester. And isn’t that how it’s done.

There are timelines that loom. Fall will soon be here. The lease to our apartment will be up in November. I begin work at the end of the year. I’m at a point where I can now see comfort in these lines, like lifelines, structuring time so my days will begin to make sense again. 

I know I will be able to work. I am even looking forward to it. By that time I will be ready to let go of all this. By that time my grief, I hope, will require less thoughtfulness, less scrutiny. With any luck, it will be like an old friend.