Things That Cannot Be Fixed: A Candlelight Vigil on Grief, Art, and Showing Up

Reimagine has been holding Candlelight Vigils since March 2020, beginning in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, as a way to make somewhere for grief to go. On August 5 we gathered again, this time around a question almost everyone has been on both sides of and almost nobody feels good about: what do you actually say to a person whose life has broken open?

We were joined by Emily Rapp Black, whose new book is I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling, and Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician and the author of That Good Night. The vocalist Vuyo Sotashe and the pianist Chris Pattishall held the evening in music. We lit candles, sat in silence for thirty seconds while each of us breathed a wish for a stranger, and then talked for an hour and a half.

This is what unfolded.

The Person Nobody Wants to Be

Emily has been, for years now, the person other people are relieved not to be. Her son died of Tay-Sachs disease when he was three.

“It’s alienating,” she said, “and you feel like you’ve got, like, grief COVID or something. Like, you’re gonna breathe on someone, and they’re also gonna have a tragedy. And so they say things like, well, I’ve been told this many times, I’m so glad I’m not you. Or, wow, this really makes me think my life is great. And I’m like, well, you don’t really know anything about my life.”

Then, without pausing, she refused the pity the sentence invites: “This is definitely the most important, terrible, brutal, beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me. But it’s also not the only thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. And so, if you were in my life, you wouldn’t want to die, because there would be things to live for.”

That is where the book title comes from, and it is deliberately barbed. When people ask her what not to say to someone who is grieving, she points at her own cover. “This title. Not this. Don’t say that. It’s not helpful, and it’s also inaccurate.”

Sunita picked up the thread from the book’s epigraph, a Katie Ford poem she had read aloud earlier in the evening. The instinct the poem names is not me, not me. It is a delusion, she said, and a common one. Nobody gets through a life without loss.

Things That Cannot Be Fixed

The evening kept returning to one diagnosis: people fail the grieving not out of cruelty but out of a compulsion to solve.

“Mortality cannot be fixed, because it’s not something to fix,” Emily said. “You can’t have one without the other, and I think it’s hard for people to understand that when they’re faced with a grieving person, because what we want to do is help. But what we need to do is hold the space and allow them to just do what they need to do, whatever that is, and not freak out while they’re doing it.”

Help, or hold. The distinction ran under everything that followed.

Sunita took it somewhere harder. What we are facing, she said, is “a real poverty of language around grief. Because there’s so many things that are embodied, that are almost impossible to put into words.” In older cultures there were rituals whose whole purpose was to let people weep in company. We took those away and left people reaching for sentences instead. “We’re looking for words when words can’t suffice.”

The Same Flawed Script

Sunita’s sharpest observation of the night came from inside her own profession.

“We have this hugely unhelpful language in our culture. Time heals all wounds. You’ll get over it eventually. And I’ve heard people say this to each other in family meetings. I’ve heard nurses say this to patients, I’ve heard doctors say this to patients. It’s really astonishing that we haven’t moved on from much of that, and yet these kind of sentimental Hallmark sorts of things are the language we reach for. Just like the tale of self-sufficiency, and like the cowboy looking at the shimmering horizon with nobody around him but a horse.”

She traced it to something bigger than bedside manner. “It’s always remained curious to me that we’re all reading from the same flawed script. It’s the same script that has people coming to me and saying, I’m a fighter, because there’s no better language to talk about what it means to be scared and sick, and maybe not wanting to get more treatment. These one-dimensional tropes are the thing we reach for in something as old and universal as grief.”

Bendable, Not Strong

Emily has no use for the words most often offered as comfort.

“The word resilience is misused often. It’s a synonym for strength, or a stand-in word, and it is analogous, but it’s not the same thing. Resilience is about being bendable. It’s about being weak, and being supported.”

Her image for it is a butterfly. You could tear one in half with a fingernail. Nobody would. And that same creature flies thousands of miles. Fragility and endurance are not opposites, and the grit script she was handed after her son died, the one about overcoming and getting back to work, did not do anything for her at all. So she went and found people who could say something else.

She was clear about what actually reached her. Not advice. A friend who called and screamed the word awful into the phone at various pitches, and sent a Danish every week. Another who texted, “How is your grief today? How is it tonight?”

And underneath it, something she named carefully: “The people who showed up for me showed up because, not that they wanted to help, but they wanted me to live, which is different.”

Art Freezes Time

Both writers came at creativity from the same direction.

“I think we make art out of a place of surrender,” Emily said, “and grief is a representative experience of the ultimate surrender. So art that comes from that space is usually really hot and heated and energetic and electric and necessary.” When you are that far in, there is no room left for overthinking. “You are just trying to put a frame around something that is so violently weird that you’re piecing together the frame just to try to contain it.”

Sunita’s version: art “gives the chaos an architecture.” A book, a painting, a song is evidence that someone has been where you are.

Emily teaches two exercises she offered to the room. Grief City is an imagined place you visit to be in relationship with someone who died. Today, what is the weather there, what are the buildings, who is in the street. It works whatever you believe happens after death. Five moments of rupture is faster and stranger: tip your head down and let the first five things fall out, then build the story of your life from those five. Some of them will seem unrelated. Trust them anyway. Her image is a tornado, which people who have been inside one say has a still, quiet centre from which you can see everything else spinning.

She was also honest about dosage. She writes ten minutes a day. “You don’t need to create for hours on end, and I actually think it can be hard to do that when you’re in an active state of grief, because what you’re getting in ten minutes is the rich chocolate cake, not the fluffy stuff.” She learned that limit the hard way, writing her way through the year of her son’s diagnosis in what she now suspects was hypergraphia. “I never want to be in that place again, but I was completely saved by the writing process.”

Then Vuyo Sotashe, before singing, arrived at the same idea from a different life. His grandmother had died recently, back home in South Africa.

“Art almost freezes time. Even though we need to bury things, it becomes a space where things that have impacted us live on. So you get to remember the goodness in these moments of frozen time. You capture your love, and your memory of that person, and set it to the cosmos, in a sense, which is what art does.”

Then he sang “Sylvia,” a love letter to a matriarch as she leaves her community, with Chris Pattishall at the piano. Nobody said anything for a while afterwards.

Keep Bringing the Casserole

So what do you actually do.

Emily’s answer is not a sentence. It is a behaviour, repeated past the point of comfort. “You show up and say, here I am. And I’m just gonna stay here, and I’m gonna keep checking in, I’m gonna keep showing up. And if the person is angry, or even if they don’t want it, keep showing up. Keep bringing the casserole, as my mom would say. Don’t worry about how you are going to sound, or what you’re going to say wrong. Just show up and look messed up, and be there, however you can.”

Sunita’s answer is to say the true thing out loud, including the awkward part. “I’m worried I’m gonna say the wrong thing. And I don’t want this to be about what I’m worried about. I want it to be about what you need. And it’s okay if you don’t know what you need. But I want you to know I’m here for you.”

Neither of them offered a way to do this well. Emily had already dispatched that idea earlier in the evening: there is no way to do it wrong, and no way to do it right. There is only the doing.

We ended as we always do, extinguishing the candles and releasing the light back out. Sunita left the room with a line she borrowed from David Foster Wallace, and it is as good a place to stop as any: every love story is a ghost story. Embedded in everything we hold dear is the reality of loss. “It’s almost like the price we pay for loving somebody. But what a price to pay, for the greatest and most complicated of gifts.”

Our Candlelight Vigils are free and open to everyone, every month. Join the next one.