Objections
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October is a terrible time to do self-assessments. If I could wave one flag of protest inside the high walls of corporate America, this would be it. The first week of October at my job has already been filled with presentations about performance reviews; how to ask for feedback and to “leverage” working relationships, how to review our SMART goals and evaluate ourselves against our objectives. It’s an exercise that makes me roll my eyes only a little when it first appears early in January and then a little more in July when it resurfaces in the mandated mid-year reviews. By October my hackles are fully raised and I respond snappishly, if only internally, “the year’s not even over yet, what more can I say about these stupid objectives?”
My son Jesse died in late September, five years ago, two weeks before his due date, which was to be the weekend of the Harvest Moon. I still see myself, enormously expectant, listening to Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” before bedtime, imagining my full moon baby. I thought then that I would sing this song to him every year of his life. For me, still, this is his song, this is his moon, this is his wishful and windswept season. “Because I'm still in love with you/ I want to see you dance again/ Because I'm still in love with you/ On this harvest moon.” Even before this tragedy, I felt September and October as the most nostalgic months. Beauty and death walk hand in hand at this darkening time of year, through the displays of foliage, the last harvests of apples and pumpkins, the preparations for a frozen season when even in these modern days, food has to be gathered and stored. I’m not a very observant Jew, but I do appreciate the cluster of holidays that mark the beginning of the Jewish New Year: Rosh Hoshanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. For more than 5,000 years, “we” have been following the heavenly and earthly cycles, ending the old year with reflection and small sacrifices, in an effort to stave off those larger losses that have always haunted humanity. No wonder it chafes to have three meetings a day to talk about productivity during what feels, deeply, like a holy time of year.
One of the lingering side-effects in my life of Jesse’s death was a complete loss of ambition. This repercussion is more common than I thought initially. I’ve met many friends in grief groups who have quit or changed careers, or simply stopped caring after their futures were rearranged in terrible, unexpected ways. I had to return to work too soon after Jesse’s birth, after the money we raised in the GoFundMe campaign had all been spent on medical expenses, therapy, luxurious take-out dinners and a couple of misguided cranio-sacral sessions. People I hardly knew, or who chose to stay anonymous, gave so generously it made my ribs hurt in grateful embarrassment. But it wasn’t enough to survive on. I might have appreciated, then, the job I have now, which offers actual paid bereavement leave and the opportunity to hide safely in the day-do-day tasks without any “client-facing” duties. I can lose myself in excel sheets and rows of data, working through projects that require attention but not much emotion. Back then I was primarily a musician and had a day job working in retail. I remember breaking down in my therapist’s office, asking how I could ever go back to work and write a newsletter. The breezy language of selling products seemed an insurmountable affront. Honestly, sometimes it still does. Tasks, I could do at least in limited bursts of focus: counting inventory, placing orders, writing code for a website, anything reasonably absorbing without an overarching narrative. But, goals? GOALS? What would be the point of setting goals now that everything had ended?
Goals imply that the future is knowable, measurable even, in the M of those SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based) that corporate America so loves. This reductionist view sees each of us as uniquely responsible for our future, as though we can walk a straight path without time rushing headlong to knock us off course. I had, for example, resolved to take 12 weeks off after Jesse was born, to move slowly and treasure every moment. It seemed a reasonable goal. Fate, however, had other plans.
There is a nihilism implicit here, I know. I see it too, lurking behind my snarky objections and passive-aggressive stance towards the constant self-improvement and self-branding in workplaces these days. What is the point of setting goals? What is the point of organization and preparation; collecting glass bottles and like-new fuzzy pajamas with feet if the baby - well, you know the story by now. What is the point of anything at all? As soon as you have set out your plans in neat, bulleted lists, a pandemic hits, the laws change, a storm floods your city, the power is knocked out for three days. What good are any of our objectives against these primal forces, these pressing and uncontrollable real-world problems? It is hard for me to squeeze this what-is-the-good-of-trying nihilism into an acceptable package at work. No one knows about my dark past and usually I prefer it that way, though this year I longed to proclaim my son’s 5th birthday as I would have for either of my living daughters, to say, “no I’m not going on a vacation. It’s necessary I go to the ocean and collect rocks and light sparklers and remember him as best I can.”
In October it’s easy to feel disappointed with where I am and what I’ve accomplished. Rather than being a clarion call to some higher purpose, this, all the objective-setting and the grief and the loss, feels more like a call to retreat. Wave the white flag, I’m done fighting. I just want to wrap myself in an old quilt and burrow down for the winter. My only ambition is to survive this season, and the next, and the next. Money helps, worldly goods help. Heat in winter, a larder stocked with cans of soup. Grief causes you to slip a bit in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but five years later it is not nothing to proclaim, “I want to survive.” I do want to carry on, alongside heartbreak and despair and my neurotic need for constant watchfulness over my surviving children.
There is no room left in my life for positive thinking, for “everything happens for a reason” or shutting some doors so that you can fling yourselves out of a window or whatever inanities people spout at you while trying to reduce your unspeakable tragedy into a repeatable platitude. “It all worked out in the end,” an acquaintance said at a party, pointing at my 6-month-old baby and when I fell silent, “didn’t it?” As though this subsequent baby was a product revamp after the first product failed to launch. No. No, “it” did not all work out in the end, my friend.
This is not what I signed up for, this was not part of the plan. My son’s death was not a message to change my life or to access some deeper meaning I had been missing. Giving birth is life-changing enough. I was ready to be broken apart, disassembled, and pieced back together with all my priorities rearranged. I would never wish this outcome on anyone. And yet, you know, you’re all here too. We have all grown in unimaginable ways, grown deeper in our love and our grief, grown to understand how fully joy and sorrow are intertwined. I have learned to sit with the contradictions, at least on my best days, to be silent and reflective rather than chasing the next shiny object. I didn’t need this lesson. I didn’t need any of this, yet here I am. Here you are, here we are together, without a mission or a goal, without any clue what will happen next. We’re just here, here for the moment.
Were you ambitious before? What happened to your ambition? What do you no longer care about? What is most important to you now, after?