“The thing about the death of a pet, is that the grief is so uncomplicated,” Erin told me, “Everyone in the situation can agree that it is sad, and it’s sad in this very pure way. It’s not messy.” This, of course, is in contrast to the very messy tangle of grief that occurs when a person is removed– whether by death or by fall out or by just losing touch. Erin’s observation sent me on a several week investigation.

In a self-proclaimed Year of Healing, grief is a hot topic; partially because of its inevitability, but also in large part for the mess it makes if left unattended. Pushing it down and aside left me unequivocally bereft by the end of last year– disinterested in creating, blase about making plans, jumping from sickness to sickness. And tired. So, so tired. I felt altered, like this was simply the act of growing up. You lose the people you love, and the grief piles up. We hold it til it winds its way around muscle and bone and calcifies, holding us in a statue of ourselves, a prisoner to our circumstances. We hold it until it sprouts bitterness or regret, circular stories that complicate the simple issue that we are sad because a person was there and now they are not there, so we can never tell them the things we wanted to tell them and they can never tell us what we’d hoped they would.

And it is for this reason that I have been trying to un-complicate grief. Which, as it turns out, was slightly complicated. Or at least delicate at first, walking the line of embracing a very real and natural process, and yet being willing to let go of it as it arises.

It started with a pizza.

I had a friend of 16 years who last year decided she would no longer be my friend. Her reasons were religious, and as much as I expressed my unwavering support and love for her, she would not abide. I was a dark mark on her celestial scorecard, and I was out. For the following months, I oscillated between smugness and anger and hurt, recalculating the timeline and digging into old postcards and letters which were our ever present connection, regardless of our disagreements. Until now.

When we passed through her town this year, I was exhausted with the loss. I was sick of the stories, of the absence, of the rationalizing. I was just sad. And I needed a way to eradicate the anger and complicated circles that had in fact calcified into my story with her.

So, I ordered her and her family a pizza.

It was a yearly tradition in the summer, where my Someone and I would park on their street for almost two weeks. In exchange for the spot and some showers, we’d help entertain the kids, wrangle the dogs, tidy up, take excursions to help my friend feel a smidge of sanity from the overwhelm of raising two kids, homeschooling, and hardly ever getting the chance to leave the house. And then, I’d cook. I made elaborate meals and sweet treats, tried tea blends and iced drinks, baked decadent veggie breads and took trips with the whole crew to farmer’s markets to try and find an ingredient or a vegetable with which to experiment. Before the kids’ bath time, everyone was full and relaxed, and my Someone and I would set to cleaning the kitchen while my friend and her husband put the kids to bed. Then, we would pick out a movie or just talk over a rhubarb crumble til well after 10, and start over again the next morning.

I loved being able to do this each year, as my friend became increasingly stressed out by housework and child rearing and trying to find some semblance of herself. It was the one thing I could do to ease what was clearly her own path to take: I could feed her.

In the spirit of uncomplicating, I called up the chain pizza place. I purchased gift certificates so as to “clean the dirty money” that could make any trace to my card. And then I sent two pizzas in keeping with her specific dietary restrictions to her home with a note.

Thought you could use a night off from cooking.

Nothing else. I couldn’t call her or text her, as she’d blocked my number and social media. I couldn’t stop by, as I didn’t want her to feel ambushed. I couldn’t sit across from her and tell her how much it all hurt, or even that I loved her. I couldn’t make her an elaborate meal. But I could send a damn pizza. And in this way, I hoped, she would feel the relief of a love consumed. And in this way, I uncomplicated over a year of agonizing the why’s and what-if’s.

“Don’t you want to know if she really ate it? Don’t you want to know if she figured it out?” my Someone asked.

“Nope,” I said, “It’s just a pizza from here on out.” And it was.

Then, it was a black eye.

We were one day away from home, on a hot day outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. We had one show left to play on our four month tour, and we were heading straight through to home. For as quickly as time went, this day compensated in its painstakingly slow minutes, compounding with the blaring heat from a mid-July sun. We found a shady spot in a park and took a nap, then rallied the dogs for a slow walk. As the time for the show came, we ambled back toward the camper and drew out the dog bowls to give the girls some water. Maybe it was the heat or the post-nap haze, but as my Someone reached down to pour the water and I simultaneously reached down to untangle leashes, my Someone stood up– fast– and smacked the back of his head directly and hard into my left eye.

Here is what I have learned over a lifetime. Don’t cry. Don’t show weakness. Shake it off. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be overdramatic.

Each and every one of those lessons blared across the sudden flash of light from the impact. And just as I prepared to swallow down the now scorching blaze of pain, I reconsidered.

Here is what I have recently learned: you gotta let that shit go. As it turns out, the more one explains and rationalizes grief, the less likely one is to get to experience grief, the less able one is to move on from it.

And also this– I was too damn full of other hurt to add to the pile. No vacancy. It was time to un-complicate.

I hit the ground. I wailed. I expressed not only my immediate, shocking pain, but the long held ache of homesickness, of being too hot, of feeling the unfairness of an unexpected injury. I cried and I kept crying until I felt the last dregs of it empty. And then, my very apologetic Someone offered me an ice pack. And for once, I didn’t decline it to ascertain martyrdom, I didn’t demand penance. I took the damn ice pack and I asked for what I needed. I fumed for a moment, and then let the anger pass. By the time we made it to the venue, I had made a joke. By the time we hit the stage, I’d perfected the joke– much to my Someone’s feigned chagrin.

Not all grief works this way. Some must work its way much more slowly through the nervous system. As my eye continued to swell and soon blossomed blue and purple in the following days, I felt strangely proud. Here was an opportunity for my wounded child self to display justification for her self pity. But I couldn’t. The opportunity had been well cleaned out with a good old fashioned cry.

How simple.

And then, finally, it was this.

The phone call came too late to be good news. When I called my mother back, she told me there had been an accident. My childhood best friend, the one whose house and family we swapped back and forth endlessly to spend as much time as possible together, whose mother was pregnant with her in the choir loft alongside my mother when she was pregnant with me– her father was dead. I hadn’t spoken to them in years. All the same, I had to sit down. I was absolutely punched. Time touched eternity and flashes of our childhood played out– had I known? Had I touched the spot in the yard at age 5, age 10, age 16 where he would one day pass? To have been removed from that integral community in my adult life made the timeline seem so obvious, so unfathomably and inconsolably finite.

When I hung up, I took a few breaths. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry the familiar mantra was already relegating grief to a farther pasture– a pasture that would eventually be overgrown and unmanageable. No, I thought, do it now. My Someone and I were on Martha’s Vineyard with our friends John and Becky. We’d weaseled out a couple of days from our touring to take our very first vacation. You’ll ruin it, I countered myself.

Then the truth became visible. By saying nothing at all, I’d create a minefield of hurt for myself and for others to tiptoe around. By saying nothing at all, those vines of complicated grief will wrap around unrelated subjects and gestures and foods, sparking an erratic jolt to the heart. If I let it out now, right away, I’d have a fighting chance of uncovering grief before it turns to anger or resentment. I’d have a fighting chance of finding out what is on the other side.

I felt like a kid waking from a nightmare, looking for a grown up to tell. I emerged from the bedroom to meet my Someone and John, who’d been patiently waiting to walk into town for ice cream. I took a minute as I put on my shoes, and then told them, as I had been told, that there was an accident. We began to walk, the dark island sea air meeting us as we kept a slow pace.

I felt a little trivial at first, expressing my deep sadness for a man who I’ve not known for years. A man who I occasionally butted heads with. A man who I often fought with to get a later bedtime, to get his daughter an extra day with me, to let us please please please have five more minutes in the pool. And as I talked, the rest also came out– that I owe a lot of rides, of camping trips, of State Fair visits to him. That I also owe him a humongous Matchbox car collection, too. This was a man who, every Sunday morning, would come with a sack full of these tiny cars he’d collected, and every kid in church would get one. I had the whole wall of my closet lined with these toys, with specialty cases to display them as a birthday present from him. By the time we got to the ice cream shop, I had told all I could remember. It was a little less complicated. Not because I said nice things, but because I had said the hard things, too. Uncomplicating grief does not mean air brushing the bad– it means bringing it all into the light so that we may be lighter. When we took our ice cream and stood by the sea and watched the ferries come in and out as we ate, I didn’t feel less sad, but I felt the clarity of grief. And it didn’t feel trivial, anymore. It felt truthful.

Thank you, George, I whispered to the Atlantic Ocean. And then we turned back toward our house.

The night was difficult. I slept in fits and awoke crying, feeling the weight of a family with a now empty chair. In the morning, I texted my friend. She didn’t have my number stored, anymore. This would be a fact that I’d have felt ashamed of before. But instead of complicating a heartbreak, I understood, identified myself, and passed on my sympathies. Then I walked to town and bought a sympathy card. I didn’t deliberate it like I had in the past, wondering if I’d be welcome, wondering how it would be received. I was learning through pizza and black eyes that the first loving impulse is the most direct route to the heart. Sending a card wasn’t about doing the right thing. Sending a card was an invitation to grief itself to be let out into the open. Speaking grief out loud creates the door that one day, with time and intention, the bereaved may walk out of again.

It was our last day on the island, and we spent it visiting old haunts and new beaches. We stopped at a general store in West Tisbury and got out to explore. As I poked around bottles of maple syrup and lobster printed dishware, John called me over.

“Look,” he said, pointing at palm sized toy cars lined up on the wall. “I was thinking of your friend who passed.”

John is an excellent listener. And he has had an unfair amount of practice with grief. Every other week, John goes to Dartmouth to get chemotherapy for a cancer that he has been told will never be healed, but only maintained. This was just a few years after John suffered a stroke that nearly knocked him out of this life. And those aren’t his only near death experiences. Instead of huddling away and letting the grief crystallize into bitterness, John turned toward the grief. He talked about it. He tells the story of his struggle until it loses the power of anger, and then he follows it up with the story of his treatment, of his recovery, of his maintenance. John is not in denial. He is accepting. And this has put him in a perpetual state, as near as I can tell, of gratitude. He runs 5Ks, he takes trips, he taught himself how to drum again. He also makes jokes about his aphasia, is perpetually curious about nature and people, and is ever eager to meet up with his friends to play music, to help them in the garden, to eat Thai food. He has shared his grief, and his community has reciprocated to make his load a little lighter.

And in turn, he is a radiant alchemist himself, changing grief into love. And in this way, looking at this wall of model cars, I felt a happy memory of George bubble up, and a happy memory of John and I transfixed into our shared story.

I know the quotes of grief being the downside of love. I understand the premise of a love being stored, and when lost, there is an emptiness. Maybe what I am learning is that there are also two ways to see the emptiness. One is as a cavern, a darkness stretching into a darkness that cannot be navigated. Or, the absence is an openness, and when that openness is brought into the light, there is left a space for love to grow again.

Sounds simple enough.