East of Eden

I live in a family of plodders.

We are like five poles of the same planet. One of us is patient and quietly opinionated. Another, loud and determined. Another, thoughtful and ambitious. One is absent, and missed. The last craves the rush, craves the world.

And yet there is a strange quality to these people that I don’t see in anyone else. I don’t see it in movies, at school, or in my friends. It’s as if genetics carried to me, to us, the ability to function under any circumstances. It’s like an innate knowledge that we’re human, we die. We mourn our dead but we don’t mourn forever.

One day my uncle died and all his sisters cried at his funeral. The next day they made lasagna and quietly packed up his belongings. The day after that, they took business calls and flew back home. And that is the process of grief in my family. There is no week-long hiatus. There is no grief counselor, no therapist, no crushing regret. It’s like we fear death the same as anyone else, but we’re made to accept it faster. We were scrubbing floors and cooking dinner when the plague swept over us. We were singing to the baby when our husbands died.

“We’re plodders,” my mom said. We take what we’re given and we use it. We see every day as a separate thing, removed from time. There is no such thing as a mental breakdown for us. It is only the morning, make coffee, go to school, learn to write. Our loves die and that’s okay because we did our best to save them; we can’t change everything. We can hardly change ourselves. That’s what it’s like living in a family of plodders. There is only one step of grief, and it’s the last.

I think that’s why I’m never going to see a therapist. I’m never going to sit on a couch while they ask me what I feel because we aren’t made like that, my family. We aren’t made to define ourselves because we know it’s impossible, and we’ll always get it wrong. There is nothing anyone can tell us about ourselves that we don’t already know, somehow.

It feels a lot like blindness, except we see too much. We look at people and they’re laid out for us; we understand them, but we can’t sympathize. We’ve never felt heart-wrenching grief; not for more than a day before our path clarifies and we fall face first into acceptance. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to not be stuck in your mourning. You move on, but it makes the lost a little less immortal.

And what I could say about immortality! What I could repeat and piece together from all those ideas! We could say immortality is living forever. Then we could say immortality is never living at all. It’s knowledge, it’s suffering, it’s death. We find eternity in death; isn’t immortality synonymous with eternity? Isn’t anything that lasts forever immortal? If so, if all we know—the entire span of our lives—is our definition of forever; are we not already immortal?

One of my favorite ideas is that words are immortal, because words don’t die. They change, sure, but all things that exist change somehow. Some things, some people, just change less.

Did I mention that my favorite phrase is “in the end”? Whose end? What end? Why, the end?

In my family we take our ends in small doses every day. That way when we come to the end of a road or a life or a book we take the grief and it’s not crippling. Our bones are hollow and in them we carry our ability to go on. That’s why this is called East of Eden (by John Steinbeck). Samuel hollowed his bones. His was a family of plodders.