Having a clear purpose will carry humans through difficult times. But occasionally, the difficulties overwhelm even the most driven of us. On February 18th, 2018, my husband, Carmen, and I were victims of an arson fire in Old City, Philadelphia. From across the street, we watched the fire spread from building to building—half a city block destroyed. So many homes and businesses lost. For us, the fire killed our cats and destroyed all of our belongings in the space of a few hours. The building next door burned to the ground, and our building was condemned.
Within the month, we buried Carmen’s stepdad. Two weeks post-fire, my mother, who had broken her back in a fall, went into hospice and died five days later. During that agonizing month, Carmen had two cancer scares. As if that wasn’t enough, my son, Zach, left the family business six weeks before the fire to pursue his professional goals. I was surprised by how sad I felt when my oldest left the company. By the end of winter, the enormity of all the losses felt like the ground was opening underneath my feet. As I moved through those months, I continued to sink into spiritual ash.
In pre-Christian Scandinavian traditions, honoring and grieving death is expressed as a time of living in the ashes. Not much is expected of a person who is in mourning during this time. The community understands that it’s vital for the mourner to go to the ground and sit with the loss more deeply than what the American worker in the 21st Century is allowed to mourn. I’ve experienced loss before, but never this many at once. Just dealing with the logistics of my mother’s illness and death, searching for a new apartment, and continuing to run the company all took up space where mourning should have happened. Instead, I negotiated a contract standing outside a surgical center for my husband’s biopsy. At the insistence and deadline of the insurance company, I created a list of lost contents while sitting in the last days of hospice with my mom. I planned a memorial service for her in the parking lot of a furniture store. As I moved out of temporary housing into permanent housing nine weeks after the fire, I also prepared to travel to fulfill a contract on the other side of the country.
Our friends and family marveled at how quickly we rebounded. We marveled at ourselves for having navigated such a full-scale ordeal. Despite the losses, there were many moments of beauty, humor mixed with tears, newly forged relationships with other fire victims, and a recalibration of what is essential in our lives and what simply doesn’t matter that much. As for mourning, I was often knocked to the ground in spiritual ash but, unlike the Scandinavian tradition, I never let myself stay there very long.
It wasn’t until a year later, on a trip to a remote village on the Wild Atlantic Coast of Western Ireland, that I was again forced into spiritual ash. It was early spring, and the weather was what you’d expect for Ireland: cold, damp, 26-mile-an-hour winds, with brilliant light filtering through the clouds. It was supposed to be a scenic tour of the Aryan Islands, Galway, and long walks on the shore. Instead, for eleven days, I was laid up in a cold Airbnb with spotty hot water, no internet, no television, and persistent pain in my neck that took my breath away just to stand. There was no escaping my grieving then. It confronted me with fresh vigor; it felt like a reliving rather than remembering. It wasn’t just the events of the previous year. In the stillness of my “house arrest,” as my husband called it, I stumbled upon so many undigested losses, betrayals, and broken relationships collected throughout my life I had no choice but to step inside and fall apart with them. It was a visceral reminder that the path of the human experience is not a linear ascent to perfect mental health and wellness.
In the 21st Century, being human is about occasionally falling apart, going to the ground, rising, going to the ground again, and rising again. But as much as we’d like to zip through the going-to-ground part, we cannot constantly adjust the pacing to suit our cultural desire for instant turnaround.
In early March 2020, As New York City’s healthcare system bulged through its seams and COVID-19 victims’ bodies stacked up in meat trucks, Philadelphia trailed only a few weeks behind. Under lockdown and sick with a mysterious virus that I couldn’t shake for weeks, like so many others in my geographic region, I felt loss, fear, and grief. This time, not just for me but for the collective.
Amid the grief, I was bombarded by my colleagues in the wellness field, who pumped out content and refined their marketing pitch to include ways to make the time in quarantine useful. You may have seen it, too. The blogs, E-newsletters, and social media posts calling on us to remain well and take this time to be creative. Right in the middle of national chaos and global suffering. Right in the middle of job loss, depletion of food banks, and essential workers without personal protective equipment, the wellness industry was telling us this was a gift, and if we squandered it, shame on us. This quarantine achievement messaging ignored the basic principle of human existence. Trauma is overwhelming and nearly impossible to pull out of until we’ve met our basic food, water, shelter, and safety needs.
To suggest we are inadequate because we missed an opportunity to grow, produce, or create in the middle of a crisis is like kicking a person who just fell down a flight of stairs. The message is detrimental to one’s well-being. That’s why the chief purpose of this book is to set the record straight about wellbeing and resilience.