Page 10 of Gracie Harris Is Under Construction

In our first session, she told me to call her Lisa. I confessed that I liked formality in these situations to keep the lines from getting blurry. We landed on Dr. Lisa, which makes me feel like I’m visiting my kids’ pediatrician, but it helps me with boundaries.

With fifteen minutes left in that first session late last summer, she’d asked me something that I hadn’t expected.

“Have you had your great unravel yet?” she inquired.

“My what?” was my question as answer.

“A lot of times—most times, actually—after a sudden loss like this, someone experiences what I’ve learned to call the great unravel. It’s that moment when everything hits you at once. Different types of people have it at different times. It’s a mind- and body-altering experience, insomuch as you aren’t in control of anything,” she explained.

“Well, I mean, I’ve cried a lot,” I said, “including many nights curled in a ball, sobbing myself to sleep. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“That’s normal behavior, given what’s happened,” she started. “But no, that’s not what unraveling feels like. It’s been my professional experience that we don’t really start ‘moving on’—although to be clear, that’s a loaded phrase—until this happens.”

“Maybe I’ll be the exception to the rule,” I respond.

“Everyone says that,” she told me. “You are doing a wonderful job working through your feelings, Gracie, but you also have a lot of commitments that compromise the potential of your emotional processing power. I believe we will come to a point where you experience this unraveling, and when it happens, I’ll be here for you.”

I remember being annoyed at her insisting I was hurtling toward an inevitable breakdown, but I’ve made it a practice to believe experts when they tell me things. So, I filed that into the back of my mind and kept moving. Nearly a year later with Dr. Lisa and no unraveling yet. Just my janky eye twitches, leg shakes, and near blackouts on television.

During our regular weekly appointments, I still talk about my grief a lot but have also graduated to generalized griping about work, writing, family, dating fails, and this emerging internet fame of mine. We’d been on a lighthearted streak for a few months, but for the last six weeks, my appointments have all been double sessions. First came the anniversary of Ben’s death, then the Maisy interview (in real life), followed by my friends practically staging an intervention to convince me to get out of town, and finally—the icing on the cake—the airing of the Maisy interview. It’s been a lot to unpack. I almost took this one back down to an hour, but as the session creeps into the second hour, I’m glad for the extra time with Dr. Lisa.

“How are you feeling about the impending move to Canopy for the summer?” she asks, adding, “I know it’s something we’ve talked about a lot, but it’s only a few days away now. Still feeling that it’s the right decision?”

“I am. Once my friends helped me see the light, it’s been clear that it’s the right choice—I’m genuinely excited now,” I respond without hesitation. “I desperately need a place that allows me to be a little more anonymous. I know that some people might recognize me, but it will be rare. I need to be someplace where my grief isn’t right there on the surface for the taking. I feel like everyone here knows my business.”

In Chapel Hill, everywhere I go people ask me how I feel,putting a hand to their heart when they ask with such predictability it’s comical. Most people—me included, before Ben died—have no idea how to be around someone who is deeply sad, so they perform a version of grief support that feels safe.

I sense a friendly reminder coming from Dr. Lisa, so I preempt her commentary.

“I’m very aware that this is about more than just ‘hiding’ my grief. If I make a few friends or even friendly acquaintances while I’m there, it will be nice to have people who get to know Gracie the person, not Gracie the sad widow,” I say.

“That’s the right attitude,” Dr. Lisa says. “You are an incredible woman, Gracie, and this is a beautiful opportunity to meet new people and be your own person for the first time in a long while.”

Dr. Lisa comes back to this a lot. Ben and I got married young and, as is prone to happen, grew up together in a way that we became “Ben and Gracie.” Not Ben, not Gracie, but an inextricably linked duo. Finding my own way has been hard, mostly because I desperately don’t want to say goodbye to the Gracie that Ben knew and loved.

“You texted me that your agent was making a last-minute trip to see you. How did that go?” she asks, changing the topic.

“Pretty good,” I respond. “Felicity is wonderful. She’s my age, she understands me, she builds up my confidence every time I see her, and we have so much in common, but…”

“But…” Dr. Lisa adds for dramatic effect. I love when she does this. It’s a gift of more time for me to find and rehearse the right words in my head before I speak.

“She brought up my editor’s prologue idea again,” I say in a despondent voice. “I get it, I really do, but it feels so gross to sharesuch a private moment. If my kids were older and I could get their permission as informed adults or even teenagers, maybe I would, but there is a reason I’ve never written an essay about it.”

I say this a lot—this line about wanting to protect my kids’ privacy. Yet every time I hear my voice say it out loud, something feels not quite right about it. Don’t get me wrong—I’m being honest, but I can’t help but feel like there is something else going on, too. Every time, though, I tuck that concern neatly back where it came from and direct my energy to the nearest distraction.

“I understand that,” she says. “Even if you don’t publish it, there could be value in being brave and writing what you remember. Memories get fuzzy over time, and as hard as it might be to read, you and your kids might find value in having it documented.”

I don’t admit to Dr. Lisa my little secret of having already written the death scene three times—omniscient-narrator style, of course, because I wasn’t there for most of it. I know she’s right, but I’m just not ready to hit Save on that story yet.

“I feel afraid,” I say, utilizing a straightforward feeling statement like she has coached me to do. “People love to play the Grief Olympics with me. Just last week a woman came up and started telling me how helpful my writing was to her ‘much more tragic than mine’ situation. There is a subset of people that use loss and grief like they’re a competitive sport—if they do thatafterreading about Ben’s death, I won’t be able to control myself.”

“Grief Olympics,” Dr. Lisa repeats. “That’s a clever way to frame what you’ve just described. I see it a lot in my line of work, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

Before that moment, it never occurred to me to give that experience a name, but Grief Olympics is pretty good. Immediately Istart turning questions over in my head: What leads people to minimize others’ grief? Why do some believe we’ve codified a hierarchy of grief—kids, partners, siblings, parents, friends, pets…in that order? Why is it only human loss we factor into the Grief Olympics? What sort of coping mechanism is this?

I’m smiling by the time Dr. Lisa and I say our goodbyes a minute later. This is how every one of my essays—particularly the popular ones—starts out. All it takes is a simple line of questioning with myself, usually mulling over a phrase or experience in my mind until it forms into the crux of an argument or a point awaiting a counterpoint. This concept of Grief Olympics has the legs to be both goodandviral. I start jotting down notes in preparation for later tonight, when I’ll sit down to type out a draft of my next essay once the kids are asleep.

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