Performative Condolence

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”That’s what people post on your FB page when you announce that your animal companion of five or fifteen years has died. It is a sad event. I do not mean to trivialize it.But it is also what people will post when they discover your brother has died, or your father, or the person with whom you’ve spent the last thirty years, father of your children, co-adventurer, co-conspirator, the one who still thought you were funny, the one who (literally) whistled while he worked, the one who got excited about compost, the one who made the best tofu in hot meat sauce, the one who bicycled with you on the shores of the Baltic even though he hated bicycling, the one who loved that chicken chop place in Chania even more than you did, he who played the monster in many a Z-grade middle school movie shot in the woods behind the house, he who calmed the waters, he who saw the vulnerability you effectively hid from all others. And never outed you.Not your “best friend.” Something else: Your one and only.I don’t have words to express the sorrow I feel now that he is gone, the longing I feel for this shared future that seemed to stretch out forever and now will never be. I don’t have the words that will comfort, and neither do you.This is not a criticism.We don’t know how to express or extend solace to others. That’s the truth of it. We don’t talk about death until it’s at our doorstep, until it knocks. And we don’t want to hear the knock, and we don’t want to open the door. And when we do, we are speechless.What I’d like to suggest is skipping what I have come to see as “performative condolence,” the so sorry for your loss response. As a person who has made her life in words, I would like to suggest forgetting words.The true solace I have gotten this past rollercoaster of a month has some from the friend who didn’t ask what I needed but rather drove an hour and a half to sit with me over a cup of coffee; the friend who didn’t ask what she could do but rather sent chicken soup and snickerdoodles across the continent; the neighbor who took a walk in the woods with me; the man who has known more hardship than I can imagine who embraced me in one of those full-body hugs that fills you with warmth and deep, deep kindness.I am a student of solace now. What I am learning I will pay forward. What I will try to practice—and by “practice,” I mean do-- for others will honor Tom, will use the energy he released into the world. It is what he wanted. It consoles me.