Beware the Ides of March and Other Things I’d Like to Say

Learning to embrace light and dark, sadness and laughter

Last night I celebrated a dear friend’s birthday at a well-appointed house in the Hudson Valley, filled with current and former New Yorkers. It was the stuff of Nancy Meyer movies, me in a kelly green cashmere sweater and Parisian top, fancy fizzy drinks, and an elegant cheese board, the scene like something I dreamed of as a young girl growing up in faraway suburban New Jersey where I wore outfits from the Macy’s outlet store and ate takeout pizza and Coca-Cola in 3-liter bottles from Pathmark.

We laughed for hours around a large wooden table eating roasted chicken and friseé salad followed by scoops of smooth vanilla ice cream and chocolate mousse cake from a Chelsea patisserie. The sunset blazed red outside the rounded window behind my seat, marking the last night before the clocks roll back before winter. I watched the light reflected in the windows before me, like a projection of another world. 

Tom Waits rasped from the stereo as the conversation ricocheted from roadside car assistance and sheriffs; opera; theater; how chickens put themselves to sleep in their coops each night, guided by the setting sun; the quiet of the country versus the city; the narcotic effect Monty Don and BBC programming had on us during the height of the pandemic; then siblings; then roadkill.   

Roadkill, a term a farmhand at Popcorn Park Animal Refuge used when telling my mother and her partner that it was only humane to stop our car and shovel dead animals off the shoulder of the road should we see one, my mother’s eyes shocked and horrified by the idea, something we laughed at for years. Roadkill, something my grandfather joked about as he sped his white Volvo from Buenos Aires to Mar de Plata during one of my visits to Argentina while possibly hitting rabbits and other small animals who got in the way. Roadkill, the word that played over and over in my head after my brother Oscar’s death in 2020 as we drove past dead deer, groundhogs, and even a bear once, on our way upstate each weekend.  

The word came as I was out of breath laughing with tears streaming down my cheeks across the table from my dear friend’s lovely brother who somehow reminded me of Oscar. It pulled me into the vulnerable softness of my body, the heaviness of sorrow mixed with laughter, finding the moment inexplicably HYSTERICAL while wanting to scream BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH, it is coming for all of US, my personality split like those ominous dramaturgical masks. 

All VERY VERY FUNNY

and also VERY VERY SAD

sometimes both things AT THE SAME TIME 

Does everyone feel like this? Desiring this connection, this laughter, and taking great care not to roil the sediment of grief and anxiety from below, keep it light, this is a celebration. But how can we not talk about it? The coming election? The 64 degree weather outside in November? The collective trauma of the past several years.

“I am so happy we are finally all together after all of this time, but how can we still be laughing? It’s too much to carry, this grief, this weight of time. I am still so sad,” is what I would say if I gave myself permission. 

Source: Oxford Dictionary

Sad is a word that often comes up when I share my work in writing groups, when I list my favorite musicians, when I name my favorite children’s books. I’ve always felt unsettled by the feedback because it is both true, but is also not how I present myself or feel most of the time: happy, silly and sometimes even funny. I have learned I hold that sadness while holding its opposite: cheer, pleasure, delight, happiness. 

“That’s called depth,” my friend Lisa texted me as I tried to make sense of it all this morning while watching the bare trees sway in the balmy November wind.

In The Before Times, a few months after the second death my family suffered over the course of several years and eight months before Oscar’s, I listened to Susan Cain give a TED talk on the idea of longing (or the place where joy and sorrow meet) as a gateway to creativity, connection and love. Her talk makes a compelling and emotional argument to embrace light and dark as a creative force and spiritual salve. I sat forward in my seat in the dark Vancouver theater, riveted as she described a feeling I have long experienced, but had not put into words: the ecstatic swoon of mournful music as an invitation to hold life’s duality in my heart. 

In the printed program under Susan’s photograph I jotted down the word “goth,” an identity I once used to stand apart from the crowds at the mall and high school in my New Jersey town. I may no longer wear all black and hang out in cemeteries (wait, I still kinda do that), but the times when I feel most connected to source and truth are when I find that sweet spot of joy and sorrow, a portal to the sublime nature of living. 

When I stood up at the end of the talk, I realized a famous alternative music singer, someone once married to one of my favorite authors, had been sitting in front of me. We looked at each other with ecstatic tears in our eyes as she declared, “Susan Cain is goth.” 

In a moment of shared recognition, I waved my program in front of her face, “I wrote the same thing!” 

We hugged each other fiercely in a moment of catharsis, tears and laughter intertwined.

I think of that moment and the recognition that we’re not alone. I’m not alone. Life contains these multitudes and if we are willing to see and feel them, it is possible to live life through both tears of sorrow and tears of joy. And it is often through moments of shared truth and community that we grow the most, breaking bread at a table with friends and sharing our truth. I am learning to do both.