Last month I saw a performance at the Minetta Lane Theater called Sorry For Your Loss, a one-man comedy show that’s also about a father mourning the death of his young son. It was a great show, and it colored my perspective as I read Lincoln in the Bardo, a story about Abraham Lincoln grieving the loss of Willie, his eleven-year-old son.
After his son’s passing, the narrator of Sorry For Your Loss could not conceive how people could all be going about their normal lives when his world had ended. Similarly, in the bardo, Lincoln realizes nobody escapes this life without tremendous suffering. He has the insight that, to some of his fellow sufferers, he is ostensibly the one carrying on even though the world has ended. Grief has its rightful mourning period, but to prolong or exaggerate our suffering does little to help those around us suffer less.
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with when one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help of great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. (303)
This relates to what I thought was the story’s most beautiful idea — that a hilarious community of ghosts have helped Abraham Lincoln work through the death of his son in a positive way that enables him to help his fellow sufferers and better serve his country.
Amongst themselves, the ghosts debate whether they have any influence over the living. But it’s clear the answer is yes. When they connect with Lincoln, ghost magic transmits their wishes, their stories, their humanities.
The ghosts first took interest in Lincoln because of the attention, tenderness, and rare lack of fear he showed to his son’s dead form. In exchange, the ghosts reward Lincoln with empathy. Empathy for his fellow parents and mourners with each loss created by the Civil War — the realization that all humans are suffering, were suffering, or soon would be suffering. Empathy for the marginalized — the plights of slaves and the unfortunates. Lincoln exits the bardo with a renowned commitment to use his position to minimize the suffering of his countrypeople, even if it means swiftly and definitively defeating the Confederacy in a violent war. History tells the rest.
In one of my favorite scenes, Bevins and Vollman “enter” Lincoln, and after Lincoln stands up to leave, they are left alone and find themselves in each other’s shoes and minds for the first time. It literally expands their compassion and deepens their friendship. They don’t just understand each other, they feel each other. Bevins doesn’t just understand Vollman’s love for his wife Anna and his reluctance to give her up, he sees her face and feels Vollman’s tenderness for her as if it were his own. Vollman doesn’t merely understand the appreciation for the beauty that fuels Bevins’s desire to keep living despite having slashing his wrists and bled out on the kitchen floor, he hears the wind rustling through the leaves, is overcome by the clouds as they dance across the blue sky, and gets lost in the kind eyes of Garrett, Bevins’s lover. The two of them are left wondering why they had not done this years before.
It’s like when you hang out with a friend you’ve known forever, but something about this night creates all the right conditions for the two of you to be more open than ever before. Maybe it’s because you’re rarely alone with this friend, or because something has recently happened in one or both of your lives that compels you to share the key personal and vulnerable fact which opens the door to new conversations and a new type of connection. Afterwards, you are much closer and wonder why it took so long for this beautiful thing to happen.
This foreshadows another scene, in which many ghosts descend onto Lincoln simultaneously and the overlap not only shares experiences but triggers memories, reminding each of them who they were and what they enjoyed separate from the stories that they hold onto in order to remember their purpose for remaining in the bardo.
How had we forgotten? All of these happy occasions?
To stay, one must deeply and continuously dwell upon one’s primary reason for staying; even to the exclusion of all else.
One must be constantly looking for opportunities to tell one’s story.
(If not permitted to tell it, one must think it and think it.)
But this had cost us, we now saw. We had forgotten so much, of all else we had been and known.
But now, through this serendipitous mass co-habitation —
We found ourselves (like flowers from which placed rocks had just been removed) being restored somewhat to our natural fullness.
As it were.
It felt good.
It did.
Very good.
And seemed to be doing us good as well. (256)
It is a beautiful example of the danger of identifying too strongly with your story. We are large; we contain multitudes. We each contain an ever-evolving community of selves. You are not one thing, not even when that thing is the story you tell yourself about yourself.
“Ask yourself: Is your story is more important to you than your happiness?” –Br. Phap Huu
Reading a story about suffering inevitably led to some reflection about my own. Next to loss and mourning, my stuff is trivial. And yet I’ve had many dark and sleepless nights because I can’t bring myself to go back to work for a company. My previous (and only) adult work experience created a scarring and intense impression. I’m left angry at the world, jaded by the objectives that motivate corporations, and deeply saddened by the effect that the ensuing practices have on everybody else (employees, customers, contractors, vendors, all of their spouses, their children, the planet, etc.) for the benefit of a tiny, elite few who are already rich and powerful.
In some ways, I’m lucky to have seen behind the curtain at a young age. But the result is that I think business is stupid and exploitative and I can’t see myself pretending to care about product-market fit or PMOs.
But I also can’t be unemployed forever. I should be preparing myself for a possible future in which the planet holds up and I’m able to grow old and maybe even my theoretical kids are able to grow old. I still need to “move forward” with my career and revenue models are one of the few things I’m qualified to do.
I’ve begun to wonder if maturity, for many people, is realizing that even though the “normal” ways of doing things — things like holding down a job, finding meaning in a career that distracts you, partnering up and devoting yourself to taking care of a family — are only normal because we’ve inherited them, and although they’re as flawed and arbitrary as any other ancient way of doing things, we may be best off just doing them anyway. As Lincoln reasons, your sorrow, whatever form it takes, no matter how singular it feels, is not uniquely yours. We all feel hopeless, have felt hopeless, or will soon feel hopeless. And to prolong and exaggerate the sorrow is mopey, a little childish, and benefits nobody.
It’s difficult and risky to go off on your own. As I’m learning, it requires deep reserves of confidence and unwavering conviction. It makes for some lonely nights. And after all, it seems like you can make a perfectly satisfactory life by doing things the regular way.
Maybe in thirty years, when I’m thinking about retirement after a relatively successful but altogether unremarkable career in middle management, I’ll sit outside my suburban home, my kids will be playing pickleball in the backyard, and I’ll pick up Lincoln in the Bardo again. Who knows what types of suffering will be dominating my thoughts, and how they’ll compare to how I feel these days. Maybe I’ll read these words and, because memory is always weaker than experience, laugh at how silly I was being when I should’ve been living carefree in Brooklyn, enjoying my youth and my year of rest and relaxation, one of the best years of my life.
–May 2023
Doubt will fester as long as we live. And when one occasion of doubt has been addressed, another and then another will arise in its place. (239)
Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten? (210)
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another — which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver. -Alain de Botton
Soooo we just supposed to eat, shit, exercise, shit, go to college, work 9–5 everyday, travel two weeks out the year, buy a house, then have kids and die? -@ciaaaxo on Twitter
excerpts
[We] had been bulky men, quietly content, who, in our first youth, had come to grasp our own unremarkableness and had, cheerfully (as if bemusedly accepting a heavy burden), shifted our life’s focus; if we would not be great, we would be useful; would be rich, and kind, and thereby able to effect good: smiling, hands in pockets, watching the world we had subtly improved walking past us (this empty dowry filled; that education secretly funded). (71)
A remarkable tableau of suffering (95)
I was tired and had been tired for ever so long. (96)
And proceeded past Trevor Williams, former hunter, seated before the tremendous heap of all the animals he had dispatched in his time: hundreds of deer, thirty-two black bear, three bear cubs, innumerable coons, lynx, foxes, mink, chipmunks, wild turkeys, woodchucks, and cougars; scores of mice and rats, a positive tumble of snakes, hundreds of cows and calves, one pony (carriage-struck), twenty thousand or so insects, each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on the quality of loving attention he could muster and the state of fear the beast happened to have been in at the time of its passing. Being thus held (the product of time and loving attention being found sufficient, that is), that particular creature would heave up, then trot or fly or squirm away, diminishing Mr. Williams’s heap by one. (127)
Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. (156)
It costs you nothing. Why not try? (164)
So many years I had known this fellow and yet had never really known him at all. (172)
The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world. (197)
Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten? (210)
Doubt will fester as long as we live. And when one occasion of doubt has been addressed, another and then another will arise in its place. (239)
Still, it is a vast world and anything might happen. (243)
What a pleasure. What a pleasure it was, being in there. Together. United in common purpose. In there together, yet also within one another, thereby receiving glimpses of another’s minds, and glimpses, also, of Mr. Lincoln’s mind. How good it felt, doing this together! (253)
All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.
It was the nature of things.
Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true.
At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end.
We must try to see one another in this way.
As suffering, limited beings — (304)
