Windows

By Erin Khar

*****

I’ve learned grief is slippery and mercurial. If you try to suppress it, it will pop up and catch you off guard, trip you and choke you and have its way with you after all.

Last year, I began having panic attacks at night. 

“Mommy, do your eyes sink into your head when you die?” and a beat, “Where do they go?”

My four-year-old Franklin whispered this into the cool air of his bedroom as we lay next to each other. It was bedtime. 

We’d just finished reading a book version of the Disney film Frozen. 

“I don’t think your eyes go anywhere,” I said. 

“No, they do. They sink. Look it up.”

I was tired and wanted him to just go to sleep, but I did it. I looked it up. He was right.

“Okay, yes, I think they do lose pressure and kind of deflate a little.” 

How did he learn this? 

“I’m scared to die because how will I see if I don’t have eyes?”

“You won’t need your eyes anymore,” I said, sure I was massively screwing up this discussion. 

Then, after a minute, he asked, “Did the parents in Frozen die?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet for a bit. Finally, I turned my head and saw that he was asleep. I don’t want to die, either, I thought. 

Later, I felt afraid again to fall asleep, worried that I might not wake up, that I might have a heart attack or stroke, and that my eyes might sink into my head. 

Death lifts the veil, the plausible deniability we must possess to function. 

*****

For so many years, beginning in childhood, I struggled with suicidal ideation. Life felt far too long. I did not want to be here. Now, probably past the halfway mark in life, there is not enough time. 

It is not hyperbole to say that I have lived in the aftermath of loss repeatedly. I've lost too many people to count to addiction and suicide. I have two living children—an 19-year-old son and a five-year-old son. But I’ve lost eight others. I've had six miscarriages and a late second-trimester loss when I went into premature labor and gave birth to a tiny stillborn boy in my father's guest bathroom. Then, mid-pandemic, I had a “therapeutic abortion” in my second trimester due to genetic abnormalities.  

I’ve become well-acquainted with grieving and its various iterations. 

Most recently, almost a year ago, I lost my dear friend, the writer David Poses, to depression. In his last text, he said: "Don’t worry; I’m focused on living."

Coming up on the anniversary of his death, the grief—in waves—shocks me, catches me in the throat. I read and reread our texts from the past couple of months. I replay our long phone calls, ones in which he talked about how much he was struggling. 

But I couldn’t save him. I flush, red prickly heat, embarrassed by the hubris I have for thinking that I could have.

My breath quickens, and I start to feel a well-worn, familiar panic rise in my throat and spill out my mouth, coating me in an uneasiness that makes me want to rip my skin off. 

For the first time in a long time, the thought runs through my head—you could jump out the window, you could just be done; this could stop. For years, this thought loop was a refrain, punctuating days and nights of looking for a way out—out of my feelings, relationships, depression, addiction, out of the urge to rip my skin off. I feel terrorized by myself, by the shades of past selves that seem to emerge in the stillness. And I don’t know how I will get through it.

And then another thought—Keep passing the open windows. 

By the time I was six, I had started sneaking into the den downstairs when I couldn’t sleep. I was an early reader—I’d started reading at three—and my first-grade books weren’t cutting it. So I’d find one of my parents' books—one with an interesting title or a cover I liked—and I’d take it back to my room, curl up into my large stuffed dog Henry’s lap, and fill the lonely still night with words. 

My introduction to John Irving occurred on one of these nights via The World According to Garp. The book was like an envelope; I could stuff myself inside. I didn’t understand all of it, but the sex and death and honor, and humanness got into my bones. 

My second John Irving read was The Hotel New Hampshire. I was eight years old and loved it even more than I’d loved Garp. If you haven’t read it—and you should because it’s funny and moving and, once again, human—the book chronicles the Berry family and their unusual lives full of love and sorrow and everything in between. I would later learn that the book had mixed reviews, and many people think it pales compared to other works by Irving that contain similar themes, places, and motifs. But the book became a part of me, like skin.

What stuck with me, what continued to stick with me—as I grew from a little girl secretly reading her parents' books to a teenager and young woman who bounced between heroin and men and the overwhelming urge to kill herself, to a woman who finally wanted to live, wanted to love—was the Berry family refrain: “Keep passing the open windows.”

I've passed so many open windows. And sometimes I stuck an arm or leg out and came back a little broken. But I always passed them. And I’m still here. I’m still here. 

With the anniversary of David's death, I've been so afraid of feeling the depth of it again, of letting the tentacles of loss travel freely. But as I’ve learned, grief is slippery and mercurial. If you try to suppress it, it will pop up and catch you off guard, trip you and choke you and have its way with you after all. So I feel it, I talk about it, I write about it. I connect with strangers about it.

I know how to live with grief. I know that grief changes the shape of us. I know that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive and that I can hold them at the same time. And I know how to keep passing the open windows. 

*****

Erin Khar is the author of Strung Out: A Memoir of Overcoming Addiction. She writes the weekly advice column, Ask Erin, on Substack, and her work has appeared in SELF, Marie Claire, Salon, The Times of London Sunday Magazine, HuffPost, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere.

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