The Great Performance

One of the unanticipated and under-discussed consequences of grief is improved acting ability. By this, I mean that the more time that passes since the death of your loved one, the more proficient you become at convincing the world that you are stable and functional. If you have other children, your ability to act may even become more nuanced and competent due to sheer frequency of practice.

For example, I have learned how to read The Runaway Bunny to Cecilia while grief for Lizzy is busy swallowing my prefrontal cortex and without changing even a slight inflection in my tone to let Cecilia suspect I am upset. I have taught myself how to tell nurses and doctors that I have one dead daughter and one disabled daughter without a single quaver altering my voice. I have answered the phone expecting lab results confirming my worst fears without revealing a fragment of anxiety. I have sobbed hysterically, seized by unrelenting memory one moment and then swallowed, breathed, and answered the phone to one of Cecilia’s therapists the next as though I had only been strolling through the sunlight on a brisk autumn day.

I don’t know if it should concern me that I have become so absurdly competent at pretending like I’m okay when most of the time I don’t feel that I or anyone or anything at all is okay. I’m not sure if this comprehensive deception is bleeding into a flattering self-deception, or if I am steadily developing a persona acceptable to society in jagged and desperate contrast to the person I wake up inside most mornings.

When you’ve survived the death of a child, and especially when that death is followed by the damning diagnosis of another child, everyone expects you to be strong and to demonstrate that pretty term: resiliency. The theory goes that if you’ve already been through the worst, presumably you could get through anything. No one wants to hear that I don’t feel strong or resilient or brave most of the time. I don’t really talk about how sometimes the reason I keep doing what I’m doing is purely out of habit or just a feeble and faltering fantasy that it’s actually making a difference. I keep repeating the phrase, “I’m not a superhero,” and am confounded when the listener only hears, “She’s a superhero.”

I think every parent, on some level, engages his or her child in the deliberate delusion that parents know who they are, what they are doing, and where to find the path forward. We do it as a sort of archetypal charity towards the fragile minds given into our care, which are far too underdeveloped to hear a fracturing truth such as “the world is a terrifying and chaotic place, and I can’t protect you from most of it.” Day by day, we willfully construct this fantasia like meticulous and insane architects until we too become swept away by the illusion, conquered utterly by the adoring gaze leveled our way from the eyes of a sixteen-month-old child.

How do you live with yourself when so much of who you are is a deliberate lie?

The problem, as I see it, is bigger than parents. Every human person who has encountered death comes uncomfortably close to the harsh reality that life separates us from death by the merest filament. Death, disease, accident, or disaster haunt our footsteps every day of our lives until, eventually, one or more of them finally catch up with us. And yet we live our lives blithely jogging on, pretending these omnipotent shadows aren’t waiting behind us or beside us or on the sidewalk home every day. They are close to us–far closer than we ever publicly acknowledge–and we simply don’t have the answers when our questions veer too close to admitting the basic problem of human frailty.

One could even argue that most of science, politics, and religion is dedicated to pretending like we have the answers to the unanswerable questions so as to give human beings something approximating a firm foothold in a desert of quicksand. At least philosophy is honest about the fact that it doesn’t have the answers. Nevertheless, most of us voluntarily choose to participate in the pleasant fabrication that our authority figures have figured most of it out and are there to point the way for the rest of us. We choose it because it enables a return to that relative state of infancy in which we are trusting ourselves to the wisdom of the educated, and, in the process, grants us a temporary reprieve from the cognitive dissonance of our own, all-too-human, helplessness.

I am forced to conclude that our constant self-delusion is a mechanistic survival tactic. There is a very real way in which we have to wake up every day as though today will not be the day when our individual life will end. There is, perhaps, an evolutionary strategy behind the great performance that characterizes human life across language and culture barriers. For if we forced ourselves on a constant basis to confront the hideous reality of human fragility and the immanence of certain death, we would find ourselves suspended in a state of fear so powerful, it would inhibit the most basic execution of bodily need. In other words, it is not just easier to lie; it is necessary.

Perhaps, in light of this, I should not feel so concerned regarding my growing ability to act. Perhaps it doesn’t mean I am becoming less human after all, and, in fact, means quite the opposite.