The Things I'll Never Know

Searching for peace in questions forever left unanswered

Cindy didn’t just wake up on March 26, 2010 and decide to check out of a wonderful life. Battling her demons ruined her career, destroyed most of her friendships and made her feel like a failure as wife and mother. She caused tremendous chaos in a lot of lives, including her own, and ultimately decided she couldn’t take any more. She’d had enough of the pain and she thought our lives would be better if she was gone.

In my attempt to make sense of her life and death I often asked myself this question:

“If she was never going to get her shit together, are we all better off with her dead?”

For many years, the answer was an emphatic, “Hell yes.” I needed that to be the answer so I could get on with creating a new life without her. It helped me forgive her because it allowed me to transform something I saw as selfish into something selfless. It also provided me with a lens through which I could explain our lives to the kids that I thought, wrongly, might cause them less pain.

As the years passed it became obvious the answer wasn’t so simplistic. In fact, I came to realize my asking the question in the first place was a way of me trying to make sense of something I couldn’t yet understand. Maybe I never would.

Losing someone you love naturally leaves a long list of answers you desperately want. And that’s one of the way people left behind drive themselves mad. We spend the rest of our lives seeking answers to questions we can never know the answer to.

Counterfactual Torture

Counterfactual thinking is the process of imagining alternatives to events that have already occurred. It’s a normal thought process we all engage in. It’s also a way people who are left behind after the loss of a loved one drive themselves fucking crazy.

We ask ourselves questions like, “What if I had done X instead of Y?” What if I dragged her to therapy? What if had pushed harder? What if I had pushed less? What if I had picked up the phone when she called? What if I had been more attentive? What if I gotten her into counselling at a younger age? What if I had explained the potential consequences better? What if I truly grasped the devastation her mom’s death had on her? What if I had talked to her friends behind her back?

What if indeed.

My mind has been running rampant for the two weeks since Chloe’s death around every possible alternative scenario I can imagine. It can be torturous to say the least. I’m doing my best to be deliberate about allowing my mind to wander and wonder without making up stories or becoming emotionally attached to any alternate scenario.

It’s not fucking easy.

We really can screw ourselves up when we allow ourselves to make a subtle but important shift. Often we don’t realize it’s happening.

Other times, we see the trap and step right into it with our eyes wide open. I’ve done it many times already. I’ll probably do it many more.

We turn “What if…” into “If only…”

“If only I had done X, my loved one would still be alive.”

If only I was easier to talk to Chloe would be alive. If only I convinced her I’d love her no matter what, Chloe would still be alive. If only I better understood the impact of her mom’s suicide, Chloe would still be alive. If only I spent less time thinking and more time acting, Chloe would still be alive. If only I had listened to others, Chloe would still be alive.

Human beings are storytellers. It’s how we make sense of the world. When there’s a gap in our knowledge, we make up a story to fill it. We also tend to have a negativity-bias so the stories we make up tend to be the worst possible interpretation.

We hate unanswered questions and we make up shitty answers to them.

(Understanding this has been one of the most important learnings of my life and I’ll explain it further in a future post.)

Before we know if we’re obsessing about a past we can’t change. We’re mired in regret for things we think we “should” have done. We invent a fantasy about how wonderful things would have been if we “had only.” And we turn the blame squarely on ourselves for failing to make it happen.

In other words, we’re fucked

I know all this and I still find myself doing it. Just like I did while I was wrestling with Cindy’s death.

The difference this time around is I have a group of people around me who I ask for help and will set me straight when they see it happening. To say it’s life-changing doesn’t even coming close to describing what these people mean to me.

Here’s an example from just yesterday.

Not Up To the Job

One of the conclusions I found myself drawing from all my “If only” thinking was that I just wasn’t up to the job of being the dad Chloe needed. "Not up to the job” was starting to run through my head obsessively. It was devastating to think that a guy who wrote a book on being a dad and who coaches dads failed as a dad when it mattered most.

It wasn’t just about me as Chloe’s dad. This story challenged my a huge part of the my identity. “Identity” is just another way of saying the stories I told myself about myself and the stories I told myself others were telling themselves about me.

Were people going to think I was a total fucking fraud? This douche bag who has been masquerading as a good father failed when the chips were down. The women around me keep dying on my watch. Fuck.

Chloe’s accident didn’t happen in a vacuum. I’ll write more about that in the coming days, weeks and years. It doesn't feel like the right time to get into the details but I will because I think it will help people and it will help me.

I reached out to a dear professional friend yesterday and here’s what she told me. I’m going to paraphrase it a bit:

This is example of how love just isn’t able to cure all that ails us 😞 Some people just need more than is humanly possible to give - I see that every day.

I also believe that had you known the extent of her struggle - you would have done your best. Just like you were trying to understand what you were seeing and support her with the parts that you did know about.

One of the things that makes loving someone struggling like this is that they can look so good at times - beautiful, smart and functional - that it doesn’t give an accurate picture of the internal turmoil.

You’re her dad, Jason… you were not meant to have the skills to analyze all that. She would have had to let someone see all of the messy for her struggle to be known and she wasn’t ready to do that…

I know you’re going to do it - because you’re human and you love her - but try not to beat yourself up too much. The Dad she needed was the guy who sat in my office wondering how to help her. She had what she needed - she just didn’t know how to let you in. And that is very sad indeed.

I read her response while I was sitting in a parking lot and wept uncontrollably. She helped me change the conclusion I was starting to draw. I know in my heart I did my best and I know I am always trying to be better. That’s enough. For me to find peace, I think it has to be.

If I can encourage you to do one thing it’s to share the stories you’re telling yourselves with others. It’s absolutely amazing how we can make almost anything make sense when we let it metastasize inside our own head. Even saying our thoughts out loud or writing them down can make you realize how unproductive, misguided and toxic they’ve become.

Let people help you by offering you an alternate point of view. Recognize that the story they’re telling you might be just as valid as the one you’re telling yourself…as hard as that might be to accept.

There’s no amount of blame that will bring your loved one back and you will never hate yourself to rebuilding a life worth living. It’s been tried by millions of people over thousands of years. It never fucking works.

Living in Questions & Observing Your Stories

I think part of the path to peace is to simply allow yourself to live in the innumerable questions you’ll inevitably have. There are things that, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never have the answers to. The person who could answer them is dead.

Allow your mind to wander and wonder. Sit in the discomfort of learning to be ok with not having an answer and not trying to create one. The more you explore the questions without attaching yourself to answers, the more easily you’ll be able to explore them from a place of peace and curiosity.

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
- Susan David

What were Chloe’s last thoughts? I will never know. Did she have time to be scared? I will never know? Did she feel any pain? I will never know. Did she want to die? I will never know. Could I have changed the outcome? I will never know. What would her life have turned out like had she lived? I will never know? How would our lives have been different had she lived? I will never know.

Eventually I will be at peace with not knowing. I’m not there yet and I know I will be.

If you do find yourself creating answers, and you will, do your best not to make them the “truth.” In the end, they are nothing more than an interesting point of view.

We often confuse our thoughts with facts. It’s one of the biggest causes of conflict between people. Two people with different thoughts argue about them as though each of them is the only one holding a sacred truth.

One of the ways I keep facts and thoughts straight is to preface a lot of my thoughts with, “The story I’m telling myself is…”. It reminds that that, like all of us, I’m a story teller and story tellers gonna story tell.

Notice of the difference between:

• “I failed as Chloe’s dad.”

• “The story I’m telling myself is that I failed as Chloe’s dad.”

The first one is stated as an unassailable fact. “I’m a fuck up. Full stop.”

The second one leads me to ask myself why I’m telling myself that story in the first place. It makes it easier to reach out to someone and ask them for their version of the story. It makes me better able to accept that their version could be just as valid as mine. It helps free me from being attached to some made up narrative. It gives me the chance to make up a story that better serves me and honours Chloe’s memory.

Thirteen Years Later

Thirteen years later, when I think about Cindy, I no longer ask myself “If she was never going to get her shit together, are we better off without her?”

I don’t ask myself much of anything at all.

I just loved her. I still do. I always will. That’s enough.

It’s only been two weeks since Chloe’s death. It’s far too soon for me to achieved much peace. I’ll get there in time.

For now, I just loved her. I still do. I always will. And one day, that will be enough.