Page 48 of Gracie Harris Is Under Construction

“Sometimes it’s easier to do the hard stuff with strangers,” he says, echoing what I’ve learned about grief over the last year. “Of course, with the knowledge that the people who love you are behind the scenes cheering you on.”

As Darrell talks, it dawns on me that today’s podcast episode isn’t just about grief. Turns out it’s about the avoidance of grief. Maisy’s line of questioning with Darrell makes this clear. This is a much more specific niche of the grief world than what I’ve been peddling.

Darrell has been the focus for a solid fifteen minutes, so I know my time is coming soon.

Maisy has allowed me to interject with a few questions of my own for Darrell, giving me time to engage while also having a private conversation with myself about how the hell I’m going to answer questions that she might have.

The pivot back to me happens when I’m staring at the studio wall, trying to remember why I agreed to this strange torture.

“Gracie, we’re here to talk about grief—you are the queen of grief, after all—but what I find most curious about you and Darrell is how you both avoided engaging with the very moment that changed your life.

We’ve just watched a video of Darrell’s injury, but there doesn’t seem to be any record or published essay on Ben’s death.

Perhaps you could talk us through that and the reason for keeping it a secret? ”

I start to drop my canned line about privacy, but I can tell she’s preparing follow-ups that will render my practiced lines worthless. A quick glance to the control studio, where both of our publicists are posted, delivers a look from Lucia that borders on disappointment. Go deep , she mouths.

I can control this, or Maisy can. I can own how this story gets told, or someone else can. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, the sadness, or the desperate need for some release, but I have the catalyst I need to do it. I’m going to go deep—so I dive in with reckless abandon.

“Maisy, do you want to know why I don’t want to talk about Ben’s death?

Ben was lively and fun and handsome and so full of life.

He had these beautiful blue eyes that could see right into my soul.

He was my everything for over twenty years, and then suddenly he was a lifeless body on a hospital bed full of tubes.

Gray skin, closed eyes. My Ben was gone.

I didn’t get to say goodbye to him . Not really.

I don’t want to talk about his death because all it brings to mind is a corpse that can’t hug me or love me.

That body is the last memory I have in my mind of the man that I loved. ”

“Gracie, that’s so hard,” she says with genuine care and emotion in her eyes. “I imagine it takes some serious mental energy to keep something like that inside.”

“It has been a struggle. I guess that I don’t want anyone—my friends, my readers, and certainly not our kids—to think of Ben in the context of his death.

I want everyone to imagine the person that I miss, that I loved, that I sometimes make fun of in my essays for silly little things.

It feels so much truer to who he was. To who we were. ”

“I can imagine that you feel very responsible for his legacy,” she says, before leaning forward and pressing again for the answer that I have yet to give. “The secret still seems to be the how , Gracie. Would it hurt his legacy for us to know? Is that why you keep it private?”

She thinks how he died is the secret.

“What? That’s not a secret. He had a heart attack.

He had a heart attack at forty-two years old.

The secret, Maisy, isn’t how Ben died,” I say with hot, soft tears now streaming down my face.

“The big secret that I’ve carried for the last year is that I’m relieved that I wasn’t there when it happened.

I’m glad that he was out drinking with his friend Drew.

I’m glad I had a business dinner. Any other night we all would’ve been at home, as a family.

When I try to imagine that happening around the dinner table or while he was kicking the soccer ball with my daughter or reading comics with my son, it’s just too much.

Our house would’ve never felt the same again.

So, my big secret—the real reason that I don’t want to share the particulars—is because the overwhelming sense that I have when I think of it happening the way that it did is relief .

I’ve come to terms with the fact that he was always going to die at 7:05 on that Tuesday night.

Nothing I could have done would have prevented his death, and I certainly couldn’t have saved him.

So, the thing I feel is relief that I wasn’t there. ”

There is a long pause in the studio. I look over at Darrell, and he has his right hand covering the lower part of his face.

Tears are welling in his eyes. Maisy is looking at me with the same expression that so many people had at the memorial service.

It says, without reservation, I’m so glad this didn’t happen to me .

I’ve told nobody this. Not my parents or Jenny, Dr. Lisa or Josh.

This has been my deepest secret for over a year, and I’ve just shared it with everyone.

This is what I’ve been running from, avoiding, shielding myself from for over a year.

I expect to feel the shake, but it doesn’t materialize.

Maybe, just maybe, this is what I’ve been holding in all along. Afraid to blurt this out.

“Part of me thinks it was a strange last gift from Ben to us that it happened the way it did,” I add, the one to break the few seconds of silence that felt like eternity.

“It seems really selfish to feel this way, but I’m not sure I would’ve survived being there when it happened, and I think he knew it.

I don’t think I’m built for that, because I’ve barely made it through all of this.

Every essay you’ve read, every interview I’ve given…

it’s all just been me barely hanging on. ”

“That’s grief, though, isn’t it?” Darrell chimes in. “Deciding every day what you have the capacity to handle and what you don’t and realizing it’s okay—really, truly okay—to put something off for another day if it means getting through this one.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Maisy says. “Four months before you lost Ben, I lost my mom. The way you wrote about your grief allowed me to deal with things in my life. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know everything you were going through.

The things you did share were deeply meaningful to me and to so many others. ”

Maisy asks a few more questions, giving me time to acclimate to the fact that I’ve just shared a huge secret. She then adeptly steers the conversation away from the shock and awe of my and Darrell’s respective big moments and tenderly walks through the different stages of grief we’ve experienced.

In the final minutes of the podcast, when it’s my turn to share, I embrace the spirit of today and dive right back into the deep end.

“I’ve been in the denial stage, I think, since day one,” I say.

“The trouble is that for a long time, I’ve been focused on one death, one loss, but in reality, what I’ve actually experienced is something far different.

I got married when I was twenty-three. When you get married that young, when you love your partner that deeply, you can’t help but envision a world where you’re celebrating a sixtieth anniversary surrounded by your kids, grandkids, and a lifetime of friends.

Darrell told us earlier that he started playing football when he was seven.

Seven! This man built every day of his adolescent and adult life around this game.

And the entire time, he had that one goal, that one vision—Super Bowl MVP—driving his life. He was so close.”

“Are you saying it’s more than just one thing you’re grieving?” she asks.

“Yes. Look, I’m grieving Ben. So much,” I say, my voice still a little shaky from earlier.

“And, yes, Darrell is mourning that one moment and the injury. But you have to understand that it’s like the timeline we saw down the road was snipped.

Cut off. I will never have a twentieth wedding anniversary with Ben, let alone a sixtieth one.

Darrell will never step foot on a field to play again.

At least not in uniform. We’re grieving the future we were supposed to have.

Meant to have. We’re grieving the end of one life and trying to figure out how the hell we start a new one.

A new one we never expected to have. One we never asked for.

And we need a new version of ourselves to do that. ”

“Where do you go from here? How do you reorient yourself after a loss that sets your life on a different path?” she asks Darrell.

He gives a beautiful answer about how he wakes up most days feeling nothing but possibility and how he’s not rushing to figure out the next thing.

He’s also giving himself permission to have bad days, because bad days still do happen. Then Maisy asks me the same question.

“First and foremost, I want grieving people to know it’s okay to feel this way,” I share.

“To feel deeply sad and loudly mad and maybe even a little self-centered. Mourning the end of one life is hard. And it’s hard because we don’t acknowledge that’s what it is—because perhaps the enormity of it would pull us to depths that could be hard to swim out of.

In my case, it’s an admission that Ben is gone forever and that I will never, ever be the same person again as a result.

But I’m not sure it’s possible to mourn fully without acknowledging that reality at some point. ”

“When did you have that aha moment, Gracie?” she asks, staring at me, hopeful for the answer that I know is the honest one.

“Just now.”