The Power of Rehearsing Grief

Ariel Gore and wife Deena Chafetz

Source: Ariel Gore

When my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, lots of people said, “I can’t imagine.”

Since her death, many more have assured me of the same: They can’t imagine what I’m going through.

But I would like to make a case for imagining. You don’t need to share the way you see yourself handling death—or disease or grief—with someone who’s actively facing it, but our imaginations help us prepare for the inevitabilities of life, one of which is death.

My imagination helped me prepare, anyway. And why wouldn’t it? Theater people know that the muscle memories they develop during rehearsals get them through opening night jitters and surprises. Athletes understand they can up their game by visualizing themselves at peak performance. When my wife and I got hitched, we hadn’t rehearsed. Gay marriage was only provisionally legal in our county, so we headed for the courthouse unprepared. We had to improvise. I didn’t know where to put my purse. And we got stuck with the standard vows.

Five years later, when she was diagnosed, her cancer had already spread to several sites in her bones, but her prognosis gave us another few years to, well . . . imagine. And rehearse. There’s something cruel about a slow march to certain death, but I came to see the time life gave us to imagine how things would go as a kind of a gift, too.

Rehearsing requires us to move through the initial panic.

Sure, long before we knew my wife had cancer, I’d run worst-case scenarios through my anxiety-brain when she was late home from work. Had there been an accident? Was she having an affair with her hot sous chef? Had she stopped at McDonalds, which she would never admit but the car would smell of Big Mac for days and I’d have to pretend I didn’t notice? I let the scenarios flash across my mind, but I never pushed past the dread.

Why I hadn’t bothered to imagine what “‘til death do us part” might look like as an ending, I can’t really explain. My mother and both my grandmothers had been widowed, but I figured that was something I could think about when I got older.

I was only 49 when my wife was diagnosed.

She was only 53.

But right away, I started imagining.

With each new treatment she ingested, I read the lists of potential side effects and I imagined tomorrow and the end of tomorrows.

In my mind’s eye, I rehearsed staying calm and bringing water and orange slices. I practiced knowing when it would be time to go to the ER. I kept a purple backpack ready. I tried to notice when I couldn’t even conjure an image of calm, which meant that I needed to go for a hike or call a friend or leave town entirely, because that was the kind of relationship we had—I was allowed to take a break when I needed one.

Walking myself through the hard experiences that might come helped me keep it together in the real and lived moments. The Stoics get a bad rap for seeming to repress their emotions, but that misses the meditative and mystical parts of their philosophy.

“Rehearse death,” the Roman Seneca said. “You only get one chance at it.”

He makes it seem almost irresponsible not to imagine it. Maybe even arrogant. Would you breeze onto a movie set without ever having shown up for a table read?

Deena Chafetz a month before she died

Source: Ariel Gore

In the years that came after my wife’s diagnosis, I rehearsed her death dozens of times. When one of her chemotherapies listed heart failure as a potential side-effect, I imagined a sudden collapse, and I kept an eye on her from the kitchen window when she went outside to water the vining tomato plants. When she clutched her chest and gasped for breath and I rushed her to the ER, I imagined her vital signs flatlining and the providers being obliged to revive her dead body because she’d refused to sign a do-not-resuscitate directive. When the cancer center sent bills for tens of thousands of dollars we didn’t have and she picked up her keys from the table and walked out the back door and let it slam behind her, I rehearsed taking the call from the Taos county sheriff who would tell me he’d found her Jeep abandoned on The Gorge Bridge. When it came to healthcare decisions, my ethos had always been “her body, her choice,” so I rarely offered my opinion at doctors appointments, but I rehearsed the day I’d have to step in and question the ethics of continuing treatments that everyone knew were only causing her more suffering.

In all those years of illness and abuse from the medical system, I felt at once like an actor, an endurance athlete, and a blushing bride.

The last time my wife was in the hospital, as she contemplated coming home into hospice, I lay alone in our bed and rehearsed my own death. It seemed only fair, if I was asking her to accept the next step in her journey, that I shouldn’t shy away from my own ending. I lay very still, closed my eyes, and looked into the cosmos. I saw a blue light in the starry night sky and I imagined myself separating from my body and rising. I breathed into the scene, then sat up very quickly, a little panicked. I went to the fridge to get some strawberry ice cream.

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“It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die,” Seneca said.

I took that as a kind of reassurance. My wife only had a few weeks or months now, but I told myself I probably had more time. Maybe I could stave off my panic a little longer in each subsequent rehearsal.

When my wife did come home and finally signed the DNR that would allow her to begin hospice, I could tell she’d been rehearsing, too. She was visibly calmer, and her face glowed with more compassion when her friends stopped by and inevitably said the wrong thing.

I doubt my own rehearsals took any of the sting out of watching her claw through the pain of that last month, but I think my willingness to imagine it allowed me to keep breathing, to mostly not erupt into panic, to call the right people at the right times, to not run away and spend her final days doing tequila shots in some roadside motel halfway to Los Angeles. I stayed home, like I imagined I would. I respected our ethos of “her body, her choice” until it didn’t feel safe, and I held her hand and told her honestly when I thought it was time to let go.

Rehearsals for Dying

Source: Ariel Gore

My wife’s death wasn’t easy. She wasn’t at peace. I saw things I don’t wish into anyone else’s imagination, but I was able to stay present. In the end, my wife’s death took everything I had—psychologically, spiritually, and logistically.

I can only imagine how hard it would have been if I hadn’t rehearsed.

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