Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen: “Empathy in Three Movements” by Vedran Husić is a searing, consummate act of literary bravery, a poignant and profound essay about the capacity for love and the devastation of grief. With close attention to character as well as landscape and sense of place, this deeply lyrical essay shows us, through words and images, “the love that is grief, the grief that is love.”
We are honored to have published the work of Naira Kuzmich as well, the essay “Dances for Armenian Women” in our Issue 13.2.
Empathy in Three Movements
Adagio (pianissimo—sotto voce)
My walks through Los Angeles started right after Naira’s death. First, a walk around the block, almost a stroll if the pleasurable leisure of such a walk didn’t clash with my raving and tears. Those initial walks took place in the evening, when Naira’s extended family visited the house. Tradition forced me to mourn among the men, without her there to rescue me like she had during other Armenian gatherings of mourning or celebration. The men drank tequila shots and spoke of practical things in the backyard, while inside, with the women, her mother told stories and wept. Ghostly, I crossed the threshold from backyard into house, outside to inside, cigarette smoke to strong perfume, the women’s eyes kind, corvine, as they watched me pass like a specter across the living room parquet. They were vulturelike and maternal in their circle of mourning, in the ragged black of their plumage (a flowing, suitable, blurred, redundant black, black of tradition, convention, forced order, black that’s not black enough, a motherly black, black of the emptiness being filled with black, the shining black of condolences, the black whose black words I knew before it spoke). My lack of Armenian was a fine metaphor for my inability to express my grief for them to understand. They talked about me, I could tell, in low, speculating voices like those one on the brink of a tall building hears far, far below. Another’s grief is a mystery even to the initiated.
But I didn’t understand that then, and many people just have no talent for sympathy, Naira’s greatest skill, maybe because they never lost anybody or never loved the people they lost, at least not the way I love her. How could they ever understand my loss? At my angriest I wanted to lash out at everybody, to tell them never to compare what they’d never had to what I’d lost. I did scream once, and I hope she heard me, at two of her idiot male cousins who were spouting heresies of positive thinking, the ability of the will to overcome the incurable. At my most proud I found peace in being alone in my love and so having to be lonely in my grief. Some expected, and were frank in their expectation, for me to get over her death, to move forward, to move beyond this, to move on into a settled, ordinary, hidden grief. But this is everything, I wanted to say, to shout, all that there is, all that’s left. How I hated being handed a tissue, that hollow show of empathy, just a terminating gesture: no, I don’t want a tissue, and no, I don’t want to wipe the pain away, I never want to do that, as if I ever could—no, I don’t want to erase the ugly, wet suffering from my face.
There was also the simple exhaustion with mourning, the windup devotion of the living to the dead that must eventually wind down. I’d been guilty of that as well, in mourning others. All empathy has an expiration date, but grief does not.
In a house shrinking with good intentions, I was stuck between the polite conventions of everyone else’s mourning and my own eruptive, world-shaking, unfulfilled ideal of grief. Everyone else’s but that of her mother, whom I couldn’t reach through the crowd or with the English language. My grief made me feel alone in that overfull house, and part of this loneliness was the painful realization that I’d made others feel so lonely in their loss when I didn’t empathize strongly enough, when I couldn’t understand.
To not understand the dying was one thing; when she was dying, I couldn’t understand Naira, whom I had my whole heart’s compassion for even if I didn’t understand, a kind of holy empathy that she’d taught me. Her dying separated us before her death. I couldn’t know what she knew, and for once, the only time, my love for her couldn’t breach my ignorance of what she felt.
I must now have greater empathy for and understanding of the undying sick, the “merely” sick, sick with anxiety, sick with depression, sick with grief, the mind-sick, greater and deeper empathy, the deepest, most needed. I thought I had the capacity for it—empathy, sympathy, compassion, what’s the difference, some of us are just good people—because I had the capacity for love, from which empathy stems, but in my love I’d been ignorant of grief, thinking of it as a parasite of love’s happiness, maggot-grief, coiled larval killer waiting to spring fatally inside the guts of love. From Naira I learned that, yes, all grief has love as part of its lineage, and all grief is inherent in love, but the relationship isn’t parasitical; there’s stability there. She always experienced love with worry, worry of losing whom she loved. Naira acknowledged this worry, invited it into her heart, lived it. To love was already to grieve. She wrote an essay on it. Don’t ask me to use plural pronouns. It is it and not they. Love and grief, there never could be a difference for her, no contradiction, it, it, it, and it again.
Grief is the child pulled from the depth of her mother’s darkness. Love is the mother’s darkness giving way to the child. Yes, Naira, grief is born along with love, together, not twins, but the same child. Also, the one mother. And I know that, born as one, they must die together, but must they live on as it? I’d never trade a lesser grief for a weaker, narrower, less vital love, but I do hope, Naira, I have my faith that love’s the limitlessness of an afterlife, and grief’s confined to this world.
Each night, before sleep, my last words to her are this: I will miss you for the rest of my life and I will love you forever. The missing, too, has an expiration date, I hope, and the worry of loss and worrying about loss, and the grieving of it. When I die, my loss of her will be lost then, one way or another, and with it my grief, and hopefully all that will remain is my love, severed clean, ancient and renewed. I will love her forever, but I will grieve her only until my last—darkest or most light-filled—breath.
Allegretto (mezzo forte)
After my semester of teaching at Los Angeles Valley College ended, I walked all day. By then Naira had been dead just over a month, and I’d remain in LA for just less than that.
In the early morning, starting off from her family home on Whitsett and heading downhill toward Ventura, I saw fog fragmenting the mountains rising before me, filling the Valley and cushioning the hollows along the canyon trails that were sometimes my midday destination. More often I was without a set destination. I didn’t seek to discover anything; by wandering, however, I placed myself in the way of discovery. I was seeing everything anew, with a new intensity of feeling, the gas stations and grocery stores, the river-less LA River, the slivers of sharp green with a bench and ornamental tree between busy streets, post offices and tennis courts, a random residential area between Colfax Avenue and Laurel Canyon Boulevard, water hydrants, telephone wires, streetlights—all the wondrous sundry of the manmade world replenished with innocence. The intensity of my emotions made every sight new and memorable, but it also obscured the material world before my eyes. The sensory world. I felt a simultaneous remoteness from and immersion in the landscape I passed. On those walks LA become a place more conceptual than real. A space to reflect in, reflect on my loss and grief, the whole city swept into peripheral awareness, secluded, reserved, unpraised, innocent.
Restlessness sickens the healthy, and certainly it was and remains a symptom of my grief, but paradoxically, it’s also its cure. Not a cure, of course not, there’s no cure, but a temporary remedy, some adhesive and gauze. In LA, so soon after her death, I wanted to be out in the world, exercise my will, tire myself out, satisfy that urgent, irrational irritation, that unnameable but familiar need to wander, as strong and natural as seasonal change. The migrating instinct. There was no choice, but then all mobility, through an inner urge or by external pressure, is forced. Praying for sidewalks, I’d pick and switch streets at random, windswept, a leaf, feather, seed. Stirred and suffocating, I caught my breath, inhaled the gray air of this hostile and fascinating pastiche city, city of epic juxtapositions, exhausted my restlessness on the broad and billboarded streets, where sometimes the only reality, or the only thing that brought me back to it, was the mounting waft of a sewer or sidelong reek of trash.
I was there, was never more anywhere than I was there, then, and yet I wasn’t there, wasn’t there at all, as I waited in the hell of my restlessness for a light on Lankershim and Riverside to change, with a live crowd forming solidly around me during the lunch hour. Once, toward evening, stopping at that light, I listened to a street preacher’s mordent drift: the devil, sin, sin, sin, reckoning, climaxing with “near, near . . . ,” words on the wind, floating on air like a name across the sky. He added another frantic element to the intersection. Another time I’d seen the same man, young, bearded, slender but not too thin, thrift-store clothed, half hipster, half prophet, coming out from the underpass on Lankershim, no cart, no sign, nothing he owned or wanted, his voice urgent, frustrated, maniacal and innocent, full of enigmatic intensity—he hadn’t been preaching to the street that time but talking spiritedly on a flip phone.
On these walks I started comparing myself to the homeless around me, the only people I encountered regularly, my existence as random and as anonymous as theirs. (Sometimes I’d think how I could end up on these walks a victim of a random and anonymous act of fatal violence by an equally random and anonymous maniac. Briefly emancipated from any concern for my own safety, this thought was merely interesting and slightly, abstractly, exciting.) Each encounter, I compared myself to them unfavorably, wanting each time to trade my random and anonymous existence with any one of theirs, as long it didn’t include the death of a loved one, a most loved one. It was a dumb game, but I was sincerely envious of them, the poor, the homeless, the physically and mentally handicapped; for all of them I now had this calculated, cold-eyed envy. Was I being too empathetic, or not enough?
One day, in a side street off Vineland, in the Arts District, I was asked by a Hispanic family in a SUV for money; I was on foot. They had each other, I was without Naira. Once there’d been guilt in my refusal of the homeless and the other more tacitly impoverished—but not anymore: I had no money to give them anyway, and neither then nor now had I the happiness they might be able to have, but never again me.
Even the refugees I saw later when I was in Sarajevo, a large group drably huddled in a bare encampment in a small park—even them, I envied. After all I was much better off when I’d been a refugee. Trade places with the placeless. Trade places, trade fates. I’d trade any luxury I owned for the poorest, most meager life together, the grace of my current suffering for the blessing of suffering less, the loss of limb, eye, ear, mind for . . . But there’s no bartering of grief.
I thought much about the homeless, the refugees, the migrant workers on LA street corners waiting to fill the bed of a truck and be taken to a jobsite—how that’s no kind of life but how it is a kind of living.
And the homeless preacher I saw, one of God’s children too and confined to the same random and anonymous sidewalk existence as me, if that man was a real prophet, would I have recognized him as such? The enigmatic intensity in his voice as grace? As the enigmatic intensity of grace? On the phone, was he actually talking to anyone at all? Was I?
On those walks I felt like a homeless man with a home. Like a mailman without mail.
Presto (fortissimo—diminuendo—crescendo)
Each morning abandon everything, wake, begin walking. Throughout the day take on nothing, keep walking. At night bring it all back home, sleep. Sleep, walk, think, dream, sleep again. Walk until exhausted—walk, walk, walk. Grief stretched my walks, and I found deeper solitudes in which to be with her, to speak to her, often erratically, sometimes with an erratic eloquence. I talked incessantly, narrating my grief, narrating the city, narrating the blurred, melting, merging interiors and exteriors of my movements through these streets. I talked to her too much about myself, the vanity of the living. I lingered over my sensations, over each one, described, dissected, indexed them, a way of being alive. Of being in the moment, in every one, even the most transient moments not escaping my careful measurement, my slow taste of them. My whole will involved in this work, I also felt I worked distractedly, measuring in the fugue of mourning, tasting without real savor. I inhabited the present, a haunted present, but moved toward the future as well, toward the unknown, toward her. I wanted always to speak to her, to show Naira every new thing, the instinct of my mind and heart always turned toward her. Only natural, in the street, to turn toward her—on my right—and tell her something I saw, thought, felt, remembered or dreamed, so why should it be unnatural in the street now to turn toward her again, in any direction but, habitually, to the right, and speak to her, talk to her always, tell her everything. Anything my grief asked, my love had to answer, talking to itself.
But in the depth of my solitude, speech, and sadness, I’d be brought up to the surface by an abrupt passerby or there’d suddenly be someone behind me when there’d been nobody only seconds ago when I last turned around to check. Looking over my shoulder all the time, how paranoid I must’ve appeared (I look back once, twice, nobody there, and then on a third, gratuitous look, someone suddenly behind me and impossibly close). Or I’d trip and stumble, or step in some gum, or dog shit, or a pothole that made my knees buckle; children would scream and adults laugh—all these people, much too alive, interrupting my guarded-off mourning. Joggers sprang upon me, other pedestrians became a personal affront, caricatures of my being, everyone in my local universe a challenge to my solitude and the private holiness of my grief.
The canyon trails, where I’d hiked with Naira on weekends, were best, on weekdays: Wilacre Park up to Fryman or Coldwater Canyon. Once I found a path and hiked to the overlook on Mulholland Drive, turning off the music because I couldn’t take music into this elevated solitude, this new altitude of grief. It was December 21, and under a solstice moon, in the dusk’s suspended luminosity—the long twilights of those days!—I began my silent ascent. The depression that intensified with the coming of night weighing on my mind and the mania of grief racing through my heart and legs, I ran-climbed the hill, desperate as always for the top, wanting a clearer view of the city in which I was so hopelessly lost, a better vantage of my loss and its hopelessness. The green vertigo of that climb! Approaching the overlook almost at a sprint, fleetly deerlike in the scudding breeze, I had another impulse on the chaparral-muffled hillside: to yell her name, let my voice echo with it, have Naira soar over these hills and canyons and taper out and disappear in the valley below. In complete solitude one doesn’t need a name, but I wanted to scream hers over this city and have it carry across the whole dark folded world.
There were people at the top, other “tourists,” taking pictures of the dramatic landscape, of themselves being dramatic in front of it, Romantically perched on the small stooped boulders at the edge of the world. Below, the depth of the canyon, the dark drop pulling me down with it, my eyes, my imagination. A giddy foreboding. I stood on the brink waiting for the other people to leave, waiting and wondering what madness awaited at the world’s edge, or at the bottom of the world, and what solitude in that madness? Each day in LA I was mastering my descent. Even up here. Opposite me, igniting the ridges one final time, light faded imperceptibly behind the distinct, jagged, looming blue-gray of far mountains, the canyon filling with the black stream of night, cushioning the steepness like the morning fog had.
The taken-for-granted movement of the sun across the sky, its amazing reality, I charted for the first time on those walks.
Dusk and a rim-eye view of all of Kidron below. A broken fragment from the Gospels came to me then, as if from above, but amplified by the depth of the gorge: the quacking earth and the renting rocks. All my knowledge of the Gospels is mangled.
Then there was no one there but me, in the near-night, on the edge of a padded darkness; I spoke her name, hesitantly at first, more confidently the second time, then with desperation, a howling call and a howling call back, double-syllabled, Nai-ra, breaking her name in half and making it whole again against the sky, Nai-ra, inhale, exhale, Nai-ra, a loud breath.
I screamed her name from that speechless height into the silent dusking, then, one last time, into the moon-bright quiet, eerily tender, rinsed by nightfall. I screamed it out of the love that’s grief, the grief that’s love, cried it out like a child to a mother, a mother to a child. Nai-ra, with the power of a word spoken in need, in faith, a prayer, one unanswered yet never in vain—the power of repetition and the magic of recitation always in a word’s rising, accumulated, magnified belief. I’d never stop calling, Naira, I never have, Naira, Naira, Naira.
Writer’s statement:
“Empathy in Three Movements,” in slightly altered form, is part of my recently completed memoir, For Those Truly Living, which deals with my partner, Naira Kuzmich, and her struggle with cancer, our life before and during it, and a year of my life following her death in 2017 at the age of twenty-nine. As the title of this nonfiction piece makes clear, it is about empathy and, stated more implicitly, music and walking, specifically in the San Fernando Valley in LA right after Naira’s passing. Early on in my grieving, these walks saved my mind.
There had been a game I often played when I saw Naira coming my way—the real, the living Naira, not the one I imagined on my walks after her death (when I had to restrain my hand from reaching out, nerves having the longest memory). Back when she was alive and I’d see her approach, I’d pretend to myself that she was this beautiful stranger I’d just glimpsed by merciful chance alone: first came the intimidation, an instinct; then came an objective awe; and, lastly, the allowed recognition that her beauty was not only a general wonder of this world but also my specific, personal blessing. This recognition of her beauty led to a recognition of my blessedness, becoming a more subjective awe—for awe was always part of my love for her.
Her recognition of me would be first in her eyes, in the birdlike penetration of those remarkably large dark-brown eyes. Then came a smile: small, closed, confirmative—you, me, us, our happiness.
Then: hello.
Like that, a vision of her would cross my mind’s eye as I walked through “the Valley,” a mute, jagged, icy white, spasmodic wedge of distant lightning. Just like that—Naira. Sometimes, these unsolicited visions wrecked my brain. Electrical, hurried, metallic, splintering. Other times, they soothed and excited me with their gentle unexpectedness, a gift. They relieved me by reliving her: imagination, memory, grief—all combining in an imperfect impersonation of Naira’s existence. Writing has now become a prolonged form of these visions, a sustained reanimating flash.
I walk less now than I did back then, but wherever I walk, I hope Naira walks beside me, invisible, dignified, present, and though I’m no longer aware of the grace of her presence, the presence of her grace walks always with me. More than that, I hope that all these walks lead back to her, to a last coming together at the border toward which we are both walking now from opposite directions, and that we will eventually greet each other there.
At my heart’s final halt, a hello.
Vedran Husić was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and raised in Germany and the United States. His collection of stories, Basements and Other Museums (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), won the St. Lawrence Book Award. He has work published in The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading, Image, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
