The Sunday Letter #22: Gifts
Happy New Year, beloved starlings. As I sit here typing, I’m wishing all of you glorious, bright, incandescent days ahead. (And not, as my neighbour and friend pointed out a few days ago, incandescent as in on fire, but incandescent as in warm and glowing! May the year light something in you that carries you forward through the dark.)
I have been thinking a lot over this past month about light, and about darkness. As our enormous-to-us-but-tiny-to-everyone-else planet completes its winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, shiftting back from the farthest point of tilt away from the Sun and moving once again towards it. Moving through these longest winter days with both the knowledge and also the hope that brighter days are coming. Knowledge because we do know, scientifically, that the seasons will turn again, but also hope because I’ll be darned if winter doesn’t feel like it will never end every single year!
December has been a difficult month these past few seasons. It’s hard to wake up at the beginning of the month and think about what was happening to Jess and her family four years ago—hard to imagine what her parents and her siblings and her husband and everyone who was closer to her then at that point in time could see, hard to imagine what they knew was coming.
By which I mean, of course, not hard to imagine, because I can, but hard to imagine because death and dying and the pain that we all carry feels endless and completely unfathomable, even as it is also the most ordinary thing in the world.
I keep having flashbacks of those last few days, her sister said to me, once. Because this is what we do, isn’t it. When death comes, when we are faced with that inevitable sense of all of a person’s days unwinding, the clock ticking down to a stop.
I can’t stop thinking about how all the days of his life were counting down to that moment, my friend said to me in November, in the immediate days after his father died unexpectedly. I can’t get it out of my head.
Death comes to us all, doesn’t it. And every time it does, somehow we’re surprised. Here we are, flailing about in the dark, convinced on some level that the warmer days will never come to us again.
Somehow, this past year, December managed to be both hard and wonderful for me at the same time. I spent the days leading up to December 6 in a Jess haze—thinking about all of the things left unsaid, all of the ways in which I was so oblivious to her pain and her struggle and the true nature of her last few weeks. The day before December 6 I went for lunch with my friend Amy and all I could say was, “The days feel normal and also…not. Everything is the same and also…not.” There is always a charged energy around this time, a sinking-in of feeling that is sad and soft and achy.
Here we are again, I found myself thinking on the morning of that day. Here we are, spinning back out from that day again, off on this unexpected trajectory, twirling lonely out in space.
But at the same time as all of this was happening, I was also spinning in a different place. I spent most of November and December finishing edits on my new novel (WILD LIFE! Coming to a bookstore near you in Spring 2025!) and doing precious little else and it. Was. A glorious time. I can’t express it any other way. I woke up on a regular schedule without an alarm clock and walked the dog and exercised and wrote, wrote, wrote the whole day long and read and sometimes (a lot of times) I avoided talking to people entirely and it was GLORIOUS. Wonderful. Every day felt perfect even as it was also steeped in sadness. Every day felt like a gift. And nothing about any day was extraordinary, even given the gift-ness. So normal! Such small, ordinary, mundane pleasures. Lattes in the morning and chai tea in the afternoon and homemade vegan burrito bowls for dinner that were so good I honestly think I’d be happy eating nothing else but those for the rest of my life.
I had hoped to finish my revisions before Christmas. I finished them on December 21, and then I read the book over again during the week between Christmas and New Year’s and sent the revisions on to my editor. And now these first few months of 2024 are open and clear and ready for me to start working in earnest on the book that I’m writing about Jess and our friendship.
The entire month felt like a gift, if I’m honest, even in spite of its inevitable pain. And it felt, in all the ways, like a gift come straight from her.
When I sat down to write this first post of the year I had this whole idea that I would write it about that cold dark stretch of space we inhabit during the winter months—this time of being at the farthest point away from our ordinary star. How we travel through the dark and the cold back to the brighter, warmer days. How the winter months have traditionally been seen as a sacred time of rest and rejuvenation, how instead of fearing the dark as we all too often do, our human response over millennia has been to hunker down, to get cozy in whatever ways we can, to rest and wait out the darkness because there is nothing else to do.
Then I sat down and discovered that this whole grand romantic image I had of the planet existing in the loneliest stretch of its orbit was, in fact, wrong. Because of course winter in the Northern Hemisphere coincides with Summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Warmer days very much exist in December, just not in the north! We are not on the farthest, loneliest stretch of our orbit in December—we are merely at our farthest point of tilt away from the Sun. A merry 23.4 degrees of tilt, if we’re going to be specific.
But the metaphor still holds a little, I think. I have been thinking so much about solitude and dark and quiet in these last five months of 100% writer time. The pull I’ve had to solitude and quiet and only-so-much-energy for speaking. (Both professionally, and also, um, just in general. Haha. With utmost apologies to all of my extrovert friends!) How so much of my time in Scotland was solitary pursuit, and how there was sometimes a tension that arose around this—I got lonely! I worried that I would no longer have any social connections once I got back!—but how it was also tension that inevitably dwindled away. Ultimately everything during that prolonged period of alone-away time—just like my prolonged period of alone-writing-time in November and December, and the upcoming period of alone-again-writing-time in these first few months of the year—felt perfect. Necessary. There was nothing to do but bow before it, sink in, and let the isolation and the quiet do what it needed to do while understanding that eventually, different days would come.
I am reminded once again that the Buddhists are not wrong. Nothing—not even winter, not even those first terrible flushes of grief—lasts forever. Everything is always changing. Even grief becomes something different to carry in some way.
One of the other things that struck me in the first year after Jess died was the overwhelming need I felt for everything to stop. I wanted to stop working, to stop going outside, to stop talking to people in person and on Zoom. When the world did grind to some version of a halt during the pandemic (though if we’re honest, it never really stopped at all—it just figured out ways to keep everything going while also paying lip service to rest) I confess I had months—months—of secret shameful relief. The pandemic was so hard (and continues to be hard! To be very clear!) for so many people and even so, for a very large part of it at the beginning I walked around thinking, thank goodness. I love this. I love not having to travel anywhere. I love the fact that we are all now encouraged to stay inside. I’m going to social distance myself right into my house and never come out except to walk the dog.
A large part of that was me being my core introvert self, I know. But twirling into life now, four years after those initial panicked months of 2020, I can also see that part of it was just the relentless nature of grief. That sense that you have of your life having changed so completely while everyone else seems to be going about their business as though nothing has changed at all.
You see, I wanted to say to those around me as we struggled through March, and then April, and May, and all the months that came after. You get it now, don’t you.
How else to explain to everyone else that my ambition had disappeared? I didn’t want to work in arts admin anymore. I no longer cared about climbing the CanLit ladder, even as I put two new books out into the world and still wanted them to do well. I wrote almost nothing for the entirety of 2020. I stopped being able to read.
The world had gone black and silent and marching forward through the dark felt both impossible and also fake. I knew on some level—just as we always know, in the winter—that warmer days would come again, but they would meet me in a different way now. My life, in turn, needed to be different when they did.
We all know how terrible we are at grieving in the Western world. You get some time off of work if you’re lucky. When I worked at a hospital years ago, you got a maximum of four days off if your spouse died. (If it was a child, you’d get a week. Two days for a sibling. Grandparent? Niece or nephew? Soulmate best friend? Sorry, out of luck.)
But even extraordinary situations beyond this—when people have the opportunity to take weeks or months off in the wake of grief—don’t really cut it, do they. What I was wanting all those years ago was an acknowledgment from the world that my trajectory as a whole had changed. What I wanted was someone to sit down with me and say, “Your whole life is going to change now, and here are the supports you’ll need to make this happen.”
Can you imagine how different our society would be if this was the way we lived our lives? Like meteor-preparedness, except for your soul. Something has come to change you, to obliterate the shores and coastlines of who you thought you were, but that’s okay. You can go and find other work and here are resources to help you do that. You can go and find other friends or find yourself drawn to different people and that might hurt, but it’s okay—we understand.
As I was mulling this over in December I thought about what a world that welcomed this kind of outlook might be like. But isn’t that selfish? I wondered. Doesn’t that then compound the difficulty and make your grief into the grief of otther people, by forcing change on others when you could just grapple through it on your own?
But maybe this is the point, isn’t it. The solution to our fear of change—which lies at the heart of all our fears about death, about illness, about letting go—is not to strive for a world where change is impossible but instead turn to a world where change happens everywhere, all of the time.
Change even just in outlook, so that an ordinary December of writing somehow ends up looking entirely different. Sacred and magical in its very ordinaryness. The way that even grief and sadness, in their way, can be sacred and magical and ordinary too.
This prolonged period of quiet and rest and solitude I’m currently in has felt like hibernation, yes. But it also feels like a chrysalis. Is it any wonder that I finished those revisions right on December 21, and moved from one project to another at that point in our annual journey? Saying goodbye to one project, one stage of life, and shifting into another. Change is coming, change is coming.
Change even to this Substack! Starting next week, I’ll be introducing a few new elements to Notes From a Small Planet. Like THIS:
The weekly Sunday Letter will “officially” move into biweekly status. I say “officially” because I might still have times where it comes out every week. (What do you even mean, Leduc, you say. The Sunday Letter has, like, hardly ever actually been on an honest-to-goodness weekly schedule. But this is exactly my point! Shifting the newsletter to biweekly mostly means that I will not carry around the crushing guilt of having failed everyone when these long, researched, weekly letters do not happen. I am prioritizing rest and rejuvenation and love for myself this year, not just in the winter! Bring on the spinning change!)
Starting next week, I’ll be introducing two new features: the Stellar Survey and the Constellation Ruminations! These features will alternate every week.
The Stellar Survey will be a free collection of the week’s interesting space news and space factoids—some of which you might know, and some of which you might not. I’ll also sprinkle in some fun bits of space folklore and history because I love myself a good story, especially of the stellar kind.
The Constellation Ruminations will be a paid series of bi-weekly posts that go through the 88 constellations in our night sky, according to the International Astronomical Union. In each post I’ll talk about a particular constellation and delve a little bit into its history and mythology, and why we’ve been obsessed for so long with the idea that the stars are ways for us to memorialize the dead.
Starting next week as well, I’ll also open up a thread for paid subscribers—a place to share ruminations on grief and community and change. It will probably just be me nattering on for the first little bit. But if you’d like to join, please know that you are already so welcome. <3
Finally: I will add to my Sunday Letters with one personal paid post every week. These posts will be shorter (famous last words, I know) and mostly filled with ordinary things, like the goings on in my life on a given day and stories about my dog.
Finally: if you are reading this and thinking, but Amanda, you just wrote a whole post in December about how you’re trying to streamline your Substack energy and now here you’ve gone and announced four new parts to your newsletter, are you quite sure you’re feeling all right?—my answer, of course, is that it is January! The month when we all make impossible, hard-to-keep resolutions! Who am I to buck that trend?
In all seriousness, I am (perhaps unwisely) optimistic that the above can be managed. I’ve tried to balance out introducing smaller, bullet-point-style things with easing up on the Sunday letter just a tad. We’ll see how it goes. (I’ve also been researching other Substacks and all of the ones I really like have multiple offerings and none of them appear to be helmed by just one person but are in fact managed by small teams, so my optimism is likely not only unwise but also severely misguided. Heigh-ho, 2024!)
In the meantime, beloveds, I hope this finds you cosy and keeping your own chrysalis vigil through these January days. May you find warmth in whatever ways you can. <3
Currently Reading: True Refuge, by Tara Brach
Currently Watching: Life On Our Planet
Currently Eating: Smitten Kitchen’s Squash and Chickpea Moroccan Stew (v.v. good, and if you don’t have preserved lemons you can make a quick substitute here).
Currently Substacking: Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert. I heart all things Liz! (Also, her interview with Jane Ratcliffe and her answers to Sari Botton’s Oldster Questionnaire are fabulous.)