Verified by 
Take it from me. I’ve had a few mid—life crises. I am to mid—life crisis like some women are to orgasms. Multiple. My mid—life crises vary in strength and duration. Who’s counting? But I’ve had two big ones and several small ones. I bet I can squeeze in one more big one before I’m too old to be called mid—life.
It’s not just quantity; it’s quality too. I’ve had the best mid-life crises a guy could ask for. Everything I know about life I learned from mid—life crises. Especially the big ones—strong, juicy learning experiences, though excruciating at the time.
I’m interested in how to grieve our way through crises efficiently. I don’t mean how to escape them ASAP because they hurt so much, but how to harvest the most benefit from the pain while you’re in it. From elementary school on, so much of what we try to learn is motivated abstractly—like someday we’ll need it. Crises motivate us to learn with visceral urgency, golden opportunities to get real.
I got into the idea of speed grief watching my mother. For 13 years she attended to my father as he died of cancer. Then, in seemingly perfect health, she took her time grieving his death, only to discover a year into it that she had terminal cancer from which she died a year later, two years after my father. She didn’t regret the time she took in grieving my father, but it served as a warning to me. Life is so short. If we knew how short it was we might grieve our losses more efficiently.
I keep track of how much of my remaining life expectancy I’ve spent grieving some loss. My second big mid—life crisis took up about four percent of my remaining life expectancy. It’s easy to calculate and therapeutic to know.
I’ve mentioned my interest in speed grieving to a few friends, several of whom dismiss it scornfully. “Grief takes as long as it takes. There’s no prescription. The only way out is through it.”
They’re entitled to their opinion but I bet that isn’t really it. Like any of us, these friends know people who have grieved too short or too long. Apparently there are plenty of ways out other than through it and there are some who never get out of it. Anyway, my opinion is different. Anything worth doing is worth doing efficiently. And grief is worth doing.
I have my own perhaps, self—affirming, be—like—me ideas about what it means to get through grief really. I count three basic take—aways from grief:
When the going gets tough, the majority get entrenched: Count what befell you as an outlier, nothing to learn, nothing to change. Persevere. Try, try again. Double down on your prior commitments. Interpret things as you had before.
180 Achy Degree Turn: Treat the crisis as the writing on the wall, the universe teaching you to to flip your commitments 180 degrees. You used to believe in X; now you believe anti—X with equal and opposite confidence. I once was lost but now I’m blind. Reinterpret sharply opposite from how you interpreted before.
Epistemology (curiosity about how we interpret the world): Get philosophical. Console yourself with better understanding of how decisions—yours and other people’s happen. Gain compassion for yourself and others through appreciation of the difficult challenge of betting well in an uncertain world.
I think epistemology is the true object of the grieving game. Therein lies everything I’ve learned about life from grieving. Understandably, most of us haven’t the appetite, aptitude, time or resources to get very epistemological. But that’s my perspective on what constitutes the richest harvest.
Grief is typically triggered by a cosmic wedgie or two, some big yanks that pull us up shorter, tighter and more restricted than we were expecting. You lose your partner, job, child, home, anything big and you’re forced into a disorienting bout of high-—states expectation management.
Your formerly fuller glass is now half empty. Should you try to get a refill? Should you pour what’s left into a smaller tumbler so it feels full again? Crises force us into serenity—prayer questions about what to have the courage to try to restore from our lost happiness and what to have the serenity to accept as permanently lost. It's important to distinguish what you can get elsewhere from what you have to give up. They require opposite effort, the effort to hold on and let go.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca said “No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity.” I love that quote and yet I don’t think it captures our inevitable experience of crush at loss and misfortune. I don’t know anyone who can long resist the pleasures of good fortune, nor anyone who can partake of good fortune for long without developing a habit of expecting it that is at least a little crushing when dashed.
I know machines that could do it. A car, for instance, can enjoy a long lush road trip. Turn the car off and after a few residual turns of the crankshaft, the car settles into idleness, perfectly contented. Cars have no expectations. Not so, us living creatures. We accumulate and therefore have to manage expectations.
One older friend, currently grieving the death of her husband, says she is trying to relax into the likelihood that she’ll never be partnered again, but also says she is trying to eliminate all expectations. One friend tries to console her by saying “You don’t have to give up on finding partnership again. It can still happen.”
True. But true to Seneca, letting go isn’t just becoming instantly agnostic. Some possible futures are easier and more delightful to imagine. To really limber up into unbiased acceptance of an uncertain future requires practicing disappointment, getting to where you’re OK with even your most dreaded possibilities. To get neutral, we have to offset our optimistic biases with pessimistic ones until we can slide more acceptingly across the range of possibilities.
You've heard of ecotourism. How about Let Go tourism? Custom tours designed to put some distance between people and their grief, accelerating the grieving process by reminding us that the world is full of a number of other things besides what they’re grieving. I picture guidebooks like "Let Go Europe"
If I were a tour designer for Let Go travels, I would customize from a palette whose shades were based on three primary colors:
1. Stimulation and distraction in an environment that doesn't trigger memories.
2. Evidence of the griever’s prowess and mojo proving they’ll be able to recover some of the joy they've lost.
3. Evidence of the variety of suffering and joy the world contains.
I suggest these three because from my experience, relief from grief comes only by three means:
1. Time: Which folds memories of what’s lost into the ever-receding wake of what’s past.
2. Upstagers: Stimulating evidence that what you miss can be had again by different means. Miss a lost partner? A new partner can remind you of what you were at pains to forget when you were in partnership: That no one person is in sole possession of what can make you happy. Love the one you’re with also or instead.
3. Evidence that you are not alone: This last one is that practiced pessimism that limbers us for receptivity to what is. I picture it this way: A gentleman comes up to me (I picture him on a certain street near my house actually) and asks in an endearing Irish accent, "And tell me boyo, does the world contain the kind of predicaments you find yourself in?"
To which I would reply, "Well, yes. Obviously."
"And is there a reason you would be exempt from such predicaments?"
"Well, no."
“And then what kind of a world is this?” he would ask, a portal to the wonders of epistemological investigation. What kind of world is this and what are we that must place bets in it.
