Never Explain: A Story of Grief and the Heart

It was Julia Child who famously said, “Never apologize. Never explain.” She was talking about cooking and how to handle the inevitable situation of screwing up dinner, but the advice applies to almost anything. When I apologized for something ridiculous I did online a million years ago, a friend sent this quote to me and encouraged me to stand my ground, a lesson I needed to learn to navigate the internet and a writing life as much as anything else.

A few months ago, I wrote that quote in my journal for the umpteenth time. For a long time, despite my friend’s urging, I still felt like I needed to explain. Explaining, I thought, would make me feel seen. And I wanted so desperately to be seen. And heard, and felt, and understood. I wanted someone to put their arms around me and tell me it was okay. I wanted someone to free me from the need to explain anything at all.

I struggle with explaining, too, in my writing, which is why I’d written Child’s quote in my journal again. At heart, deep down in my bones, I’m a poet first and always will be. To me, poetry is freedom—a place to be imaginative and lyrical, to play with language and with bending reality while never betraying the truth. If anything, poetry leans hard into the truth, but seldom does it explain.

For many years, though, I’ve been writing prose, merging my poetic sensibility with the structure of sentences and paragraphs instead of lines and stanzas. But then something happened, something I’ve been working hard this last year to undo: I worked against my poetic instincts, pushed them down and crushed them. I wouldn’t write a poetic turn of phrase or dive too deep into metaphor. That territory was off limits; instead, I favored the immediacy and exposition of prose.

Exposition: the act of expounding, setting forth, or explaining.

In literature, exposition is a device that gives background information to the reader. It explains what’s happened in the past to catch the reader up to present time.

There’s another term, an editorial one, that means let it stand. The word is stet and if you find it on your document, it means leave it alone. Let it stand. Do not change what’s on the page.

It might be a stretch to say that stet is the opposite of an explanation. It really depends on the situation and the text. But on a gut level, I think they oppose each other. Explain or let it stand. Give the background information or trust the reader to get what you mean. Write as if you desperately need someone to understand you or trust yourself enough to create something that holds on its own.

***

Last week, I got news that a family member was sick. It’s a sticky situation, complicated by broken relationships and illogical reasoning. There have been years and years of messiness, threads to untangle and lies to unlearn. Having to return and offer help felt like turning back in the wrong direction and, by week’s end, I had a bad case of emotional whiplash and a vulnerability hangover.

Here I stop and ask if I’m explaining too much. I haven’t actually said anything. This could be anyone’s situation. We all have complicated relationships. We’ve all experienced brokenness and unresolved pain. This is the human condition.

But still. Am I explaining too much? How much do I say? None of this is straightforward and I’ve spent hours trying to parse through what’s happened and is happening and will happen. Because I don’t know. It’s all so fresh and everything is so uncertain.

I have nothing to apologize for (I think). I haven’t explained (but should I?).

Perhaps I should write an extended metaphor. Something about February being at the heart of winter and how my poor heart is so sore right now. Something about my tender heart being a snow globe, all shaken up, or how my heart skips sometimes when I lie down to sleep. Something about how someone I love might be dying, his heart giving out minute by minute, while mine beats on despite all the cold.

Is that explaining too much?

Stet.

But I do worry about my own heart, how it sometimes tumbles around in my chest. I wake in the night, breathing deeply and trying to regulate its beat, wondering if I should wake my husband or let it pass. I wonder what it feels like to die or, worse, to know you are dying. Because I want to die in my sleep, not awake in the darkness wondering if this is the end. This is only compounded by the fact that I will turn forty in October.

It’s the middle of February, the middle of winter. It’s the middle of the night in the middle of my life. My heart is a snow globe. My head is one too, all the swirling making me dizzy. All I want is to settle it down, for all the giant, bubbly flakes to sink to the ground.

Have I said too much?

I refuse to apologize.

***

The other morning, standing at the kitchen counter cutting a pineapple, I was a ghost. I’d woken at 2:30 a.m. and never got back to sleep. I’d made coffee and drank it, then realized we were out of cereal but had ingredients for granola, so I made it. Then, I was cutting a pineapple, my hand holding the knife and slicing the sweet flesh, so I could make a smoothie for my daughter.

My mind was somewhere else entirely.

I put on an old Counting Crows album from high school, fully expecting to inhabit one of my old selves and, more importantly, to cry. I wanted to bawl, that sweet release. But it didn’t come. No songs about Maria could conjure it; no memory of standing a few feet from Adam Duritz while he whined his way through my favorite songs could. I simply did the next thing and the next, singing along and periodically staring out the window.

A Rilke quote kept coming to mind, the one about being patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Only, in my head, it’s all that is unresolved in your heart, which is a lot of things. Nothing is solved in my heart and there’s still a lot that is unresolved. My heart, its very self, the size of my fist, feels like an unknowable puzzle, a mystery of mysteries.

I pulled the granola out of the oven and swirled the morning’s smoothie, humming and singing and thinking about my heart. My tender heart, my watery heart, my February heart. A tent for my heart, a canoe.

I was exhausted and it was okay. I’d head back to bed soon to doze for a few hours. I’d take my tiny snow globe of a heart and my sixteen-year-old, Counting Crows-loving self with me. I’d take my nearly thirty-year-old self who found reprieve in Rilke and the woman who last week sat on an old couch and tried to reconnect with someone she loves.

It was Kathleen Norris who said poets ask questions and poets wait. We do not rush ahead toward answers but hold space for mystery. We live the questions and believe that we will, too, live the answers. And when I look up the rest of the Rilke quote, I am relieved. I don’t know what happens next, but I have something I desperately need: hope.

***

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”