These are the days of thinning veils and shortening days, the light that leaves us bit by bit until we’re more dark than anything else. These are the days that as kids meant starting over, just barely, the smell of smoke from first bonfires to mark homecoming of another year in school, fewer, then fewer, until we didn’t return again. I don’t return anymore, haven’t for over two decades now, but there’s a swelling in my throat that steals the timbre of my voice each year around this time, when the leaves trade green for golden, then fall, then pick up with each Autumn wind that rattles down the quieter streets.
Nostalgia is grief, I decided one evening after a day of headache pain and a night without sleep, it’s a mourning, in the end. I called this out of the shower water, beyond the curtain into the darkness I hoped Sarah was still sitting in, said it like it was nothing, a throwaway thought like so many I toss her way. This one though, was not nothing, this one was everything, and served as the highlighter to my own soul, the underline of the passages written somewhere deep inside myself that I’ve been reading, then re-reading, ever since I grew too big for the bedroom I grew up in, too old to haunt the same hallways I once walked down, slowly, as time was an infinite thing then, I knew nothing of running out. The tightening of this throat, the wetness in the corner of these eyes, they come not from the Winter that enters without knocking, but for the loss of what once was, the understanding that it will never be again.
Nostalgia is grief, I sputtered out through the half haze and delirium that only pain can bring, and I think somehow in speaking this, I finally understood. I’ve long been a nostalgic fool, I’ve long said I carry a melancholy and a darkness in the folds of my soul. Not always do they show, but always I feel them, always they pull like some quiet gravity from the center of me, lowering my chin to chest, my eyes to the feet I trust to carry me on. I’ve wondered about the root of this, questioned its continued existence, asked it aloud ten thousand times. Why then, I ask, with all that is well, do I ache for how it was then, and who else feels this way too? Often enough to call it always, I wonder this, why the pull back, when around me is the joy I’ve earned? It is this shower statement that holds the answer, and I know this now.
Nostalgia is grief, it is a mourning, and the death that it laments is that of bigness.
Some truths are unexplainable ones, but I owe it to myself to at least try on this, as some truths are important enough to reach beyond our grasp. This is me reaching:
When we are young, fresh and naively beautiful enough to feel the omnipresent spectre of hope, so much of this innocent belief is rooted in this vague idea of bigness. All things are big, all things a quarter-shade shy of epic, and we feel this. Each kiss is a revolution to our lips, each breakup a catastrophe threatening earthquake to the foundations we trust. Each song first listened to in the darkness of a best friend’s basement feels like THE SONG, universe penned that explains the machinations of something so much stranger and more important than we ever before dared to grasp. As the seasons turn and the boundaries between them begins to blur and fade, we feel awe, we feel wonder, for what will come with the new winds, the clouds that roll over the western hills and hint at snowfall, or rain. This bigness comes as we’ve not the libraries of experience within us to draw comparisons from, we’ve not the examples to hold up to the magnifying glass and scrutinize. All is big because it’s all we know, we’re not yet stained with the ink of three hundred attempts, three hundred failures. The immensity of this life pales at the hands of comparison, as it is the thief of much more than just joy.
Its experience, in the end, that delivers the killing blow to the back of this bigness, the knife between the ribs, the twisting of the blade. The more we do, the more we have to compare what we’ve done to, the more we compare, the less things feel big, the less epic, the less monumental and world-shifting. What is the weight of these youthful worries, we ask, now that we’ve the “real world” to juxtapose them? What of this breakup, when we’ve the weight of war we now understand? What impact is lost from the music we hear, when we’ve the experience of information of those that made it, the uncouth political proclivities they hold, the MAGA hats they may or may not wear in public? Each set of lips is just another set of lips in a long line of lips to compare them to, until of course, we find the lips that will erase all others, then and perhaps only then, does that bigness return.
This is not a negative story, not a pessimistic view that as we age all things become boring, all things lose the luster they once held, no. It’s just truthful to me, and perhaps only to me, but it’s honest in what it illuminates. To me, nostalgia feels like grieving feels, it feels like looking back with a bit of wonder, a bit of aching, at the understanding that though we can go to the same places, even do the same things, they will not feel that way again, not to us, not this time around. The death of bigness comes as things stop being firsts, and things stop being firsts naturally as we grow. Perhaps the key to keeping this melancholy at bay, this nostalgia at arm’s length, is to have more firsts, to carve out more time for adventure, forge new paths that we still do not know. I know this to be true from the adventures I find myself on, there, somewhere 5,000 miles from home, I feel it again. The bigness.
I know not the word for the opposite of nostalgia, but perhaps it’s here, that we can reanimate the corpse of bigness like Frankenstein’s monster, and get it walking again. Perhaps it’s a glance forward into possibility, into the unknown, that is the lightning strike to the bolts in that monster’s neck. Maybe it’s here that the grief settles into the background, like white noise on a television set left on in the other room. Perhaps, but I know one thing above all others: When Summer begins to wane and the winds hold chill from the West and the leaves start their curling on the ends of each branch, when the smell of wood stoves first hits the air, when the streets are dark and wet and smell like the sweetness of rot, I’ll feel it again, this grief that I know now will never leave.
We cannot be them again, and so we mourn, after all, nostalgia is grief.
The death of bigness
comes with the comparisons.
Nostalgia is grief.
After coming out of a dream that was ripe with nostalgia, this--THIS--was exactly what I needed to read. Thank you.
You're so very very welcome.
This is one of my favourite pieces you’ve ever shared because it comforts me so much to know that I’m not the only one who feels this so deeply. Thank you for putting words to that feeling of longing for a time when we felt our own lives felt more filled with excitement, when the world felt a lot less dark and awful and I so innocently felt like the road ahead was paved only with things to look forward to. I’ve found that the almost mid 40s, for me,
has been a time to grapple with the weight of this feeling you describe so well and you’re right, it’s even more poignant this time of year as the darkness settles in. It’s so comforting that you put perfect words to these emotions.
Ah this means so much, seriously Heather. This piece meant so much when I was writing it, so to know it resonated, means even more. Thank You for reading this, for being part of this place, for feeling it so deeply. Thank you. Here comes the darkness, still here we shine.
I believe I have been able to experience a shadow of “bigness” again through my children’s eyes as they grew up. Sadly, you know they have left their childhood behind when they no longer experience the awe of new things in the same way. I think you are right about needing to seek out new experiences that will make us appreciate the bigness again- but also look to find something new in what used to seem big.
Ahhh yes, Laura, I think you're right, we can experience bigness through watching others do the same. In fact, when we took our friend, and fellow light chaser, Steven, to Scotland, I got to re-experience the entire thing. Find the bigness in all new ways.
Reading your words while preparing my family home for sale, emptying boxes and folders and looking through photo albums after blowing the dust of the covers, I almost got swallowed by nostalgia. I left this house about 30 years ago and even my home country ten years later and still sitting here knowing this place will disappear of the map of places that I can visit is so freaking hard ... thank you for your words!!!
Oh the timing of this, the swallowing of such weight and nostalgia, I am so sorry, but also so jealous you're swimming in such a delicious sea of weird sorrow. I hope you rise so sweetly through this.
This completely and utterly is so true. You had me shout "oh my god, I get it now!!" upon reading this piece. I, too, carry this weighty grief and people whom I speak with about nostalgic things often say "but Em, it's fun to look back; it's good to remember the good times. Why are you sad?"
It's not like I don't remember the joy and the fun, etc; I do. But these memories come with more than just 'good' feelings.
Thank you for giving me language to better validate and describe how I feel.
I love making people shout back at me, hahaha. What a huge compliment. And yes, yes yes, I have people all the time asking why I'm only looking at the sadness, the negative, and I never know how to explain that's not what it is. Thank you, for being open to that language.
Dang. I love this writing. And that's a super cute tiny human warrior-with-teddy-bears picture. I remember once going back to a house that I was a child in and had not been in since. And it was SMALLER than I remembered. I'm sure it seemed bigger as a child, or it lived bigger in my memory. It's such a great question to ponder, how to invite, or open to, that bigness now as a grown (growing?) human. How to stay tender to that arising nostalgia, how to listen to what it has to tell us, as you have hear. Hmmmm. Thank u.
Haha, I was such a goofy little kid, little tiny human warrior hahaha. And the "smallness" is so real, I've experienced that so many times, places not feeling the way we remembered them, it happens so much. Thank YOU for this.
Oh, this is just so timely. I love this.
I love you.
Love you right back, my friend.
I think it’s fair to say our perception gets smaller as we get crowded out by responsibilities, knowledge, and sadness. The bigness is still there though, you just have to look harder and longer to see it. I see it when I let all the adulting go and just bask in the pleasure of being outside in nature. I feel it when I’m in my lovers arms and everything narrows down and expands out into the universe all at once. Nostalgia IS grief, but daydreams are grief’s antithesis.
Kit you're so very right, responsibilities tend to eclipse so much, and the sadness so often follows. You're also so very right that the bigness is still there, always, waiting for us to find it. And your final statement is STUNNING. "daydreams are grief’s antithesis." Wow.
I thought on this one a lot this morning. Listened and reread a few times because, for me, I didn't make the connection between nostalgia and grief. I reflected on my nostalgia and it resonates more like gratitude in my mind. I don't mourn the past and when I look back on times gone by, I find myself reminiscing about the good memories more than the bad ones. But nostalgia is not reminiscing. I actually looked up the definition of nostalgia: "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition." says our friends at Merriam Webster. In which case, nostalgia is indeed grief because we are yearning for something that we cannot get back. So what makes me nostalgic I then ask myself? Is it the yearning for the people I have lost? Missing the simpler times of life when responsibilities were not so much of a burden? Cool toys and games from the 80s and 90s? We throw around the term nostalgic a lot but in reality, I don't feel a longing to return to these things. Maybe the people, but that I equate to mourning not nostalgia. And yet both are grief when you think about it.
I spent the afternoon with an old Italian sailor who is an artist and a philosopher who has spent the last 30 years travelling the world with his beloved wife. She passed away last week. And alone he had to literally dig her grave and bury her in the local cemetery. He had asked me to come to the little room he had rented on the outskirts of our town where he had nursed her until she couldn't go on. Her metal framed bed was folded up beside his. He needed my help to sort through ten years worth of semi precious stones and jewelry that they had gathered in their travels to make and sell their art around the world. He needs to sell it all so he can return to Italy because he can't continue this lifestyle here without her. It is too hard and no longer has purpose he tells me. As we sat there, going through bag after bag of memories and places where they had bartered, bought and traded these beautiful stones, I thought again about this essay. And the nostalgia in the memories he shared. Every bag of stones, every piece of jewelry she made. The pain in his eyes was as profound as the beauty of their art. This irrevocable loss will now and for always anchor his memories in this sense of nostalgia. As he packs up a life of adventure to return alone to the life of a pensioner in a country and ideology that he has long since rejected, every day he will be nostalgic for the life he is leaving behind. And he will grieve for it as he does the dear woman whose remains will stay behind with all the memories they have made here. For him, nostalgia will always be grief.
I realize that thankfully, my nostalgia does resonate gratitude because I have not yet felt a loss that has crippled my whole world. I have felt great loss and pain and suffering as we all have, and there are people who I wish I could bring back. But I don't equate my mourning of their loss, to nostalgia. Maybe I am not that nostalgic when it comes down to it. And maybe I should be grateful for that.
This is so beautiful, in so many ways, and I feel so thankful that you, and others like you, are so willing to spill, share, and elaborate on the ways that ANYTHING I write resonates and touches them. What a gift this place is, to me. To me. Thank you.
Oh my goodness, this is crazy, today is Monday morning and I finally took my quiet time to read this…. I have to tell you about Sunday morning, mass, MY tears and my awakening….. we really are connected still…..
Thank you for sharing your story with me on the walk that day!
I've never thought of nostalgia this way until you put it so eloquently. It makes so much sense. This post is such a beautiful reminder that no matter our age, we can still find that bigness again.
We can, we should, we have to. The bigness is what matters, it's what propels us to the end of things. What a thing.
A powerful and true statement. I think you hit the nail on the head that those two words are inseparable. The longing we feel is a natural part of the human experience. And amidst the nostalgia and grief and longing, there can still be joy. That's what is so beautiful and mysterious about this life.
You are so very right, it's a part of this entire experience, and always will be. But my goodness, sometimes it hurts.