Low Expecations

There is a great deal of advice about what to expect from life. Expect good things. Expect to be happy. Expect love to find you. Expect your best years to still be ahead of you. After my mother died, I decided to expect almost none of it. This sounds depressing, and perhaps it is, but it has turned out to be surprisingly useful. Optimism requires quite a bit of maintenance.

I did not expect another great birthday. I could not imagine receiving another birthday present I particularly cared about. The last birthday gift my mother gave me was a pair of gold bangles from a very chic jewelry shop uptown. As last gifts go, she chose well.

We celebrated my birthday at her West Village apartment. She was already housebound, so slices of cake from Lady M arrived by Uber Eats. I helped set the table with our favorite tea from Mariage Frères and her “very good” Herend floral plates and teacups, bought on a holiday in Bermuda nearly thirty years earlier. Ordinarily, she would have done this herself. By then, she couldn’t.

Her present to me was already on the table, perfectly wrapped. As I set out the plates, my eyes welled with tears. I knew what was inside: two gold bangles I had been coveting. It wasn’t really the bracelets that got to me. Between hospital visits and days when she could barely leave the house, my mother had still thought about a birthday gift for me. She had called the store, arranged the delivery, and made sure it arrived in time.

My mother had been sick for years, and this was hardly the first birthday shadowed by her illness. There had been other birthdays when she was very sick, other moments when I understood perfectly well what could happen. And yet I had always behaved, mentally at least, as though there would be more time. This time, I didn’t.

I had felt something similar on our last trip to Ramatuelle, France. While we were there, I had the unmistakable feeling that it would be our last time. I have come to recognize the difference between fear and knowing. Fear is quite busy. It calculates probabilities. It asks questions. It searches the internet at inappropriate hours. It finds reasons things might be fine. Knowing doesn’t have much to do.

My mind could still imagine another birthday. My heart couldn’t. Of course I hoped I was wrong. Hope is not particularly interested in evidence. My mother was sitting across from me. She was alive. As long as she was alive, another birthday remained technically possible. So we had tea. We ate the cake. I opened my present.

After she died, the future became a much less interesting place to speculate about. I didn’t expect another great birthday. I didn’t expect life to become exciting or romantic or even especially interesting. It wasn’t that I thought nothing good would ever happen again. I just couldn’t imagine what any of it would mean without her.

My mother was dead. She was never coming back. In fact, she remains dead. This is a remarkably stubborn condition. For a while I thought of grief as something I was going through, which suggested movement and, eventually, an exit. I no longer think there is an exit. My mother’s absence is not a period in my life. It is a fact about the rest of it. She will not be at my next birthday. Or Christmas. Or on the other end of the phone when I have something completely unimportant to tell her. This isn’t pessimism. It is, unfortunately, accurate.

What I did expect was that I would continue. I expected very little from life. I still expected myself to show up for it.

Against my own predictions, I have gotten better. Not better in the triumphant sense. There has been no montage. I have not climbed a mountain, discovered meditation, or returned from Bali with a new understanding of gratitude. I have acquired no special breathing technique. I mean something considerably less impressive. I become interested in things.

I want to see a friend. I want to write something. I care what I wear. I make plans. I laugh. Sometimes I laugh hard enough that for a few minutes I am not simultaneously aware that my mother is dead. Before, these things would have been unremarkable. They were simply the contents of a life. Now they occasionally feel like luxuries. Apparently grief did not eliminate my capacity for enjoyment. It merely cured me of expecting it.

For a while, I thought anything good enough to matter would have to compete with what I had lost. This presented a fairly serious problem. Nothing was going to win. A wonderful dinner would not make me miss my mother less. A trip would not do it. Falling in love would not do it. My mother would still be dead afterward.

Eventually I realized I had been asking the wrong thing of happiness. A good walk could simply be a good walk. Dinner with a friend did not need to demonstrate that I was “moving forward.” Laughing did not mean I had successfully completed grief. Something good could simply be good.

More importantly, I had confused having expectations for my life with having expectations of myself. They are not the same thing. If anything, as my expectations of life have gone down, my expectations of myself have gone up.

I don’t expect life to be fair. I don’t expect things to work out because I behaved well, tried hard, loved someone enough, or filled out the correct forms. I have seen fairly convincing evidence against all four. But I do expect something from myself.

I expect myself to deal with what is in front of me. To make decisions when there are no particularly good decisions available. To take care of the people I love. To make things. To remain curious. To notice when I am wrong. To change my mind when the evidence requires it. To keep going when I would very much prefer not to. I expect more of myself now, not less.

Not because I believe effort guarantees an outcome. It very clearly does not. But I have become less interested in the outcome as proof that the effort was worthwhile. I can do everything right and still lose. I can love someone completely and still lose them. I can work very hard at something that fails. I can make a careful decision and discover later that it was the wrong one.

This used to strike me as rather unfair. It still does, actually. I just no longer think fairness has much to do with it.

I don’t think everything will work out. Some things very clearly don’t. And I no longer see much point in waiting for life to become easier before I engage with it. Life has made no such commitment. Life can do what it likes. I remain responsible for mine.

Suffering, it turns out, is not a full-time job. I can miss my mother desperately and still become absorbed in something else. I can think about the fact that I will never see her again and, moments later, wonder what I should wear. There are days when I am devastated and still manage to have an excellent dinner, laugh at something stupid, or remember, with some urgency, that I have three days left to return a dress I absolutely do not need. None of this makes me miss her less. I no longer expect it to.

I also don’t particularly need her death to have improved me. There is a peculiar pressure to make terrible things productive. If something awful happens, we apparently expect a return on the investment. We should emerge wiser, stronger, more grateful, better at boundaries, perhaps with a morning routine. I have survived something terrible. This does not mean I am pleased to have been given the opportunity.

Whatever I make of it now belongs to me. And what belongs to me, among other things, is time. An almost offensive amount of it. My mother’s time stopped. Mine didn’t.

There is tomorrow morning and next Thursday. There is fall. There is Christmas. There are potentially decades of groceries, dentist appointments, software updates, and passwords I will forget. The person I loved most in the world has ceased to exist, and someone will still want to know whether I’d like to join their rewards program. Life is very committed to continuing.

For years there was always something coming next—another appointment, another scan, another decision, another problem to solve. Even when I was frightened, I could still imagine the next thing. Now the future is different. It is considerably more open and considerably less certain. Sometimes I look at all the time in front of me and think: What exactly am I supposed to do with all of this?

I don’t know yet.

For now, I have a dog to walk. I have people I love. I have a home I intend to keep. I have things I want to write down. Tomorrow will arrive whether or not I have developed a satisfactory philosophy about it.

I don’t expect life to reward me for continuing. I don’t expect suffering to transform me into a wiser or better person. I don’t expect every loss to contain a lesson or every terrible thing to eventually reveal its purpose. Some things are simply terrible.

Before my mother died, I think I still believed, without quite knowing it, in a certain arrangement: you tried hard, loved people well, did what you were supposed to do, and life would more or less meet you halfway.

It does not.

This has lowered my expectations of life considerably. Oddly, it has raised my expectations of myself. Life can do what it likes. I still have to decide what I’m going to do with mine.

And then, every once in a while, I have a wonderful afternoon. Someone makes me laugh. The weather is beautiful. I like what I’m wearing. I find myself looking forward to dinner.

Wait. This too?

Apparently, life occasionally exceeds specifications.

Oh. I didn’t know I still got to have this.