15 Minutes a Day
Grief is having a big moment on social media. Or perhaps it only seems that way to me because having lost my baby brother and sister-in-law all too recently, I linger a fraction too long over grief-related posts, so those are what keep popping up on my feed. But some of the best advice I’ve seen has actually come from the Apple show Shrinking, which just finished its third season. I don’t think a spoiler alert is required to reveal the series involves a bunch of people processing a bunch of different sadnesses. Early on, the grouchy, experienced therapist played by Harrison Ford recommends a specific technique to one of those people: to set aside 15 minutes each day to grieve even if she has to compartmentalize her feelings the rest of the time. To take a grief “timeout” to give her sadness at least one outlet. For the character involved, that outlet ended up being a lot of (strangely funny) intense crying.
Those crying scenes were reminiscent of the great movie from the 1980s, Broadcast News, in which Holly Hunter plays a high-strung television news producer. From the time she is a young girl, Hunter’s character takes her phone off the hook (remember that?) and forces (allows?) herself to cry for a few minutes everyday, I can’t remember how long. To purge stress or whatever; the movie never gives an exact reason. Then she goes right back to her life.
Of course, not every therapist subscribes to Shrinking’s grief timeout theory. And no one on the show or in the movie addresses the inevitable aftereffects of a 10- or 15-minute crying jag: the swollen eyes, runny nose, and red face. So recently, in my own experiment with the Shrinking method, I’ve substituted a different cathartic process: listening to sad Bruce Springsteen songs. Not every day. At least, not anymore. But whenever I am in a cab or on the subway, from the start of the ride to the end.
Bruce Springsteen was the obvious choice for this experiment and not just because of where I’m from (cue New Jersey jokes). Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the New York Times launched a series called “Portraits of Grief” with photos and short remembrances of the missing and presumed dead. Perhaps not surprisingly given how many workers in the World Trade Center commuted from my home state, a striking number of those remembrances emphasized how much the person loved—LOVED—Bruce Springsteen’s music. Bruce himself was stunned and moved by the comments, which inspired some of the songs on his next album, The Rising.
Bruce has long channeled our collective grief through his music. Among many examples, there’s “Streets of Philadelphia,” the song he wrote for the Tom Hanks/Denzel Washington movie addressing the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. And the song “American Skin,” its repeating refrain of “41 shots” defying people to forget the horrific killing of an innocent black man, Amadou Diallo, by four New York City police officers, all of whom were acquitted for the shooting. Even now, Bruce is on his “Land of Hope & Dreams” tour playing the song he wrote for the people of Minneapolis after the terrible murders of residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Goode during ICE’s surge in that city earlier this year.
But the reason I chose Bruce for my dedicated grief sessions was more personal than all of that. My brother Michael was a huge Bruce Springsteen fan—it was one of the ways we connected despite our wide age difference. Along with our other brothers and/or friends, we saw many shows together although, truth be told, when good tickets were hard to come by, sometimes Mike stuck me with the nosebleed seats while he enjoyed the view from the lower level, his perk for having been the one to go through the whole hassle known as Ticketmaster.
As luck would have it, he scored great seats for all of us for the last big concert we saw in 2016, Bruce’s anniversary tour for The River, his double album filled with songs of desperation and heartache. (Some fun too—Bruce knows how to strike a balance.) That was the night I learned one of Michael’s favorite Bruce songs was “Racing in the Streets,” which was on an earlier album and which talks about lost illusions and escape, in hindsight a potential red flag had I been attentive enough to see it. That was also the night Michael teased me for loving the song “Point Blank,” which, despite the expressive piano opening I enjoyed so much, has even more intense lyrics (“you wake up and you’re dying, you don’t even know what from”).
Combined, they make the perfect soundtrack for a grief timeout.
Mourning a loved one can feel like an endless cycle. You’re either moving closer to a dreaded milestone or recovering from having survived one. For me, the impending summer now feels a bit like doom approaching. Because that was the season my baby brother slipped from my grasp. Because that was the season I backed out of what I didn’t know was going to be our final chance to see Bruce together. Because that’s the season I’ll have to go to a new show without him.
Sometimes my trips around New York City take longer than the 15 minutes recommended on Shrinking, not that it matters much. I just play the songs again and lean into the lyrics Michael was right to note are among Bruce’s saddest: “Once I dreamed we were together again. Baby, you and me. Back home in the old clubs, the way we used to be.”
The way we used to be.
Eventually, though, the cab stops at the requested corner, or the train pulls into the station, and I turn off the song. Then I’m back out in the world, the sadness no one wants to see safely tucked away, a little more bearable for having been allowed room to breathe. Just as Harrison Ford predicted.