"I'm Fine."

I remember the first time I lied and told someone I was “fine.”  I was five and sitting in the back of car on the way home, having just embarrassed my mother by responding to an acquaintance’s, “how are you, Emily?” with, “I am having a bad day.”

Up until that moment, and it might have been the first moment the question had ever been directed at me in a conversation, I had never realized that the phrase was in fact a question, presented to illicit a response. As if the person, however distant an acquaintance, was genuinely interested in my physiological well-being.

            My mother struggled to get me to understand that the people who ask, “How are you?” do not want a textured response depending on my mood of the moment; that as a child, unless I am being maimed, I am fine. That while trying to be polite by showing interest in my life beyond a passing greeting, they did not require an in depth analysis of the grievances of my day, but just to make sure no one had died, or that I wasn’t being kidnapped. I do not need to share my personal problems with the world. This was before Facebook – clearly.

I was five and had a very minimal understanding of nuance, let alone socially rhetorical questions, so all I gathered at that young age was the appropriate response to people’s poking and prodding into my personal life was to inform them that I am “fine,” and not to let them linger in their concern for me.

To clarify, this was by no means my mother being heartless by implying that no one was concerned about my negative observations on life (though at such a young age, I am not sure anyone should have been,) but instead her providing insight into the way in which social interactions were conducted in my family and where I am from. People did not, as a general rule stop on Main Street and have discussions with strangers about their day, and unless close friends or long lost acquaintances, grocery store interactions stopped at a polite head nod. While most of the 136,225 people of Merrimack County were in some way or another closely acquainted, social graces were quite proper, and the grocery store remained a place of anonymity.  

So when my mother said “N’est ce pas?” the little pig French I knew in our family to mean, “do you understand?” I dutifully replied, “Nass pa: I am fine.”

            For the thirteen years that followed, I lived quite contently within the rules of social engagement; only those closest to me being privileged to my personal insights, pursuits, and later transgressions. There were side effects of sorts; despite having a class size in the low 60’s for most of high school (and having known most of that 60 for at least three years prior in the adjoining middle school,) longtime fellow classmates were usually the last to find out when someone’s parents got divorced, grandparent died, or heart broken. Most often, the news would trickle down through the ranks through an intricate web of personal connections that anyone else outside the school (or town, depending on the setting of the subject,) would be referred to as violent gossip. It was simply impolite to confront an individual’s hardship face to face.

            Without the blatant social opportunity to cry for help, those who were truly concerned about your well-being learned to see the signs elsewhere: the physical signals that everyone has when they are in one form of distress or another.  There is the obvious and often embarrassing flood of tears, or bloody gash, but before trouble crescendos in such a harsh direction there are more subtle indications.  The cardinal example was in April of my sophomore year. 

I had just finished working sound on the school musical; Anything Goes, (I remember because on this particular day, I was wearing our production’s shirt.) I walked out of a particularly unpleasant 45 minutes in Mr. Cole’s English class to find my father standing in the middle of the Sophomore hallway amongst all my classmates looking incredibly lost, likely because he had only been to my high school a handful of times, and had clearly yet to see a familiar face.

“Dad?” He seemed immeasurably pleased to have found me, but the relief faded far too fast, to a look of unbearable discomfort.  “Why are you here? You’re not supposed to come and get me for another… six hours?” My father’s awkward presence quickly began to be a source of embarrassment, and panic welled in my gut.

“Emily... Emily we have to go. I came to get you. Something has happened.” I have rarely been tested, but somehow I have always handled terrible situation with all the grace I can muster, what little that may be. I calmly blew past him, dumped a random handful of work and textbooks from my locker into my bag, and turned around to look at my dad, who now seemed more comfortable standing in the emptying hallway.  At that moment no one I was close to was near; no one to throw me a look of questioning concern, no one to introduce to my father to break the tension, just me and him, leaving in silence.

I knew somehow what had happened. I knew because my arms were still blessed with the lingering tan from the vacation we had all taken barely weeks before. I knew because he would have wanted to go quietly, on a bright, beautiful spring day. I knew because he would have wanted to make it as easy for everyone else as possible. Especially mom; so he waited until dad was home so she wouldn’t be alone. 

And right as the front door of my goofy, rural, private school settled into the frame behind us, and my dad was no longer burdened with his desire to not send me over the edge in front of people, “Emily, your grandfather died.”

There was no one outside. It was too early; we had only just gotten to school a few hours earlier. It was a Thursday. There was still muddy gray snow in awkward lumps throughout the yard where the plow had piled it too high. 

My dad smiled. Not a friendly smile per say, but an uncomfortable reassuring one. And I laughed. Not as if watching the Daily Show after an unpleasant Presidential Debate, but when you see all the pieces of a complicated puzzle come together and realize you’ve had the image right in front of you all along. I laughed, and my dad smiled, because even in death, my grandfather, the eternal caregiver had found a way to make sure we would all be okay. He had orchestrated an elaborate vacation, with everyone present just a few weeks before. He had been an intolerable, lecturing grump; he had railed on me about what I was eating, lectured my dad about his work, and done everything he could to make sure that our shortcomings were highlighted. Not to be a jerk it turns out, but because he did not want to leave us all here without making sure we would be alright without him. He wanted to ensure I made it out of my teens healthy and happy, that my dad spent time with his family, that we all did our best to not wallow in his loss for too long after he was gone. 

“Boo child, are you okay?” My dad asked on our way home.

I knew we were driving home to tell my mother that her favorite person in the world had died, and that she would be a horrible wreck for the foreseeable future as a result. I knew that this was the first of many moments of loss to come over the coming years, and I knew that there was very little I could do to stop them. I was terrified, but it was clearly not my turn to be upset. My turn did not really come for a long time afterword…

“yeah dad, I am fine.”

My family and Derryfield were not alone in the emotional silence. It was the way everyone seemed to work. The East Coast is stereotyped by its unending dedication to work, frigid (some would say reserved,) emotional openness and the importance of community. Some stereotypes are just that, embellishments, but within every cliché there is a grain of truth. In this case, you could fill a bag of rice with all these grains of truth.

Leah, a classmate from my first year Latin class would go on to lose her last living grandparent the next week. We had been homework buddies in the months prior since her arrival at Derryfield that Fall, but had never been close.  

The day after my grandfather died, I still had not cried. Instead, all alone in the house I decided to bake, seemingly a logical substitute. Somehow, along the way, I had forgotten I really could not cook; I had been overwhelmed with the idea that it was something someone who was grieving would do. With my hands covered in a vomit like, purple icing, I left my disastrous attempt to bake behind and called Leah to find out our quirky teacher’s response to my absence.

“Doc was too focused on Jake getting kicked out to dwell on you missing, he did get upset that no one had done the homework though… Emily, I know you said you were fine… but… how are you really doing?”

I had thought up until this moment that I had protected my shattered psyche well, dwelling on homework and the newsy dismissal of our long time classmate, but Leah did not buy it. I had said I was fine at least a dozen times, but she hadn’t been convinced. Maybe it was how meek my voice was, or maybe it was the beginning of kismet: signaling the close friendship Leah and I would develop – she could see past the socially indoctrinated, politeness.  Fine was in no way synonymous with good in our world, and so she poked and prodded until I confessed my troubling concern:

“To be honest…I haven’t cried, at all. Is that bad?”

“Emily, It’s a lot to take in. You know that just because you aren’t crying doesn’t mean you don’t care, don’t you? You are taking care of your mom and Kate. Not everyone cries.”

Somehow, even though we had not been close, Leah knew me: I cared about the loss, I cared too much about those around me to show it, and I would not break down at that moment.  She did not need to hear a cry for help to know I was in need.

Until I left my bubble to go to college, I never realized that not everyone acts in such a way. I never realized people could be so open about personal feelings, or at least do so without being branded a lunatic.  In the Pacific Northwest there is a limit to how far the social graces I was taught would reach. People here wave to strangers in the street, get into never ending conversations with cashiers about their children, and announce their troubles to the world. It is more commonly defined as, warmth. Here the surface was the warmest part of a person: to share comfort with one another, to build trust, to welcome one another into our lives. At first it felt like Wonderland; a world full of kind, good people.

            After spending a fair amount of time here, I began to notice two problems with such an attitude. The first was what I viewed as the close-minded reaction people here had to those on the East Coast (“People in New York are so cold!” or “No one smiled at me when I visiting Boston, what’s their problem?”) However, the second and more important one was, the cost of my habit of saying, “I am fine.”

            It would seem quite logical I imagine to take everyone at face value, and assume that an individual is, in fact, fine. In truth, I never noticed how my false fine’s were affecting people till someone got upset.  Friends were repeatedly saying, “Why didn’t you say something?!” and I was eternally let down by them not seeing the signs.  To them, there would have been no need to pester me about how I was doing after my initial, “I’m fine,” the way Leah had. However I would equally imagine, that those same people would struggle to understand how I could be doing fine after my first experience with loss, and subsequently would have assumed I was either insincere or heartless.

I never realized until it was too late that the problem was in our disjointed communication: because all along, I was saying something, and yet had not given them their sign for trouble. Somehow, I was still relying on them to understand mine. 

At home, we never need the question, “how are you doing,” to gage the mood of those around us. I could hear it in my friends voices, see it written all over a person’s face, know by looking at how they were carrying themselves that things simply were not okay, and because of that, the chronic white lie, “I’m fine,” became as meaningless as “Hello,” or “Good Morning.” Instead of the formulaic words, what really mattered was how the conversation progressed after that first interaction, because if the person truly cared, and saw that the other was in need, “I am fine,” was never a suitable conclusion.