The flip side of love isn’t hate: it’s fear


On battling the monsters of grief and trauma after a sudden death

Warning: Contains a brief but explicit description of an animal’s death.


Our dog Trip died a little over two weeks ago, and I’ve barely been able to write a word about it. I’m a writer, so I know that’s not a good sign. I’m trying. I just have to keep trying.

I miss him in this deep, aching way that—despite all the loss I’ve known in my life, even in this last year—feels so raw and desperate and powerful, like at any moment it could just fling me into some void, and I would go.

There are two parts to this: the grief and the trauma. They’re both familiar creatures. Not quite old friends, but the liberties they take are well-known.

Grief will have its way with you, I always say, and never the other way around. All you can ever do is surrender to its power. Submit to its idiosyncratic timeline, its inconsistent forecast for which days will be tolerably miserable and which will end in you falling to the floor, sobbing, no matter how normal you felt a minute ago.

I keep finding dried, salty smudges around the corner of my eyes, even when I don’t remember crying. The pattern of grief never makes any more sense, and you’re left with so little energy after each dance that you might as well just do whatever it wants until you eventually come out the other side of the storm.

But then there’s trauma, the trickier monster.

Trauma has its way with you, too, though we know scientifically that at least some part of that occupation is a basic sense of self-preservation—in a state of shock, we repress because remembering would be more life-threatening than forgetting. You need to focus on fight-or-flight, not fear or other feelings.

The way trauma changes you, the way it fucks you up, is both more predictable and more elusive. (I know. I’ve been trying to write it out for going on 12 years now.)

Where grief is like a suffocating hug, an embrace so brutal you eventually realize you’re better off letting go, trauma is the worst kind of bogeyman, a long-term shadow. Experiencing a traumatic event changes your brain chemistry, skews your muscle memories, inhabits your body like a virus.

First there is the reliving of it. The story that stays with you even if you never tell another person how it happened. But I have to put it into words; I have to tell everybody, or I can’t begin to move forward.

This is how it happened:

I pulled into the driveway and came into the house and said hello to my wife, Jessica. Trip rushed out into the yard to scamper and pee and grin back at me with that big dumb smile that is especially prevalent among pit bulls. Jessica stood up from the couch and walked over and we were bracketing the door when he ran back up onto the porch.

He seemed to stumble over his own feet. This happened sometimes, normally when he first woke up; he was an aging gentlemen who’d never had full use of all four legs, and we have slick wood floors.

But then he fell onto the threshold of our door, right between our legs. His body seized, quickly but with small movements, and we both got down on our knees, our hands in his fur, trying to figure out what was going on, could he get back up, should we help him back up.

It was so fast. There was the foul smell of his body releasing a tiny mess. His tongue fell out of his mouth. His eyes stayed wide open but went suddenly still. He was so warm, and we couldn’t tell if his heart was beating or not, whether he was moving at all.

Jessica yelled at me to call the vet, so I did, though it took a few tries to dial correctly. “He’s dying,” she yelled into the speakerphone when they answered. “I think he’s died.” I don’t think I said anything except maybe no.

It was her urgency that got us up out of the house fast, into the car. The vet said to come there if we could, so we did. Jessica sat in the back and did CPR. I ran at least one red light. She carried him inside the clinic. It was maybe 15 minutes from when I’d gotten home and Trip brushed past me into the yard. It was too late. It was probably much, much too late.

Trauma is the monster that shows that movie again and again, that makes my throat close up in a tight swallow every time I step in or out of my house or my car or drive down our street. Trauma ushers in the crushing anxiety every time I remember how we couldn’t save him, how we can’t save anybody, how everyone and everything we love is always just a breath from being taken away.

The flip side of love isn’t hate: it’s fear. Fear of losing what you love most.

Then there is the reinterpretation.

The version of that story where it is obviously all your fault, where every decision you made or didn’t make to take care of him for two years was wrong, was hurtful, is what killed him. I can simultaneously tell myself that is completely ridiculous—no dog has ever been loved like ours has been loved; we embraced an epic, embarrassing display of affection; we fussed over every possible change in his body or behavior that might have meant he was sick—and still be stuck wearing the weight of that guilt. Those what ifs. I’m trying to name and acknowledge that guilt so I don’t drown in it. Because I do know—I do—how false it is.

Trauma’s best trick is when it fools you into thinking you had the power to stop yourself from being traumatized, which is basically never, ever true.

Our impossibly kind vet, who sat down on the floor of the exam room and cried with us, said wisely that especially with animals an unexpected death shifts the burden of suffering. From your dog—who went quickly and hopefully with little pain and maybe even some sense of comfort from your hands on his body—to you.

I try to find some comfort in that idea, that we avoided what would have been an impossibly hard and painful period where he grew older and weaker and we struggled to find some balance between extending his life and acknowledging it was not worth living. Of course I would rather feel all of that pain than think of him bearing it. Of course.

He was such a sweet, good dog, and he had such a curiously noble way of cocking his head that we’d barely even officially been granted guardianship over him before we were inventing more elaborate explanations and names. Trip became Lord Trippington. Obviously he could not be the first to hold such an honorable title: Call him Lord Trippington the Third. Of the Trip Harbor Trippingtons, naturally. But he was also such an effusive, almost clingy snuggler—a Cuddles on his mother’s side, then. We quite seriously discussed whether the Trippingtons approved of the Cuddles. But he still had no first name until: George, George, George of the Cuddles. And so Trip had become Lord George Cuddles Trippington III.

We talked to him almost constantly. Sang songs we made up about him. Inquired as to his opinion. Asked if he knew how much we really loved him. (We asked him that a lot.) We often had to yell down the hallway, “Are you talking to me or the dog?” I’d be standing in the front yard carrying on a conversation with Trip about what we’d do while we waited for Jessica to get home and realize my neighbor was watering the yard only a few feet away, politely ignoring me.

This year has already been so filled with sadness, with grief, with fear and confusion about a lot of big and small ways our lives have changed and so quickly. Trip was the one who seemed to know how to handle all that, which makes no sense of course because he was the dog and we were the ones with scary bills and dead friends and real world issues.

But he would crawl on top of you when you were sad, pin you to the couch and hold you down until you stopped trying to fight your way out. And he would stay like that until you’d cried yourself out or he deemed you well enough to go on about your silly human life. He’d stand up, usually with a bruising paw in your stomach or your thigh, and climb down, trusting you were basically functional enough now to take care of yourself and maybe also finally go get him that ice cube to chomp on.

For now, anyway, what Jessica and I have is each other. And I don’t say that lightly. At a moment where it would be so easy to feel so untethered, so easily lost after two years organizing every day around the schedule of making sure our dog was fed and cared for, instead we just turn towards each other, again and again.

She told me I had to write about it, so I am. She said not to be too nice about it, too sanitized, so I’m not. We take turns pointing out the obvious: We will mourn and we will heal and at some point we will be ready when another dog finds us. We both know enough about grief and trauma to know this is true even when none of it feels real.

Neither of us will get lost in the void. We will keep beating back the monsters together.


Shana Naomi Krochmal is a writer and producer who lives in Los Angeles.

She and her wife are raising money to support Angel City Pit Bulls in this year’s Race for the Rescues.

Chris Pine: The Thinker

Chris Pine: The Thinker | Out Magazine
Cover Story, June/July 2013

Is Chris Pine too smart for his own good? Or just ours?

Many, many outtakes & extended thoughts were also posted:

Chris on having many flaws, the Avedonian photos taken of him for this shoot, and where he’d like to be at 40; on the (excellent) indie film People Like Us; on Kirk, Spock and Star Trek: Into Darkness; on Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan; on not talking about Tom Clancy’s terrible politics.

Full Q&A with Zachary Quinto about Chris.

Kenneth Branagh gushing about how Chris is, like Paul Newman, a character actor in a leading man’s body.

Zachary and Kenneth both contributing new adjectives to describe those blue, blue eyes.

And more thinky rambling from me about how Chris totally ruined the curvehow to interview smart people, how I almost killed this interview before it began, and some details either Chris or I got wrong and readers who corrected us.

Portia de Rossi: That Girl

Portia de Rossi: That Girl | Out Magazine
Cover Story, May 2013

Portia de Rossi has always been a lot more than one-half of television’s most powerful gay couple – and with a new season of the cult hit ‘Arrested Development,’ she’s back to prove it.

Her wife, Ellen DeGeneres, tweeted about the cover:

Portia’s comments about why they weren’t interested in having babies was widely covered by People, Entertainment Tonight and ABCNews.com.

This was actually my second cover story interview with Portia—I spoke to her in 2010 for The Advocate—and she was as smart, thoughtful and funny as I’d remembered.

Women Can Take Tips on Negotiating from Pop Culture

Commentator, NPR’s “All Things Considered”
March 25, 2013

My contribution to the discussion about Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, took the form of a commentary piece about how few examples in pop culture there are for women who want to learn to be great negotiators.

One of my earliest memories is of my father teaching me two very important life skills: Don’t hit like a girl—the trick is, don’t put your thumb inside your fist—and how to shake hands like a man. We practiced both extensively. Still, nobody—not my dad, not my feminist mom—ever taught me how to negotiate to make sure I got paid what I was truly worth.

You can read the transcript here.

I also wrote a little more about my reaction to the book and the importance of men’s magazines in learning to haggle.

Kimberly Peirce: ‘Why Are We Growing Domestic Terrorists?’

Kimberly Peirce: ‘Why Are We Growing Domestic Terrorists?’
Out.com, January 7, 2013

“You will know her name,” the poster for director Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie reboot promises… but it won’t be in March.

I spoke to Peirce one week after the Newtown, Conn., shootings about her adaptation of the 1974 Stephen King novel for a planned March feature in OUT. We discussed at length the possibility that Sony would bump Carrie’s release date, given how violently it ends and the possibility that maybe, maybe, maybe this time a mass shooting would be enough to spark serious, long-term change — rather than just another moment of hysteria followed by inaction.

In January it was announced they’d premiere the film in October instead, officially to take advantage of the Halloween market for supernatural thrillers. OUT will still run a longer featured profile about Peirce; in the meantime, we wanted to share some of her extremely smart and thoughtful responses about violence, escapism and the film.

Lost & Found

Lost & Found | Out Magazine
Cover Story, September 2012

Long before “It Gets Better,” there was “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a young adult novel that became a touchstone for a generation. Can the movie follow suit?

This story included actor Ezra Miller’s first interview in which he talked about being queer. (I wrote more about “coming out” interviews here.)

You can read my extended interviews and outtakes with Ezra MillerLogan Lerman and writer/director Stephen Chbosky. I also moderated a Q&A with Miller and Chbosky at a screening of the film co-hosted by OUT, Outfest & Lionsgate.

Read reactions and commentary from The Hollywood Reporter, Huffington Post, The GuardianIndiewire and hundreds of other blogs.

Diana Nyad, The Swimmer

Diana Nyad, The Swimmer | Out Magazine
Feature, August 2012

Three times she has tried to swim the 103 miles separating Cuba from Florida, and every time she has been defeated – by weather patterns, by box jellyfish, by exhaustion. This summer represents attempt number four. She is 63. She is as ready as she’s ever been.

Once the great journey begins, she will be surrounded by a small flotilla of support teams. But she will still be a tiny, solitary speck in the ocean, arms pushing into each wave, alone in the water. Alone in her head. And that’s where things really get tough.

Read reactions at AdAgeJezebel, Outsports & FishbowlLA.