Ham Sandwich
Low Swank | About | All Essays | Subscribe
When I was growing up and someone we knew died, my Dad would send a spiral-cut ham to the grieving family. Outwardly this was an adherence to a very Southern tradition (and maybe even a little formal), but internally he referred to it as “the Death Ham,” emphatically reminding us that the trick was not to be on the receiving end of the delivery. Along with a (debatably) healthy penchant for levity, this was a lesson I took to heart.
My mid-40s have brought on a new examination of my relationship with mortality—which is, of course, right on time. If you’ve thus far managed to avoid tragedy and grief and the American medical system; if Death hasn’t already poked its head in and taken at least a cursory look at you and your people—this is when we’re made to realize, beyond any sort of reasonable doubt, that definitive endings do exist.
My instinct is to stare unblinking into that good night, and to be ready when the inevitable comes to pass. I catastrophize and call it exposure therapy; last year I signed up for a workshop for caregivers of people living with dementia, just in case. I’m spending the precious sliver of ~now~ I've been allotted imagining feelings and scenarios that I understand to be unimaginable, and incrementally paying double in sadness. This is Klarna-ass behavior, but I can’t blame myself for wanting to mitigate impact.
Heartbreak is exhausting on a cellular level, and having to reorient oneself to a new way of being is an all-encompassing task. I will tell you, with a straight face, that my energy healer-slash-massage therapist says I have a good amount of grief stored in my upper back. I believe him, because it’s very clear to me that even the most emotionally healthy among us would rather toss that particular feeling over their shoulder than take on the messy, awful work of walking through it.
Trauma (midlife trauma, especially) can reshuffle your cards in such a way that clarity escapes the end result. Burning Man might start to make sense, conceptually, or you could find yourself comparing prices on 5G-blocking bucket hats and googling “how to ground your bed to the earth.” I’m not throwing stones here (at least not large ones; see: the aforementioned energy healer), but it's with rare exception that a bucket hat is flattering on a 45-year old. Protecting my sense of reality is critical at this juncture.
It would be ideal to just accept death’s impending specter as the natural order of the cosmos. I’m not not there, but coming to terms with the myriad ways in which people leave the party—along with the seemingly random order in which said leaving occurs—has to be one of the more uphill requirements of the human condition.
I can only assume, in this particular moment, that the world already weighs heavily upon you. I also know you have in no way asked for someone whose beat is being mid-40s and (hopefully) sort of funny about it to hammer that point home. I do, though, like to think of this newsletter as a small gesture of complicity: we are on the planet and alive at the very same time, thinking and caring about some of the very same things. I like this about us. And so—in temporary avoidance of definitive endings—I trust we will both make the most of the time we have before the ham arrives.
“Ham Sandwich” emailed out 9.24.2025 with newsletter-only exclusives. Subscribe here.