Often, while grieving, people will say they see their loved one everywhere. Not me—I smell my father wherever I go.
My dad, Imad, died two years ago after a long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The rare motoneuron disease took away his ability to dress himself in the suits he carefully curated over the years, dance on Saturday nights to Hunter Sullivan at the Mansion Bar, and always—always—spritz himself with his signature scent before walking out the door. He was loyal to Christian Dior’s Sauvage. It was always the finishing touch of getting dressed, whether he was putting it on himself or we were doing it for him, long after he lost the use of his hands.
Sauvage—a blend of bergamot, cedar, and lavender—is often referred to as the world’s most popular fragrance. Malls and airports are wallpapered with its advertisements, and it’s reported that a bottle is sold every 30 seconds, with more than 12 million last year alone. Essentially, it’s impossible to avoid.
“Unlike the other senses, scent has a direct pathway to the brain’s limbic system,” says Lauren Rooney, DSM-Firmenich’s vice president of fine fragrance marketing. “This is the area responsible for both emotion and memory. This means that the moment we encounter a fragrance, it can bypass rational processing and connect immediately with how we feel and what we remember.” It’s the scientific explanation behind the cliché of scent being transportive—that it can take you back to that incredible beach vacation, or the moment you fell in love—and while I have a lifetime of happy memories with my dad, smelling Sauvage is more like a bullet train straight to sadness. Every time it happens, I immediately get the urge to call him (sometimes, even opening my phone to do so), then remember I can’t. After that, the full body experience—blood rushing to my head, the urge to vomit—comes.
Matthew Schnipper, author of the forthcoming memoir Rise Above, gets it. “After my son died unexpectedly, people suggested we put one of his stuffed animals in a Ziploc bag so it would continue to smell like him,” he tells me. “I knew I couldn’t do that. Scent is so real, and his smell was particles of him. The idea that I would do something to purposefully evoke him when he wasn’t here seemed like too much to bear.”
When Schnipper’s second child, a daughter, was born, he and his partner made a conscious decision about scent. “My partner and I thought a lot about the products we used on our son,” he says. “The soap, the diaper cream; these are all generic things alone, but together, they made up the scent of our son. For our daughter, we chose all different products on purpose. We didn’t want to experience the reminder that we no longer had our son every time we smelled her.”
Two years into my own experience, Sauvage continues to haunt me on the subway, at dinner, and on holiday. Once I finally decide I can’t continue living in anticipation of such anguish-inducing, sensorial surprise, I go searching for answers (not a particularly easy thing to do when you’re low-level depressed all the time). “Grief isn’t a problem to solve or something to ‘get over,’” says Brennan Wood, the executive director at the Dougy Center, a nonprofit organization that helps families experiencing loss. If I’m being frank, I was hoping for something like a magic pill.
David Kessler, co-author of On Grief and Grieving and the founder of Grief.com, echoes a similar message after I explain my Sauvage situation. “When it comes to grief, I tend not to talk about ‘moving on,’” he says. “If the scent of your father’s cologne suddenly brings tears to your eyes, pause and explore what it evokes. Rather than pushing them away, allow yourself to lean in with curiosity. Grief has a way of speaking to us through those memories.”
#Pain #Smelling #Late #Father
