GOOD GRIEF

6 May, 2012                 

A few days ago, someone asked me “Why grieve?” My first response was shock not by the question, but that there is such a question. Why Grieve? My second response was ‘because I’m human’ and I don’t mean that in a smart-alecky way.

I’ve thought about this question in the ensuing days and it strikes me as a provocative and interesting question; the kind of question Murray, who died recently, might have asked, being the great provocateur that he was, the absence of which I grieve.

I don’t view grief as a negative feeling, just one of the many in the human range: joy, sadness, anger, bliss, frustration, envy, lust, disappointment, pride, satisfaction et al., all of them to be experienced as they arise and let go of. I wouldn’t want to spend my life stuck in any one of them, yet value each for what they can teach us about ourselves.

Of course, one of the difficulties with communicating through written or verbal language is semantics; how one person defines a word may be quite different than the way another does. So let’s go to the dictionary.

The Webster dictionary defines grief as: mental anguish as a result of the loss of someone or something. The Oxford defines it as: intense sorrow, especially caused by someone’s death. The Webster definition causes me some grief. It’s that phrase ‘mental anguish’ which implies a fragility of mind bordering on insanity. I experienced that kind of grief when I lost my first child at birth.

I was 24 and my grief was both visceral and mental. The visceral part was more acceptable to me: it was the animal shock of the loss of the life I had been harboring, readying for on the most primal level. I remember saying there was a hole in my arms where a baby was supposed to be. The body, my body, so totally prepared for the job of mothering, produced milk for nearly a month after she died. The mental anguish was perhaps more human than animal; the sense that somehow I must have been responsible for her death, that I had done something wrong. Her name is Amy Katherine.

Now, after all these years and subsequent deaths of parents, loved ones and yes, a few dogs, I’m more aligned to the Oxford Dictionary’s definition: intense sorrow caused by someone’s death. And why would we not want to feel that? Well, because it sucks actually. The actual feeling of grief, when it hits you full blast, brings you to your knees and feels in that moment like it will never end.

Perhaps the question is not so much ‘why grieve’ – which implies there is a choice – so much as will you let grief become your identity? When you fall to your knees will you choose to remain felled or will you keep rising up until, by so doing, grief recedes, like all feelings.

Perhaps some people hold onto grief as a way of keeping the loved one alive to them. Perhaps the grief accompanied by mental anguish has to do with regret. I don’t know. What I do know is that my journey through grief over Amy’s death was long and deeply spiritual. It was a journey that gave me the opportunity to examine my beliefs and misconceptions about what our time on earth means. It moved time and space in ways I still don’t fully understand and showed me how little I would ever understand about life. It melted the man-made boundaries between here and there, before and after, life and death. And here is where language really becomes useless, because there are no words that can describe the experience of existence beyond our mortal realm.

How else to explain that the first time I saw a heron come to land on the lake, by which I then lived, I understood that Amy’s spirit had been too gentle for this world and that I had done nothing wrong. The gift of Amy was not to be manifest in earthly accomplishments but in visitations once in a while during the course of my life; a gentle breeze that teaches me to connect with my own gentle spirit – a lesson in which I am of continual need.

If I had buried my grief along with her, would I have evolved this way, to the point where that grief is no longer – nor has been for many years – necessary?

Yet grief for a life not yet lived is different than the grief we feel for the lives we have lived with, be they parent, mate, or friend. If we are fortunate, grief is attached to the real loss of shared life: the laughter and tears, the disagreements and disappointments, the inside jokes and intimate conversations, the tender smile, the kiss on the nape of the neck, the folding of underwear not your own.

Grief is what we fill the space with until we are able to step back into the ongoing river where we will inevitably be carried away and forward into our new lives. For sure, some grief’s are harder than others; the grief we feel at the death of any loved one with whom love was unrequited or in some way thwarted is grief multiplied by all that never was and now can never be. Yet even that grief can be the vehicle through which we come to terms with the imperfect nature of life on earth.

Grief is a good thing, as long as we don’t choose to live in it for the rest of our lives. But the journey through it is solitary and personal and as varied as life itself.

  Photograph by Maggie Barrett