Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them

by Sallie Tisdale

  You have trouble remembering details while the rest of the world forgets the big event. People are almost surprised that you haven’t forgotten, too. What we miss is often the most mundane thing. How she folded a towel. The sound of his foot on the porch. Her handwriting. I keep a recipe card from my mother’s collection on my bulletin board because she had beautiful handwriting and she tried to instill that in me, with little luck. You miss the snore that used to annoy you so. The scent of soap. The pat on the bottom. Small, ordinary things that no one else misses. You can’t say to a grieving person who is suddenly frantic about not being able to do the laundry together that doing the laundry isn’t important. Only the grieving person knows why it is so important, why not being able to do the laundry together is an immeasurable loss. The loss may be accepted in time, but this isn’t the same as “getting over it.” There are so many things not to say now: At least your mother and father are together again. He’s in a better place. You’ll marry again someday. (People say such stupid things. I just heard about a person who was told her daughter’s death was just the result of her karma. Consider asking a neutral friend to stay with you during the funeral as a stupidity monitor. Let them be the gentle bouncer: to say that you need to be alone, need to step out, can’t do any more hugging, don’t want to hold any more hands.)

  We are trained about crying from a very young age. In the West, we often judge open grief as unseemly, “hysterical”—yet a stoic person is judged as unfeeling. Men and women receive wildly different messages about tears. How and when we cry is conditioned by our entire experience and has nothing to do with whether our hearts are broken. Some people cry, some don’t. Some cry a lot, others a little. Some cry for a long time, others briefly. The tears of grief are structurally different from the tears of laughter and happiness; they are literally of a different shape. There is no prescription for tears. What not to say: Don’t cry; it will make you feel worse. Don’t say: Why aren’t you crying? It will make you feel better.

  Crying is neither necessary nor sufficient. The grief counseling partners John W. James and Russell Friedman write, “During our grief recovery seminars, when someone starts crying, we gently urge them to ‘talk while you cry.’

  “The emotions are contained in the words the griever speaks, not in the tears that they cry. What is fascinating to observe, is that as the thoughts and feelings are spoken, the tears usually disappear, and the depth of feeling communicated seems much more powerful than mere tears.…Tears [can] become a distraction from the real pain.”

  Regret is inevitable. Not one of us has lived a life without error. Grief is remorseful. Grief is angry. Angry at the disease: at the terrible choices that had to be made, at the stolen days. Angry at the accident, the mistake, the stupidity of death. Angry at the dead person. How dare you go away? How dare you leave me alone? Angry at everyone involved, everyone who didn’t stop death. The motorcyclist came over the crest of the hill way too fast, straight into a car pulling out into traffic. I was mad at him even when I was trying to get his heart to beat again: the risk, the damage done to the other driver, to the neighbors, to his friend, his family, to me. We long to blame someone. Why wasn’t she wearing a seat belt? Why didn’t he tell anyone he had chest pain? Why wouldn’t he quit smoking?

  Anger can be a way for the survivor to deal with the fear of surviving: How do I go on? How do I live now? Weeks after Carol’s death, her husband kept reviewing the last day, questioning everything, his decisions and the actions of the doctors and nurses. He felt rage at the universe’s “utter dumbness,” he wrote. “Mouth-breathing doofuses. When I go into town and see them walking around alive and Carol died, it is totally stupid.”

  Religion doesn’t fix grief. (Don’t say: God always has a plan.) Explanations don’t fix it, advice doesn’t fix it, sharing doesn’t fix it. All these things may help immensely, but grief is not a disease to be cured. Grief is a wound not unlike that from a knife or a bludgeon. The injury will heal in time, leaving a scar, but the tissue is never quite the same. One moves forward, changed. The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”

  Grief is not orderly or predictable. There is no schedule. I have seen people in their seventies weeping over the loss of a parent in their nineties. One of my students lost her husband this winter. He died at the breakfast table while she was out of town visiting her own elderly mother. A well-meaning person told her that her grief should last two months. More like two years, she thinks, but who knows? My student writes, “Every thought I have is based on assumptions that are now out of date. That’s why it takes a long time.” Grief lasts as long as it lasts. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. It may evolve and may even cease to be painful, but we are changed. The poet Jack Gilbert wrote: “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy.” The man adjusts his arms and hands, holds the weight in different ways, shifting when his muscles tire. He keeps finding new ways to carry that heavy, heavy box, “so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.”

  Grief is the internal experience of loss. Mourning is its outward expression. Together we call this bereavement, a wonderful word. Its root comes from the Old English berēafian, which means to rob.

  James Wilce, an anthropologist, studies lamentation, the impassioned cries of the grieved, what he calls “spontaneous tuneful texted weeping” or “melodic wailing.” Lamentation is found around the world. In the last several years, he has studied a form practiced by the Karelian people of Finland. The Finnish Lament Society (Äänellä Itkijät ry) has revived the traditional practice and teaches it in workshops in a reinvented form, explicitly intended as a kind of self-help technique, useful for any loss. Wilce describes it as a singsong speaking, or “weep-and-speak,” done in a particular kind of intonation, a kind of music built out of pain—a cracked and lonesome sound. The laments tell the life story of the dead person and help to wake up those who have already died, so they can come and meet the newly deceased. Wilce has attended several of the trainings, and found that his old grief about a sister who died in childhood was met more completely by the lamentation than it had been by years of therapy. He said of the experience, “Be prepared to be overcome.”

  As individual as grief is, taking its own path like the rivulets of rain along a glass, mourning has many forms. Islamic culture frowns on public shows of grief; a little quiet crying for a few days should be enough. Too much mourning can be seen as a rejection of one’s destiny and submission to God. Some Muslims don’t buy life insurance; they believe that it is forbidden to trade something you don’t own, and your life belongs to God. Islam posits God’s mercy, regardless of our predisposition to evil behavior. Death is not a tragedy if you are going to heaven. In other cultures, the bereft will fall prostrate, shake his fists at heaven, beat his chest. People slice their skin, cut off or tear out their hair, tear their clothes to pieces, or wear special clothing for the rest of their lives. A person may be expected to get a particular kind of tattoo.

  In traditional Jewish tradition, mourners tear a piece of clothing in a particular way and wear the torn clothing for the seven days of mourning called shiva. For a week after the death, the family is cared for by friends and neighbors. They sit together, often on low stools instead of chairs. Men don’t shave; women wear no makeup. They may not bathe and are not supposed to study the Torah, except the portions related to grief, because to study the Torah is a pleasant thing to do. During these seven days, the world is set aside, held apart, while those left behind remember—set aside, that is, except for countless telephone calls and visitors and even emails sent by friends and relatives, each requiring a personal response. An Orthodox friend of mine finds shiva a great trial. (She refers to the endless stream of people as a kind of “assault” to those who like to be alone.) I am sure that sitting shiva is boring and the neighbors are intrusive and annoying, the stools are uncomfortable, and everyone begins to smell a little
bad. But this setting aside of all things, surrendering power to the community for a time, seems wise in its way. Maybe it should be a trial; it is a container of discomfort, built by others, a labor giving birth to a new life.

  I worked for several years on an oncology unit. One evening I had an old Tongan woman as my patient. She was dying. By luck or forethought, she’d been admitted alone to a double room. Through the course of the night, many relatives gathered: at least twenty big, cheerful Tongans crowded in, catching up and gossiping and sharing McDonald’s takeout and laughing. My patient lay silently, eyes closed, never speaking. Late in the evening, a young woman found me at the desk and said, “I think she’s gone.” I listened to her chest. No heartbeat, no breath. I waited a moment to be sure and then looked at the room full of people and said, “She has died.”

  Never have I been so impressed with the fact that mourning is a social experience. One by one, each sister, cousin, and nephew, every relative, came to the side of the bed, knelt, and cried loudly for a few minutes. Then each stood and turned away and went directly back to gossiping, laughing, and sharing food. This went on for a few hours, until every person had taken a turn.

  I appreciated the ritual acknowledgment that the event was momentous, that it deserved recognition even from distant relatives who may not be feeling personal grief. I have wanted to wail, to cover the mirrors and wear only black for months. James Wilce makes the specific point that Finnish lamentation is not “stereotypical, modern, Protestant, or dry-eyed.” Which is exactly my heritage: hooded, a little taciturn, tight-lipped.

  I don’t remember much about my mother’s funeral. It was the middle of the afternoon, and people were solemn, squeezing my father’s elbow, patting my hand, without a word. A few dabbed at their eyes, but no one was crying. I sat with my father and my brother and sister in the front row. Then the young Lutheran pastor came forward casually and put his hand on the casket, as though on the shoulder of a friend. “This woman,” he said to the church, which to my surprise was filled with people, “this was a good woman.” I had been filled with crying, and crying wouldn’t come. Until then I’d been calm. But the laying of hands on my mother’s coffin, this expression of the intimacy of peers and maybe friends, the loving acknowledgment of my shy, plain, charitable mother’s life, was too much for even my pride. That’s when I was finally able to cry; I filled the church with sobs. Finally.

  Try not to say: You shouldn’t dwell on the past. Grief is a story that must be told, over and over. Very few people know how to listen to a grieving person without in some way trying to shut down or control the strong emotion. (“A grieving acquaintance is a shy person’s nightmare,” says Lindy West.) Because it is hard for others to listen, the grieving tell each other the story of their losses, over and over. There are so many things not to say. What are the things to say? I love you. I’m so sorry. And one of the best things to say is Do you want to talk? I would be glad to listen to the story. The story of how you met, of what he was like as a child, of her favorite food, of that trip you took together to Iceland, why he liked that blue plaid shirt so much, what the last moments were like. Whatever story you want to tell.

  We want to tell the story, our story, and we want to know the rest of the story—not just the life story, but the story of the death. There can be grief in not knowing how someone died, in having not been present. Knowing doesn’t necessarily fix anything and may leave you with new questions and new losses, but the urge to have the story finished is strong.

  When the motorcyclist died in front of me—the tall man’s voice rising, “Is he dead? Is he dead? Oh, God,” pacing back and forth by the tangle of broken bike, his words beginning to squeak as his throat closed until he walked to a tree, knelt, leaned his drooping head against the bark, and began to sob, loud and ragged—I wondered if his family would want details. I thought the tall man might want to talk about what had happened. By then I had found out that his father was in one of my exercise classes, and that he had attended the same high school as my daughter. I told myself that I would go to the funeral in case his father and friend wanted to know more of the story of his death. But in fact it was me that wanted to know the story of his life. I had seen only his face dead, inside a motorcycle helmet: glazed eyes, scruffy facial hair, a big nose. The photo with the obituary added big, uneven teeth, crow’s-feet, a smile. I wanted to know who this man had been.

  The church was crowded. I thought he might be one kind of biker, but he turned out to be another. The church was filled with young people with pink and green hair and piercings and a lot of good ink. There were quite a few long-haired, bearded guys who cried into their leather sleeves, and my entire water aerobics class sharing a pew. It was a traditional Catholic funeral with lots of standing up and reciting and praying, and a sermon about eternal life. The program had a Mary Oliver poem: “I thought the earth / remembered me, she / took me back so tenderly.” I didn’t get the whole story, but I got enough.

  In her memoir of dying (called Dying: A Memoir), Cory Taylor felt something lacking as she approached her own death. She was not religious, and realized that without a religious structure, there were few social frames for grief. “We have lost our common rituals and our common language for dying, and must either improvise, or fall back on traditions about which we feel deeply ambivalent. I am talking especially about people like me, who have no religious faith. For us it seems that dying exposes the limitations of secularism like nothing else.” Atheism or agnosticism shouldn’t mean no rituals; we hold rituals as a community and we create rituals out of our lives. Brushing your teeth is a ritual; chances are you do it exactly the same way every day. I believe in rituals and so I believe in funerals and wakes and memorials and doing these things on anniversaries and doing them with others. Ceremonies are one of the hinges of a community.

  They can take any form you like. My friend Patrick arranged a potlatch for after his death. He didn’t have much in the way of possessions, but everyone who knew him recognized the Hawaiian shirts, the sandals, the reading glasses. All his worldly goods were laid out on tables as though at a church bazaar. His friends wandered about, picking and choosing their favorites, making trades.

  ***

  Sometimes grief isn’t recognized; others don’t understand why you grieve, or grieve with such passion. The loss seems relatively small: a divorced partner, a spouse with end-stage dementia, an early miscarriage. (Try explaining to your supervisor that your religious teacher has died and you need a few days off work.) There are no bereavement fares for a best friend or business partner. People may not even realize you are grieving: a secret affair may never be divulged, but the loss is real. This is sometimes called disenfranchised grief. Grief unrecognized or undervalued is real and disabling.

  After unexpected or violent deaths, the survivors may feel what is commonly known as complicated grief: pain that remains sharp and unchanging for many months or years. I’m a little wary of this label, because grief has no strict timeline, no prescribed schedule in which one moves forward. But most people do move forward over several months or a few years, even if they think of the dead person every day. A new life without the person in it is slowly created.

  My friends Thomas and Kevin moved across the country, from Oregon to Vermont, when Thomas was promoted. He called me early one morning, stunned: “Kevin’s dead.” Thomas had confronted him the evening before with his suspicions that Kevin was abusing drugs. Kevin carried a lot of demons, had anxiety and depression from a brutal childhood, and had abused both alcohol and prescription drugs in the past. Thomas didn’t really want to believe he was doing it again, especially since he’d been diagnosed with heart disease and had a stent placed. But Kevin admitted it.

  This is what Thomas remembers now, six years later: “I was just crestfallen. And as the afternoon wore on, he was popping more pills, and he was stumbling around.” Thomas decided to get out of the house. He had dinner, went to a movie, and drove around town for several hours.
“I came home,” he remembers, “and the lights were on. The house looked normal, and I took the dog out and started closing house. I just assumed he was asleep upstairs. But when I went upstairs, he was not in bed, and I just panicked.” He found Kevin in the basement laundry room with his face in a hamper full of clothes. “I remember thinking a mix of disbelief and ‘This is it. It happened. This is how it happened.’ ” The dryer door was open and the light was on. “I reached over, half out of denial, half not knowing what you do. Do you touch him? Do you not touch him?” Thomas pulled him over and his body was already so stiff that he didn’t lie flat. “He was dead, and had been dead for a while. He died doing chores! He was doing chores, he was self-medicating with Oxycontin, he was doing laundry.”

  He called the police. He didn’t go back down to the basement and he never saw Kevin’s body again, a choice he still regrets.

  Thomas remembers that the police were kind. But they questioned him for a long time, taking turns. “‘Where were you? Did anybody see you? Can anybody verify you were there? Do you have receipts?’ You shift between extraordinary grief and pain the likes of which I didn’t know you could feel, and complete denial the next moment, and task-oriented mode the next minute.”

  Kevin was found with two items in his pocket: a half-full bottle of Oxycontin and an AA sobriety chip. The medical examiner ruled the death accidental, a cardiac arrest related to the drug use. Kevin was thirty-nine years old.

  The grief counselors John James and Russell Friedman developed a program they call Grief Recovery Method, based on James’s experiences after his three-day-old baby died. Their work is based on the idea that unresolved grief happens because “the griever is often left with things they wish had happened differently, better, or more, and with unrealized hopes, dreams, and expectations for the future.” This can be true in healthy relationships as well as dysfunctional ones, anticipated deaths as well as sudden ones. The relationship feels suspended, unfinished, with no way forward. Recovery means, to James and Friedman, letting go of “a different or better yesterday.”