The first systematic survey of grief, I read, was conducted by Erich Lindemann. Having studied 101 people, many of them related to the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, he defined grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.” Intensive subjective distress. Yes, exactly: that was the objective description I was looking for. The experience is, as Lindemann notes, brutally physiological. It literally takes your breath away. Its physicality is also what makes grief so hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.
One of the questions I had was whether there was any empirical evidence supporting the famous “five stages of grief.” Mention that you had a death in the family to anyone, stranger or friend, and he is likely to say something about the five stages. According to “stage theory,” an idea popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her famous 1969 study On Death and Dying, grieving typically takes the form of five emotional stages, in sequence: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This idea took hold in American culture almost as soon as Kübler-Ross articulated it (even though originally she used it to describe the grief the dying feel), perhaps because it makes loss sound controllable—and because the idea of acceptance appeals to our national character. In the months after my mother died, I saw stage theory invoked repeatedly, especially on TV medical shows. But my experience seemed to bear little resemblance to the “stages,” and as it turns out, stage theory isn’t a very accurate description of what it’s like to grieve. There is little evidence suggesting that most people experience capital-letter Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance in simple sequence. Instead, according to a study that Prigerson, the Dana-Farber researcher, worked on, Kübler-Ross’s stages seem to be more like states. Though Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that the dying and their families experience, grief doesn’t generally follow a checklist. It’s less like an orderly progression of stages and more like an ongoing, messy process—sometimes one that never fully ends.
One of the things Prigerson told me when I talked to her on the phone was that researchers now believe there are two kinds of grief: “normal grief” and “complicated grief” (also called “prolonged grief”). “Normal grief” is a term for what most bereaved people experience. It peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. “Complicated grief” does not, and often requires medication or therapy. But even “normal grief,” Prigerson said, is hardly gentle. Its symptoms include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth. I had had all of these symptoms, including one banal hallucination at dinner with a friend, when I imagined I saw a waitress bring him ice cream. In addition to the symptoms Prigerson named, I had one more: difficulty spelling. Like my mother, I had always been a good speller. Now I had to rely on the dictionary to ascertain whether siege is spelled ie or ei. My problem was not unusual; certain forms of grief can take a toll on your cognitive functions.
An enduring psychiatric idea about grief is that the mourner needs to “let go” in order to “move on,” and in the weeks after my mother died, people kept suggesting as much. But I didn’t want to let go. And in fact studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. In China, for instance, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study demonstrated that the bereaved there “recovered more quickly from loss” than bereaved Americans do.
I wasn’t living in China, though, and in those weeks after my mother’s death, I felt that the world expected me to absorb the loss and move forward, like some kind of emotional warrior. One night I heard a character on 24—the president of the United States—announce that grief was a “luxury” she couldn’t “afford right now.” This model represents an old American ethic of muscling through pain by throwing yourself into work; embedded in it is a desire to avoid looking at death. We’ve adopted a sort of “Ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but as my dad had said, the mourner quickly figures out that it shouldn’t always be taken for an actual inquiry. Around this time I read a book by a Johns Hopkins researcher in which she described an exchange, three months after her husband’s death, with a colleague who asked her to peer-review an article. The researcher said, “My husband just died.” To which her colleague responded, “It’s been three months.” A mourner’s experience of time isn’t like everyone else’s. Grief that lasts longer than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence to those around you. But if you’re in mourning, three months seems like nothing—going by Prigerson’s research, three months might well find you approaching the height of sorrow.
My pervasive loneliness was a result, I believe, of what I now think of as the privatization of grief. For centuries, private grief and public mourning were allied in most cultures. In many places, it used to be that if your husband died the village came to your door, bearing fresh-baked rolls or soup. As Darian Leader, a British psychoanalyst, argues in The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression, mourning—to truly be mourning—“requires other people.” To lose someone was to be swept into a flurry of rituals. In many nations some kind of viewing followed the cleaning of the body—what was known as a wake in Ireland, an “encoffining” in China. Many cultures had—and some still have—special mourning clothes. In the Jewish shiva, a mourner sits on a low chair and is visited by friends and family. In The Hour of Our Death, a magisterial history of Western attitudes toward mortality, which Isabel had given me, Philippe Ariès notes that until the turn of the twentieth century, “the death of a man still solemnly altered the space and time of a social group that could be extended to include the entire community.”
Why, I wondered, did I live in a world where there were so few rituals to guide me through this loss? The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the author of Death, Grief, and Mourning, argues that, at least in Britain, the First World War played a huge role in changing the way people mourned. Communities were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead that the practice of ritualized mourning for the individual eroded. Other changes were less obvious but no less important. More people, including women, began working outside the home; in the absence of caretakers, death increasingly took place in the quarantining swaddle of the hospital. The rise of psychoanalysis shifted attention from the communal to the individual experience. In 1917, only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” defined it as something essentially private and individual, internalizing the work of mourning. Within a few generations, I read, the experience of grief had fundamentally changed. Death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm. By the 1960s, Gorer could write that many people believed that “sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as . . . masturbation.” Today, our only public mourning takes the form of watching the funerals of celebrities and statesmen. It’s common to mock such grief as false or voyeuristic (“crocodile tears,” one commentator called mourners’ distress at Princess Diana’s funeral), and yet it serves an important social function. It’s a more mediated version, Leader suggests, of a practice that goes all the way back to soldiers in The Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus.
I found myself nodding in recognition at Gorer’s conclusions. “If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,” Gorer wrote. “At the moment our society is signally failing to give this support and assistance. . . . The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair and maladaptive behavior is very high.” Maybe
it’s not a coincidence that in Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report more physical ailments in the year following a death.
After my mother died, I kept thinking, “I just want somewhere to put my grief.” I was imagining a vessel for it: a long, shallow wooden bowl, irregularly shaped. I had the sense that if I could chant, or rend my clothes, or tear my hair, I could, in effect, create that vessel in the world. Five days after my mother died a man elbowed me aside on the subway and I felt bruised and angry; if I had been wearing mourning clothes, I furiously thought, he would have taken greater care. I longed for rituals not only to indicate I was still in mourning but also to have a nonpsychological way of commemorating and expressing my loss. Without ritual, the only way to share a loss was to talk about it—foregrounding the particularities of my own emotions, my own bereavement. At times, though, this sharing felt invasive. I did not want to be pitied. In those moments, I wanted a way to show my grief rather than tell it.
One reason people over the ages have ritualized grief is to perform it and thereby descant it. For most of human history, as Robert Pogue Harrison shows in The Dominion of the Dead, elaborate rituals surrounding death served both to express and limit its power over our minds. “By expressing grief in the various forms of celebration or cult of the dead,” the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce writes, “one overcomes heartbreak, rendering it objective.” Ritual helps us let go of our identification with the dead. In this way, ritual can contain what Robert Pogue Harrison calls the “crisis” of grief, so that the mourner doesn’t plunge into “sheer delirium.” All this clarified to me what I had been craving: a formalization of grief, one that might externalize it.
For I had some understanding of delirium. At my nadir, on a wintry night after my mother died, I opened up the cut on my arm—the cut I’d given myself at Thanksgiving. My entire mind and body hurt. Watching TV and eating dinner, I’d started to weep violently, almost as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. With my nails pressing deeply into the skin, I scraped open my inner arm. The flesh turned pink. I took an ivory-handled dinner knife on the plate beside me and dragged it along the healing scar. Red drops of blood welled up. It’s hard to describe this now, because putting it in words seems to sensationalize it, or to devalue it. I did not want to hurt myself, or to die. I just wanted to create some embodiment of the heartbreak eating me up. And, oddly enough, it was clarifying. As soon as I did it, I thought: I need to get away for a bit. I went back to the desert, near Marfa, Texas, and while there I bought a black-and-white friendship bracelet to signify my loss, and I wore it for three months, never taking it off.
The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea. My friend D.’s best friend had recently lost her husband; D. was anxious to feel that there was something she could do to help that didn’t seem to diminish or trivialize her friend’s pain.
Even so, ritual mourning does not appeal to everyone, I know. A friend raised her eyebrows when I said how drawn I was to the idea of public mourning. “I just went to my uncle’s funeral,” she said, “and I was horrified by the way some of the women who knew him least were wailing the most. It was hypocritical. The whole funeral seemed stale and false.” Perhaps. But, I said, those women were also mourning their own prior losses, and this is in part what such rituals are for. They aren’t just about the individual; they are about the community.
I got my own taste of this at a memorial service we held for my mother at Saint Ann’s at the end of February. The service was held at the church around the corner, where we used to have choral concerts, and where the school’s graduation ceremonies were held; the last time I’d been there was for Eamon’s graduation. It was a cold, clear day, and when we arrived the church was nearly full. My father, my brothers, and I spoke, along with Isabel and Diana and a few of my mother’s close friends. I felt nervous about speaking, but also strangely subdued; I kept looking around, seeing people from my childhood—a woman who’d been the assistant teacher in one of my mother’s early second-grade classes; students my mother had taught when I was in kindergarten. The charge of contact I felt at seeing old faces carried more weight than I’d expected. What I actually said about my mother barely captured anything about her, or our relationship, but the coming together of all these people gave me a sense of solace. Even seeing them cry opened up a knot in me: my mother’s death meant something to them. Students from the school where my mother worked sobbed so loudly that later my friends told me they were taken aback. But I understood the sobbing. They were putting their grief into the service. A few months later I was talking to my friend Katie, whose father had died after a long illness, and she said that it had been comforting to see other people cry at her father’s memorial service. “It sounds strange or awful to say,” she told me, “but my brother and I would poke each other and say, ‘See that person? See how sad he is?’ It made us feel part of a community of mourners.”
It is human to want our friends and family to recover from pain, to look for a silver lining—or so I reminded myself. But when people stop mentioning the dead person’s name to you, the silence can seem worse than the pain of hearing those familiar, beloved syllables. Henry James, after the death of his sister, Alice, and his friend James Russell Lowell, wrote in his journal: “The waves sweep dreadfully over the dead—they drop out and their names are unuttered.” I thought of the famous letter Abraham Lincoln had sent to the woman who lost all her sons in the Civil War; while he wanted to tell her what a gift her sons had given to the nation, he also wrote that he did not want to “beguile” her out of her grief. Likewise, I wanted my distress acknowledged, rather than beguiled away with promises that one day I’d “heal” or “move on.”
The painful fact behind every ritual and psychological finding is that even a “good” death is rarely good for the survivors. The word grief, I read in my etymological dictionary, derives from an old French word meaning “to burden.” For this reason, the matter-of-fact mordancy of Emily Dickinson, the supreme poet of grief, provided more balm to me than did the glad tidings of those who talked about how death can enrich us. In her poem “I Measure Every Grief I Meet,” the speaker’s curiosity about other people’s grief ends up conveying how heavy her own is:I wonder if It weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long—
Or did it just begin—
I could not tell the Date of Mine—
It feels so old a pain—
I wonder if it hurts to live—
And if They have to try—
And whether—could They choose between—
It would not be—to die—
CHAPTER NINE
{spring}
It was a cold spring. A bitter rain came down for days on end, as if the gods knew my sorrow. In literary criticism, the term for this association is “pathetic fallacy,” coined by the art critic John Ruskin to describe the attribution of human emotions to nature and inanimate objects; the harsh, angry moors in Wuthering Heights mirror the characters’ lives. At work on the website, I was often irritable, and I’d decided that after its launch I would take the summer off, then go back to teaching. I couldn’t fall asleep until late in the night. When I did sleep, I had violent dreams about people I loved. I dreamed that a friend told me I was doing a bad job at work; furious, I tore out a clump of her long blond hair.
This friend had been nothing but kind to me after my mother’s death.
In a different dream, I got angry at a friend who told me that I had forgotten to prepare a presentation for her class. You have no idea what this is like, I wept. My mother died. My mother died.
My mother died.
In the dreams, when I said this,
I experienced the shock all over again: My mother had died. It was hard to take it in; she was the very being who once contained me. As Adrienne Rich wrote, a mother is “beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival—a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.” When you separate a puppy from its mother temporarily, it goes into protest mode; when you separate it from its mother permanently, it goes into despair. We need love and security as children, or else we wither.
Another psychoanalyst, René Spitz, wrote about a miniepidemic of orphans becoming sickly in the 1940s. It turned out that, caught up in the new mania for hygiene, orphanages were no longer handling or playing with babies; they merely fed them and kept them warm and clothed. Many of the babies grew sick and some died. All had become much more susceptible to the very infections the hygienic approach was supposed to protect them from. (An allegory for mourning: The more we hygienically avoid messy emotions, the more they infect us?) It was from this work that John Bowlby developed his concept of attachment theory—the idea that infants are born with “an instinctive behavioral bond with mothers. That bond produces distress when a mother is absent, as well as the drive for the two to seek each other out when the child is frightened or in pain.” You find the same process in other young mammals, “who also cry and cling and seek out their mothers when danger looms.”
“The thing is,” Liam kept saying, “she’s the one who made me better when I felt like this. And that only makes this worse.”
The Long Goodbye Page 12
