Gratitude and the Long Arc of Grief

             I’m sitting in a cemetery in Peru with the dead, thinking about Hope’s journey to a different Peru, sorrow for an entire culture of people, and trying to describe how moved I am by the breadth of her book The AfterGrief. 

Today is the fall equinox and dry leaves are beginning to drop from the trees and rest on graves in central Illinois, which means that October and Halloween will soon be here when we will dress our children up as skeletons and images of the living dead, but we still won’t talk about death.

 

            In her book, Hope Edelman discusses death, grief, and living, and includes so many insights that I won’t try to summarize everything here. My marked-up copy attests to all of her findings about the clarity and complexities of grief that I want to think about more. 

 

Hope’s seminal work, Motherless Daughters, broke new ground when it was published in 1994. Her new book explores another area of grief that has been underexplored—the long arc of loss—how our understanding of the experience and nature of our grief changes over the years, how we find new meaning, and how we can integrate this loss into our life. Her book focuses primarily on deaths that happened a long time ago, to people who were young when their person died, and talks about the unfinished business that some still have to work through. 

 

Her book traces how the theories of bereavement care have developed over the decades, and how society’s view of grief is moving from being an individual’s problem to being recognized as a community endeavor.

 

There are many memorable lines. For example, on page 131, she notes that when a caterpillar enters its cocoon, before it transforms into a butterfly, it “disintegrates into a primordial puddle of goop,” a striking image for how our early months of grief feel.

 

If we dialogue with grief over the years, Hope says, we will find greater clarity about the initial months after the death, as well as an awareness that our relationship with grief continues to evolve. Unlike when she began grieving her mother, it is now understood that we do not get over grief, and that the people who died can remain part of our lives, if we want them to. Also, just as the impact of a death can cause post-traumatic stress, it can also open the way for post-traumatic growth. This discussion alone is worth the read.

 

Hope uses the term Sherpas of Sorrow to refer to people who have had to bear the heavy load of multiple deaths in their lives. I think the term can have another meaning. In the Himalayas, Sherpas carry gear and guide climbers over treacherous crevasses and icy slopes in the Himalayas as they climb into the death zone, the elevation where oxygen levels are so low that people die if they linger, to reach the top of mountain peaks and return safely home. 

I think Hope is a Sherpa of Sorrow who takes the suffering of others into her heart, helps them bear the weight of their grief, and guides them through danger to where they are ready to take the risk of loving life again.  

 

This is an important book for those who have lost loved ones, and for counselors who are working with the bereaved and want to understand the entire landscape of grief. It’s a much-welcomed addition to the literature of grief.

 

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Feeling gratitude for any loss is hard. In 2019, Anderson Cooper did an interview with Stephen Colbert. Shortly afterwards, my friend Steve, who has been a muse since my wife died, contacted me: “What did you think?” Steve is wise, compassionate, and intuitively sees deeper into things than I do, yet he keeps asking for my take on grief matters when they show up in public.

 

We were both impressed that two intelligent men were willing to talk from the heart about their tragedies. They set aside their roles as journalist and entertainer and shared as humans. Cooper’s mother had died recently, while his father died when he was young. Colbert lost his father and his two older brothers in a plane crash when he was young. That men were sharing their grief on TV was tremendously significant. At times, though, it seemed like they were searching for answers and the words wouldn’t come to express the depths of their feelings or the extent of their thoughts. Neither Steve nor I knew if the discussion questions were shared ahead of time. If they weren’t, we wish they had been, because we sensed that both of them could have shared so much more. 

 

Hope mentions the interview. She was struck by Colbert talking about his grief with gratitude, and that while he wished it had never happened, he felt that if we are grateful for our life, then we have to be grateful for all of it. We can’t pick and choose. Hope says her understanding of what this means keeps shifting. While we are never grateful for the death of someone we loved, she says, we come to be grateful for how our ongoing narrative of life evolves alongside the eternally tragic one.

 

I struggle with this, as well. While I will never be grateful that my wife died young, I have learned to live with the reality of it. I am grateful for who Evelyn was, and I’m grateful for who I’ve become because I had to find a way to survive her death and deal with my grief. I’m grateful that this has spurred me to write about grief in ways that help other people. And I’m grateful for Hope, her writing, her deep-hearted compassion, and vision.