Seeing Our Life in a New Way

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James were thinkers and writers, and each of them faced the traumatic death of a person they loved. They responded to grief differently, but the deaths caused them to change direction and each discovered his life’s work. 

 

Yes, I know. These are three white males, but how they reacted to grief is how many men respond to grief today. Also, grief can help each of us pause, look at our life, and decide if we want to make a change and do what we’ve always wanted to do. Life is shorter than we want.

 

Their experiences are recounted in Robert Richardson’s book, Three Roads Back. It’s a short work, maybe 18,000 words, and was published in 2023. Below are some of the ideas. There are many more in the book.

 

Emerson lost his young wife Ellen after a year of marriage. She died in 1831 of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, and it caused him to give up his Unitarian faith. Five days into grief, still torn up by her death, he wrote that he knew he would appreciate beauty again one day, and wondered if he was really grieving because of this. Yet, each day Emerson visited her grave, and two months in, he opened her casket and looked at her remains. It would take him two and a half years to recover. He continued his pastoral duties for a couple of months, but his focus changed from theology to science, and he came to put his trust not in doctrines or dogma, but in the self-reliance of the individual.

 

In January 1842, Thoreau’s brother cut himself while shaving. It became gangrenous, tetanus set in, and he died rigid and delirious in Thoreau’s arms at age 27. Thoreau would spend the next four weeks in bed, and developed sympathetic reactions that mimicked his brother’s. Seeing his friend struggling, Emerson asked Thoreau to write reviews of books on nature. Thoreau renewed his relationship with the outdoors and realized that death was an ongoing part of nature’s life. Six months into grief, Thoreau began to come out of his funk. One of his guides was Emerson’s book, Nature, which talks about how individuals in nature die, but nature continues on to renew and replenish. Thoreau’s collapse led to his first writing about nature – “Resilience,” then to Walden, and his life’s work began. 

 

James was prone to despair when he was young. Then his beloved twenty-four-year-old cousin, Minny Temple, died of tuberculosis in 1870. For James it was a major loss because of how rare and good a person Minny was, and he felt that a big part of him died with her. Seven weeks later he resolved to deal less with speculations, fears, and possibilities, and focus more on the actual experiences of trauma and work with them. Changing his attitude helped him recover his hope, and he found his career as a psychologist.

 

Death is an inescapable part of life. It can be a teacher and a catalyst for a new life.

 

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See my related review of Neil Chethik’s book, Fatherloss, on the four main ways that men grieve the death of their fathers. https://widowersgrief.blogspot.com/2014/10/writing-about-grief-neil-chethik.html

 

Also see the work of Christina Rasmussen who writes about how to start life over after a death. I talk about her in my post: https://widowersgrief.blogspot.com/2020/12/pomegranate.html