Grief Words

 

Writing the Shadows

            We need the words. How are we going to talk about grief without the words?

 

It’s difficult to talk about grief when the language we know comes from the back of a cereal box. We stumble around, find a few words that seem to fit, find other words that fit better, and our vocabulary begins to expand.

 

The Sloth and Avocado

 Jill Christman’s new book, If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, is about her life—being raped, falling in love, grief, PTSD, the struggle to recover herself and her sexuality, falling in love again, miscarriage, becoming a mother and trying to protect her children from every imaginable harm, with them telling her to let them be kids and learn how to gauge the risks they take on their own. Just like she did.

 

Child Loss

 

Michelle Cramer put out a book this year called Unshattered Grief. In it she shares stories of parents as they deal with stillbirths or the deaths of their older children.

 

The loss of a child is crushing because we never expect it to happen. It always feels wrong. At a time when expectations of joy are building for a new life, they are taken away and emptiness is left behind.

 

Is Grief a Room or the House?

             What is the most devastating loss we can experience? Is it the death of a parent, spouse or partner, child, pet, or best friend? Or is it the loss of a marriage, the destruction of a wilderness, belief in our self-worth, or trust that our society will do the right thing? 

 

One of Suzanne Roberts’s friends said that ‘grief used to be one room in the house, but after their son died, grief was the only room.’

 

Leavings

 

            Few of us look forward to change. We like routine and comfort. Yet over the course of our life, we will leave many places and people, and they will leave us. The reasons will be varied—new jobs, marriage, wanderlust, and sometimes what drew us together was one mutual interest, and when that had run its course, we drifted apart. Sometimes we simply sense that there is more waiting for us.

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. 

 

Possessions Left Behind

 

            After a loved one’s death, we have to decide what to do with their possessions. Although there are some things that we wish they would have taken with them, many of their possessions have stories and emotions attached—their favorite coffee cup with the slight chip, the tools they used for their hobbies, the scent in their clothes, and their ashes.

 

            After Ev died, I wanted to keep everything, and I mean everything, even her handwritten notes on containers in the freezer identifying food, and the to-do list on the board, with smiley faces indicating her preference for which tasks we should tackle next. I didn’t want to lose anything that reminded me of part of her personality, laughter, or sense of style. As the survivor, I became the gatekeeper of her life. 

 

Pomegranate

Christina Rasmussen, Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again, Hay House, 2013

 

When someone we love dies, we need to sit with our sorrow for a time and grieve. We need to mourn and cry and pound on the walls. We need to acknowledge our emotions and the fears that show up—of our own death, of life changing, of being alone. Grief is overwhelming. The impact of the death sends an electrical surge through our body, and our brain’s main circuit breaker trips before our entire wiring gets fried, but we end up numb and in shock.

 

We find ourselves in a place of darkness, feeling vulnerable and broken. For a time, we will live here, in the space between the world we knew and loved and the unknown world that is coming. 

 

Poetry of Dying

Poetry and dying go together because when we’re facing the end of our life, our senses sharpen and our ocean of words distill into a surging river of images and metaphors.

 

Many of us would not want to take time away from living our last months to sit at a desk and deliberate over the right words to describe our dying. We would prefer to do some of the remaining items on our bucket list, or simply to enjoy each day free of everyone’s expectations.

 

Expressing Grief Through Music

As we get older, more of our friends and family pass away. Some die from old age, but too many die young, we think, before their time, from accidents, cancer, and other causes. Realizing how fragile life is, and how quickly death can come to the unsuspecting and unprepared, can unnerve us so much that we wake every morning fearing that someone else has died overnight. Every strange ache, cough, and tick of our body can make us think that something is seriously wrong and we’re next.

Widowed Fathers

I have read few books that speak honestly and in detail about being a widowed father. Compared to the number of grief memoirs written by women, there aren’t many written by men. There should be more of both.

 

A recent book by Donald Rosenstein and Justin Yopp is excellent—The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life. It shares the stories of men in a support group that met monthly and talked through their struggles of suddenly having to raise children as a solo parent. As they shared their insights and emotions, they helped each other navigate and survive their new challenge. 

 

The Freedom of Walking

Walking is an act of freedom.

Taking a break from writing, I go out for a walk. This time I’m not heading into the woods. I’m walking on the streets of the neighborhoods around me. Literally. Some have no sidewalks. Some don’t even have a shoulder, and I have to step in the ditch when cars approach. 

Accidental Grieving

It’s unsettling to read about someone who is in anguish and coming apart at the seams. At the same time, Maryanne Pope’s book A Widow’s Awakening is a heartwarming story of her spirit’s ability to endure one of the hardest experiences we will ever face — the death of someone we love. 

Hospice Journey

If someone you love has died, you may be familiar with hospice. If you aren’t, a good and compassionate introduction is a new book by Larry Patten, A Companion for the Hospice Journey. Patten carefully lays out what hospice is, what the different people on the hospice team do (doctor, nurse, social worker, home health aide, chaplain), and answers the common questions people have.

Grief of Dementia

We grieve when someone we love dies. We also grieve when a loved one is disappearing into dementia.

Leaving Tinkertown, written by Tanya Ward Goodman and published by the Univ. of New Mexico Press, is a brutally honest account of how a family fought against the incursions of Alzheimer’s, and their anguish at being unable to stop the disintegration. It’s also heartwarming to read because we see the family’s love for each other bringing them strength to endure when little else did.

Cooking with Grief

Everyone once in a while, a book on dealing with a life-threatening illness catches my attention because it deals with anticipatory grief. Recently it was Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, published this year by Milkweed Editions.

An Honest Journey Through Grief

What we want from a memoir, when matters of life and death are involved, is honesty. We don’t want sugar. Sugar doesn’t give us real hope. Sugar melts away when tears begin to fall. We want truth because we know that one day we will face what they have gone through, and we want to know how to survive. 

Elaine Mansfield’s book, Leaning Into Love, is honest about her husband’s struggles with cancer and chemotherapy, her tiredness of trying to help, and her struggle with grief and beginning a new life alone.

Breaking Point

Sharing our grief is hard, no matter the cause. It could be the death of a parent, spouse, pet, or child. The death of a long-term, committed relationship can be just as devastating.

It’s made more difficult when we are sharing with someone who has never experienced a severe loss. We are trying to describe what’s going on inside, and there is nothing physical that we can hold up to show them. And if neither of us has grieved before, then we don’t know the landscape we are trying to describe. It’s like being dropped in a foreign land and trying to describe it to someone over the phone.

Dancing With the Dwarfs of Grief

Elizabeth McCracken says that when tragedy comes, talk to the Dwarfs of Grief. 

McCracken had just given birth to a stillborn baby in a French hospital, and the midwife asked if she and her husband wanted to talk to a dwarf. Mistranslation. The midwife’s word was nun not dwarf (nonne vs nain). Edward thought it odd, but he also thought that speaking to a dwarf might cheer him up. They theorized that French hospitals in Bordeaux kept dwarfs in the basement for the worst-off patients. (I assume they are referring to the dwarfs of folklore, the mythical race of short, stocky creatures, along the lines of gnomes, trolls, elves and leprechauns.)

Empty Journals

The mother of writer Terry Tempest Williams left Terry her journals but said she could not read them until after she died. When it was time, Terry opened them and discovered the pages were blank. Why would her mother take such care to nicely bind her journals yet leave the pages empty?