Mark Liebenow - Grief (formerly Widowers Grief)
Writing about our grief is like wading into a mosh pit. There’s a lot of jumping and shoving going on, and it’s hard to describe everything we’re experiencing.
Writing in a journal each day helps us figure out what is going on, and keeps us working with grief. Isak Dinesen said that when we can put our trauma on paper, then it can live there instead of inside us.
Nietzsche gets down to the brass tacks for grievers. When someone central to our life dies, and it feels like there is nothing left, we need to find a why to want to continue on. We can continue to breathe, eat, and sleep for a long time, lumbering like a zombie through our days, but to feel zest and energy for life again, we need to find something that makes us eager to get out of bed in the morning.
Creating new dreams without our loved one in it is daunting.
If we love anyone, we will suffer when they die because their death will fracture us. Many of us will think that we should be strong enough to deal with grief on our own, so we won’t tell anyone. When others are suffering, they don’t tell us for the same reason, even though we would want to help. Everyone ends up suffering in silence, alone with our thoughts and feelings that circle around and around until they spiral us down.
Because grief will never completely go away, the question is how to live with grief and still celebrate the daily joy of life?
a prolegomenon
Philosophy is like sitting in a café and sipping a hot latte. It’s something special and reassuring. It should be a triple espresso and give us a jolt of energy because it opens a window into a convoluted problem and we can finally see the genesis of an answer. It should roust us into spirited discussions.
A philosophy of grief should help those who are grieving understand what is happening, guide us in learning about ourselves, and help us find meaning in our experiences. It should also enable us to see how our personal suffering, the grief of one individual, fits into the larger context of the suffering going in the world.
How we think about grief depends upon whether we’ve lost someone close, and lived inside the Theatre of the Absurd for a time, or we’re still standing on the street trying to look cool, wanting, not wanting, to peek in.
We can observe someone hunched over, sobbing with emotion, hands clenching and unclenching, face wet with tears, and know how grief looks and sounds.
We can classify grief as a species, study its genetics and genomes, and observe how it interweaves with other species like anger, despair, love, guilt, loneliness, rage, depression, saudade, and hope.
Last night I was wandering around the house, which is something I do now and then to get my bearings, when a line from Rumi’s “Zero Circle” came to mind: “Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.” I don’t think Rumi was addressing grief, but his words have useful insights.
The poem starts: “Be helpless, dumbfounded, / Unable to say yes or no.” This pretty much sums up our state of mind when grief begins. We no longer know what to think or feel, and find it hard to make even simple decisions.
On Thanksgiving we gather at many tables, some with family, some with friends. The holiday can be brutal on those who are grieving because it insists that we be thankful, and on the first Thanksgiving after a death, all we may be able to feel is sorrow for the person who died.
The traditional things we celebrate on Thanksgiving are food, family, and home. If we haven’t recovered our interest in food, and we don’t have the energy to make our traditional holiday dishes, this option is out. Family means the people we usually gather with, but if they are tired of hearing about our grief, then we have to remain silent and sit on the side of their conversations. If we always spent Thanksgiving at home with the one who died, then anything we do on this day is likely to be a dirge.
One of my grief essays was published in the Chautauqua literary journal. It’s called “Hiking with Kierkegaard,” and it’s about going to Yosemite to hike with grief and philosophers. Its subtitle is: “The Philosophical Struggle Between the Idea and the Experience of Nature: A Debate Informed by Goethe, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, the Velveteen Rabbit, and Shaped by an Actual Hike to the Top of El Capitan.”
One of the points in the essay is that we do not see everything about reality on our own. We need the help of others to see the rest, and to become aware of what is going on in the background and under the surface, both in nature and in grief.
