Apparently, there are prescribed ways to grieve. Not too public, because while we can share our thoughts about food, music, or the perfectly ordered life we all lead (sarcasm) on our blogs and via our social media feeds, I guess grief and loss are off limits.
That’s an interesting approach in terms of being transparent and “real.” Only sharing the good, but never touching on the tough times. Life’s a cakewalk when everything is going great. But if you write about your life, then why stop when things turn to shit? Something worth considering, I think.
A writer none other than iconic Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.” Didion’s book is masterful, bringing her unflagging skills as a journalist to what at times feels like her, “reporting out” on grief, while also passing through the experience, personally, after the sudden (and unexpected) death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003.
Didion looks to Emily Post’s noted book on etiquette (published in 1922), where she draws upon Post’s chapter on funerals:
[Ms. Post] wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view. [An author] notes that beginning about 1930 there had been …a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. ‘Death,’ he wrote, ‘so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.’ [Another author] had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new ‘ethical duty to enjoy oneself,’ a novel ‘imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.’ … [T]he contemporary trend was to ‘treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hid their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.’
One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home. The average adult was expected to deal competently, and also sensitively, with its aftermath.”
We can learn from the past when it comes to grief and loss.
This passage is fascinating and Didion’s pondering America in the 21st century in how we don’t seem able to acknowledge grief in the same manner as previous generations. As we evolve (or at least tell ourselves that we are) with technology being the usual default for everything, we seem ever-more stunted, emotionally.
Grief has no predetermined duration in which mourning somehow reaches a point where it’s “completed.” Where does that kind of stilted, emotionally cut-off shit originate? Perhaps in some idyllic nod at Victorian nostalgia, but as Didion reveals, the Victorians were more adept at supporting the grieving than our happy-at-all-cost culture.
In our lives lived as reality television programs, we get to “edit out” the parts we don’t like and don’t want others to know about. And we also tell (lie to?) ourselves that we’re in control. Our lives are ordered around an illusion that fate can be manipulated by actions and mantras. But it can’t.
The entire self-help industry—which rakes in $10 billion (yes, with a “b”) or more a year—is premised on there being a lot of unhappy people. Rather than look a little deeper at the systemic dysfunction permeating life and society, many continue believing that happiness can be acquired by pills, books, mantras, offering gratitude, along with other hokum. Actually, pills are an even bigger industry than the one propped up with gurus. Americans spent $446 billion on medications in 2016—half of all the spending on pharmaceuticals in the world. Being unhappy is big business!
When parents lose an adult child like Mark—suddenly and without warning—the floor of your life falls away beneath your feet. It feels like you’re in a freefall, yet the ground isn’t coming up for you, but seems like it’s moving away. People also move away. Because your tragedy makes something obvious and if it’s obvious, then they have to deny it. It’s that no matter what, you can’t keep your children safe. You also can’t protect your spouse, your parents, or your neighbors.
Think about the rash of school shootings. At one time, parents could be almost certain that when their son or daughter left for school in the morning, they’d return home, later in the day. Not anymore!
Events like 9-11, suicide bombers, drivers plowing their vehicles into crowds of people—all of these things drive home the point that we’re not in control. An argument can be made that we never were.
We believe government will keep us safe. Or, if we have a gun (or many guns), then we’ll be safe. Again that illusion of control.
There are a host of strategies and work-arounds that people develop. Lists, mindfulness, diets, fitness routines—none of them will fend off the inevitable. We’re all going to die.
We’re really good at convincing ourselves that when things are going well—we’re feeling organized, have a system for mostly everything, we’re as productive as ever, and our health is good—then we are ensconced in the palace of control.
I wasn’t thrilled that Mark was out walking. But I wasn’t going to tell him he couldn’t do what he felt he needed to do. Who the hell was I to inflict my values and fears upon another, especially my adult son, who I loved. I learned that lesson all-too-well in my family of origin and I was damned and determined that I’d never inflict that on my son. There are those people from my past (ones, btw, who haven’t had anything to do with me for more than a year) who to this day think somehow I was negligent in not doing something that was impossible—getting Mark to come home. He wasn’t going to, no matter if I’d tried to entice him back to safety. I mean, was I supposed to kidnap him? I don’t think so! Instead, both Mary and I supported his efforts. We were even planning to meet him along his route west, in February. But we never got that chance.
Again, there’s that sense that we have control over our lives, right? Like the place Mark was at somehow, determined what happened to him.
Why do you think self-help gurus have created a cottage industry? Then, corporations, who are adept at extracting excessive value from the labor of workers (it’s called exploitation, aka, capitalism), now are pawning off mindfulness as a ploy to get workers to do more with less, yet find happiness in doing so. “Here are some scraps from our table—you will be happy with that, serf!”
Authors the likes of Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brach are just two of many who have become “authorities” in a movement that some have called, “the cult of mindfulness.” They’re likely laughing all the way to the bank teaching you that you should be happy (and accepting) for the garbage that others dump in your lap. Brach’s book even sticks the word “radical” in the title, as if being a doormat and accepting something as meaningless as having your son run down on the side of the road is something cutting edge. This is such absolute bullshit that it defies having to comment on it, but I will.
On top of having our lives destroyed, or at the very least, permanently altered by this tragedy, we’re having to deal with rejection by people who refuse to acknowledge that once more, we don’t have fucking control over anything. But maybe Mary and I weren’t grateful enough, or good enough, or kind enough, or whatever thing that people like to tell themselves that makes them different than those whose life has just been turned upside down.
Don’t like me writing about my experience over the last year? Fine. Read something else. Continue to believe that somehow, you can control things—until you can’t.
People like to judge.
I’ll leave you with this beautiful and haunting selection by Bipolar Explorer, a band I “discovered” a few weeks ago. I’ve been captivated by their new double-CD, “Sometimes in Dreams,” that I’m pretty sure is going to end up on my best of list for music in 2018. This track is from their previous outing, “Dream Together.” This is art created around grief and loss that has the power to touch and minister to others passing through that landscape.