WHY DO WE GRIEVE?
At my grandmother’s funeral, when I was eleven, I had a sudden spasm of uncontrollable laughter. She was eighty-six years old and until I was ten she lived with my parents, my sister and me. Always difficult, critical and disapproving in her silent, gesture-driven way of communicating, my grandmother must have suffered all the years I knew her and many years before. But at her funeral I had only the memory of her as a crone.
Yet, as the years passed, I came to grieve her. Not in any conventional way, not through the phases of denial anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as Kubler-Ross had ascribed. My grief for my grandmother was for her loss of a life different from the one she had lived. And she wore that loss all day, every day, as I grew up around her, not just indifferent but insensate, unaware as children can be when the adult atmosphere hangs heavily around them and they tune it out.
Perhaps that delayed and displaced grief for my grandmother affected my experience of loss, of grief, in my later years, right up to the present.
Grief is a lesson never learned.
When I was fifteen I overheard a conversation between my dermatologist and a patient, a school room friend of mine, Mike, who had a melanoma. I cannot recall the exact words but the message was extremely foreboding. Mike died six months later. He was not a close friend but the fact of his presence for several years in my class and among a group of boys horsing around the school yard and often just being side-by-side, Mike’s life was unquestioned until it abruptly ended. My reaction was focused on the future that was denied him and, to me, it felt that I was to have been a small, even tiny, part of that future. And its loss made me sad in a way I had never experienced before. It was death suddenly thrown in my face for the first time. Even though Mike’s death was quite removed from where and how I lived, it brought sorrow of a high order, higher than I knew I had no real right to feel. And I grieved for Mike, the boy ripped out of his life and out of the future owed to him.
I have endured the death of my parents and other relatives as well as the deaths of close friends and others not so close. And the grief that followed each was unique as each of them were uniquely the person they had been. These griefs followed what must be the more natural order, variations on the Kuble-Ross themes, but always poignant and lasting.
The accumulation of losses offers no alleviation of the pain that follows each one. Grief is a lesson never learned. Each loss is stunning even when anticipated, the finality throwing oneself into the same river of sorrow, each time as if it were the first time, over and over again.
There are certain losses I fear, as probably everyone does: the loss of someone especially dear and close—a spouse, a partner, a child, a best friend. The dread of such loss seems to set up, or prepare us, with a kind of anticipatory grief. We deny those special ones the possibility that they might die; we become angry if they seem careless and take risks; we find ourselves bargaining with them about the need to pursue a medical symptom or avoid some even remote danger; we ruminate sadly as if depressed about the futility of worrying about those we love; and we accept a postponed inevitability, putting ourselves to bed relieved to have lived the day without loss.
Grief, I know, unites people of the world and has always provided that unity, as a kind of social glue that makes people hang together. The avoidance of grief renders people protective of each other as well as forging a bond that makes them stand close together. The fear of loss is embedded in the experience of grief and the passion to forestall it.
There is a sad end story to grief, a letter to the world declaimed in pulpits but ignored in the everyday: we force loss, often terrible loss, on others. And we do not allow their grief to touch us.
We can be like a child, standing by, laughing at their funeral.
