Sooner or later, grief finds us, every one of us. We grieve over time in our separate cells of pained consciousness, yet some of us appear to move on more readily from loss, while others linger in the shadows, appearing unwilling to re-enter once-familiar life.
In Shakespeare’s play, King John, Constance, mother of a young son who has died, is taunted for grieving so profoundly that she is accused of being “in love with grief”. Constance responds to her accusers in a voice sharpened with loss that is located in the senses: touch, sight and sounds that re-animate the bodily presence of the dead.
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Grief is an uncanny companion here, embodying the dead child, walking beside his mother, filling out his familiar clothes, speaking in his inimitable voice, flashing his memorable looks. Who wouldn’t want to keep living under grief’s spell as it fills such personal emptiness?
When my husband died suddenly in 2000, I remained apart from myself for a long time, though I immediately returned to parenting and not long after, teaching - following David’s death. Perhaps the term “grief-stricken” is better described as shock -- in those “stricken” cold moments when we are confronted with the stark reality of a death. Shock erases identity, negates our sense of self.
Grief arrives later, within time, after reflection on the loss and reflection on the self as it attempts to make sense of death. The power of grief, following shock, resides in its ability to restore the erased obliterated self - along with a very malleable new presence of the dead. If the self is an ongoing drama, the dead become, inevitably, helpless characters in this drama. They often take on qualities they never had in life - idealized as superior beings – or sometimes the opposite – in reconstructed memory.
I was aware of life going on around me after my husband died. At one point I was informed that the loss of a spouse is considered Number One in the death-survivors survey of comparable losses - parents, children, siblings --with spousal or partner death at the pinnacle of suffering.
This death directive in its algorithmic portentousness, like other pronouncements I encountered, included the highly- misleading DSM (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) – its published judgment (since re-written) that the average grieving period after a death typically lasts just a few months.
This defied common sense – and Shakespeare -and what I read and felt when I was finally able to read again after my husband’s death. I felt a powerful urge to “indict” myself in the court of survivors’ guilt. I had begun to repossess a self.
I thought I would never write again after David ‘s death. But when poems came to me, months after his death, I put what I experienced on the page. Writing or meditating – or just living in grief’s influence - opens a path back to the self.
The dead have left us behind – they are not conscious of the suffering or joy we endure in remembering them – and remembering ourselves in relation to them: whatever kindnesses or injuries we may have shown them when they lived.
So much has been written about this – almost always what is written is personal. Personal as Patti Smith saying “It’s like, Ah, I’m feeling grief.. It’s just more proof that we’re alive and that we’re capable of feeling still a plethora of emotions.”
At the Bread Loaf writers conference, a year or two after David’s death, I read from the elegiac poems in a new book (called ‘Sparrow”) Following my reading, I talked about the loss that inspired the poems. I had focused the poems, instead of on grief itself – on my husband’s art, acting – roles he played that included scripted death – as well (as we say) a “celebration” of his gift.
Another writer, a colleague at the conference, who had recently lost a brother – began a debate with me about the “selfishness” of grief. He described his brother as “beyond pain” – and said his own book of poems had assuaged his grief, in the powerful consolation of art.
I responded that I felt no consolation in writing the poems, though they helped clarify for me what I could not begin to understand.
My colleague went further: Grieving, he said, was ultimately “pleasurable “to survivors, especially those who wrote or made art. At the time I strongly disagreed.
Now, years later, I think he was feeling defensive about his own sorrow, but also that he was a little bit right.
Grieving is a step forward from shock. It allows us to see and hear again those who have died. Like Shakespeare’s Constance, it may feel right to be “in love with grief”. Yes, perhaps in love, but always unrequited in this love – one’s cries of loss forever unanswered in a soul-motion that brings us back to the self – waiting to be found again.
■ Carol Muske-Dukes
IS PROLONGED GRIEF SELFISH?
Such a full exploration of grief and thank you for sharing it. I've lived through, not past, losses -- one my daughter of 16, another my husband. I do think everyone experiences loss differently but ultimately each of us has to confront it in some non-formulaic way. Thanks again. JRP
What an exquisite reflection on what for me is the most feared experience. Thank you Carol. As always, you open my eyes and my heart.