Grief

Following on from Tim Clark’s post about grief, I am reminded of a piece by Janice Turner in last week’s Times about the hostile response to Jennifer Saunders’ announcement that she was free of cancer: 

She was accused of “slating” survivors and her remark that some wore the disease “like a badge” distressed terminally ill women who scoffed: “Yeah, like we have a choice!” … Response from other former sufferers was loud and quite angry: how dare she think that she could ever be “free”. 

Turner goes on: 

A vast edifice of fund-raising and female bonding events has grown up around breast cancer to unite sufferers and the bereaved. A health journalist friend, who has interviewed hundreds of activists, says that for some the brush with mortality is so powerful, the solidarity and sense of common purpose so overwhelming, that they identify with the breast cancer movement long after they are well again. They never consider themselves “free”, so may feel betrayed by those who do.

The same applies to many bereaved people. The difference, though, is that some people get cancer; everyone experiences bereavement. For all its severity, it is also commonplace. 

Source (£)

Posted by Tim Clark

Jenny Uzzell’s excellent GFG posting about the liminal state between death and burial has got me thinking, specifically about grief.

Grief is love that has been made homeless; I don’t know where that came from, I first heard it in “Borgen,” the Danish TV political series. It’s a striking, poignant idea – but does the love remain homeless? What home does it eventually find? Homeless people must find some sort of home eventually, or in our climate, they die. This, we know too well.

A good funeral can help people grieve; maybe a bad one obstructs a natural and necessary process. It seems to me that a good funeral affects, changes, the nature of grieving. I couldn’t – shouldn’t – hazard a guess about “from what to what,” but the liminal state between death and funeral has something to do with it, whether you use “liminal” literally or as a metaphor. To put it more simply, most people feel better after a (good) funeral.

The only definition about grief I can make is that you can’t define anyone’s grief: people grieve variously.

Down at the Good Funeral Awards gathering in Bournemouth, I went to a session delivered by Kristie West. Kristie is a young woman with the courage and insight to use a dreadful sequence of bereavement in her own family to get us to reconsider how grief does, or could, work. If you want to know more, go here.  

But for now, let me pull out her point that the pain of grief separates us from the memory of someone we love, and that the belief that the pain is what keeps us in touch is a false and obstructive belief. We don’t want to keep re-visiting pain, so in fact, she is saying, the pain of grief pushes us away from visiting memories and thoughts about someone we love who is dead. They drift away from our consciousness because of the pain we haven’t addressed.

That seems to me a big idea. My view that each of us grieves differently doesn’t allow me to agree 100%, but something more important than agreement is happening to me. I’m thinking more carefully about grief: its origin in the death of someone we love; its in-between, homeless state until a funeral, until we accept that the body isn’t the person so we can let it go; and what happens to grief after the funeral.

I fear what happens to too many people is that they are left — literally — alone with their grief. Relatives drive home, friends are still there but they don’t know quite what to do, how to behave, now the funeral’s over. Perhaps we need, for secularists, some milestone rituals, we need to re-visit our grief in some succession of resonant acts. We need to do grief, we need to heal our pain. We need to provide some spiritual depth to help people after the funeral and on into their new lives.

There we go, baby-boomers once again trying to make it ours, trying to change it all our way. “Hey man, we need new rituals.” It is sometimes said we don’t know, understand, “know,” grief well, in our culture. Anyone who has been bereaved knows grief. Our job is to do the best we can for this person’s own unique grieving state.

Some of us might need new rituals. Some of us might need Kristie’s brave insights. But you can’t define or categorise anyone’s grief. Sometimes people really mean it when they say “I’m doing fine, thanks.”

Last word to Elizabeth Barratt Browning:

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death–
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

In his new book, Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes of the grief he felt, and still feels, following the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh. It centres on:

“the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, in-jokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes — all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.”

It takes a great writer to articulate it so well. 

Barnes also describes the moment when it became “less likely” that he would kill himself because he realised that she was still alive in his memory. “I was her principal rememberer … I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her. She would die a second time.”

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Not so long ago, The Independent’s left-wing young writer Johann Hari fell from being an award-winning media star when he was exposed as a self-promoting liar and cheat. The Economist was not convinced by his apology for plagiariasm. 

It’s now the turn of right-wing, young digital hack Milo Yiannopoulus. His mainstream profile may not be as high as Hari’s but he’s well-known in the blogosphere. Having cut his teeth at the Telegraph (and Catholic Herald), he went on to launch The Kernel, an online magazine about technology start-up companies, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in Britain’s digital economy by Wired.

His company has just declared bankruptcy. Yiannopoulus’s detractors, of which there are many as he has a pugilistic style (he even fell out with Stephen Fry on Twitter), are no doubt gloating. Here’s The Guardian last year.

For all the precocity of a Hari or Yiannopoulus, the latter starts his redeeming process with a persuasively repentant and reflective blog in which he wonders if failure might feel like grief.

Worth a read in my opinion, here. 

Finding words of comfort is tricky after a career crisis, relationship break-up or bereavement. You can say, ‘sorry to hear about your news. I sympathise at this difficult time’. But only with the career crisis can you say ‘you will come out of suffering stronger and better’ without meriting a slap across the face. Time may indeed heal, but grief is very different from self pity following injury to lifestyle, reputation, ego or bank account, self-inflicted or otherwise.

When Mishael Porembski lost her husband, she found the steady stream of pot lucks and coffee clubs wasn’t easing the grief. So she decided instead to sweat through her grief by training for an Iron Girl triathlon. 

She felt so much better for doing it that she created HOT Widows and invited other widows to join her. They get HOT in the conventional sense, through their exertions, and HOT in an acronymic sense. HOT stands for Healthy Optimistic Thriving. There’s a team of them training for the next Iron Girl event — and their stories are both brave and touching. 

Sounds like a brilliant form of grief therapy to us. Go Team HOT Widow!