Grief

“The grieving process gets close at what it means to be human; it’s understandable that handing it over to professionals armed with pills approaches the most dangerous misuse of pharmaceuticals we can imagine.

“Whereas depression is usually constant, grief is more likely to ebb and flow in waves and it does not usually invoke the feelings of worthlessness and low self-esteem that are so characteristic of depression. Grievers long to be reunited with someone they loved; the depressed often believe that they are unlovable.”

A thoughtful piece, this, well worth a read. Find it here.

“Grief is like a drunken houseguest who keeps coming back for one more goodbye hug.”

Source

The subject of this photo, taken after the shootings in Newtown, Conn, says: 

“I sat there in a moment of devastation with my hands in prayer pose asking for peace and healing in the hearts of men. I was having such a strong moment and my heart was open, and I started to cry.

“All of a sudden I hear order brand cialis online ‘clickclickclickclickclick’ all over the place. And there are people in the bushes, all around me, and they are photographing me, and now I’m pissed. I felt like a zoo animal.”

Full story here.

Posted by Quokkagirl

Each Christmas I, like many other celebrants, am asked if I will ‘do a reading’ at memorial services which funeral directors provide for their past clients. Being the secular contingent of the service, it’s usually a painful and time-consuming trawl through the poetry books to find something remotely suitable and relevant. There is no question that religion has already bagged the best words and rituals……….so far. I believe this is why they continue to have the upper hand at times of great joy, grief and uncertainty – all the big rites of passage. There is no good alternative source of material and ritual guidance – yet.

There is a vast expanse of space waiting to be filled in this field. Thankfully, most of the changes are being led by emotionally intelligent and honest challengers of the old ways. In time, maybe we will find that good writing emerges, with decent funereal readings to support the newly emerging rituals and appropriate literature expressing the human experience of grief as a quality alternative to the traditional.

I don’t know about you, but for me, when I think of the first Christmas after a death, the single most poignant symbol that we are one less on The Day is the Empty Chair. The chair your Mum or Dad always sat in when they visited, or the position at the Christmas table that your husband or wife always occupied. Or the spare stool that your brother, sister, aunt or uncle always perched on precariously. I have been searching for a really good ‘empty chair’ poem/reading for a long time without success.

When I do find the words which encapsulate that awful feeling of ‘one missing’, and how to draw some comfort from it, I will share them. If you find them, please share them with me.

Until then, for all those of you facing the prospect of an empty chair this Christmas, I hope you will find some Peace from your grief, and Joy from your memories.

Writing in yesterday’s Times, Matthew Parris says: “missing somebody terribly, years after they’ve gone, is not some kind of psychological disorder to be “got over” or “dealt with”, but an honest response to loss. I hate all that stuff about closure and moving on.”

He was prompted to write this after being asked to discuss, on the Today programme on Wednesday, the feelings he expressed in an article in the Spectator three years ago, which chime exactly with Maurice Saatchi’s feelings about the death of his wife, which we quoted on Monday:

 “In my view, to move on is a monstrous act of betrayal and to come to terms with — I think I’d call that an act of selfishness.”

Parris is worth quoting at greater length:

I’ve decided that I don’t want to ‘come to terms’ with Dad’s death. It’s bloody awful that he isn’t here. It still cuts me up, and this is a fact of love. I’m perfectly capable of keeping things in proportion, as Dad always did, but I don’t want to ‘get things into perspective’, if by that one means wanting them to grow smaller. It’s a fact; his life is a fact; the gap now is a fact; it’s not getting any smaller; I’m sad, but I’m happy that I’m sad.

So: refusal to move on, get over, find closure — all of these are suddenly zeitgeisty. Just as celebrations of life express the new grieving style at funerals, so has indulging feelings of loss become the new grieving rule for the bereaved.

Except that it’s not new. It’s actually been around since 1996. What Parris and Saatchi have done is translate the idea of continuing bonds from scholarese into language comprehensible to ordinary joes like us. They’ve endorsed it, too, by virtue of being celebs. And they’ve got people talking.

Is it not terribly perilous to encourage people to indulge feelings that might lead to clinical depression? Is grief not an injury to the psyche that could easily turn gangrenous? Was Freud really wrong when he said that we need to break the bonds that tie us to a dead person – to unshackle ourselves from the corpse?

It seems he was. Research evidence shows that most people hurt like hell when someone dies, but they don’t go mad. On the contrary, they are more likely to benefit from post-traumatic growth – what doesn’t kill you (too) makes you stronger.

As for grief counselling, early intervention has been shown to be either valueless or to interfere with natural grieving. Intervention should be reserved for those who really need it, later, when it’s all gone wrong.

It seems to make sense that, though death ends a life, it doesn’t end a relationship. It feels right. So far as I can discover, there is just one rule: you must believe that the dead person is dead. They ain’t coming back.

And there’s just one proviso. People who are lousy at relationships with the living are lousy at relationships with the dead. No surprise there.

Do read the full Matthew Parris piece in the Spectator. You can find it here. (I quote it in funerals more often than I care to admit.)