Where the tree falls, the forest rises

From The Rising, by Wendell Berry

There is a grave, too, in each

survivor. By it, the dead one lives.

He enters us, a broken blade,

sharp, clear as a lens or mirror.

Like a wound, grief receives him.

Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep

as part of ourselves the severe gift.

By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligence of life.

Where the tree falls, the forest rises.

There is nowhere to stand but in absence,

no life but in the fateful light.

Charlene Elderkin, eminent home funeralist and member of the Threshold Care Circle in Wisconsin, is writing a book: a collection of stories offering an intimate glimpse into the personal renewal experienced following the death of a loved one. 

She is looking for contributors with story submissions that offer an intimate glimpse into personal renewal following the death of a loved one or community member. Without denying the experience of grief and loss, these first-hand accounts illustrate how ordinary people find a way to integrate the death of their beloved into a forever-changed life. How this integration unfolds and when is as varied as the people writing their stories.

It’s to be called Where the Tree Falls, the Forest Rises. Find her website here

 

Planning for a happy death

posted by our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson

A recently widowed middle-aged woman came in tears to Benedictine monk Fr Christopher Jamison, and thanked him for explaining in a talk based on his book, Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life, what she had felt since her husband died.

Fr Christopher had shared his thoughts on achieving a happy death, a phrase that is for most people today a contradiction in terms. The woman’s pain at the loss seemed overwhelming but through loving interaction with so many concerned people she had experienced deep consolation too. In the midst of pain, she could still contemplate the good and do good. She had never understood before how she could be experiencing both such grief and such consolation.

Here’s an abridged version of Fr Jamison’s words:

Each of us will have a particular desire for the time of our death: that an estranged relative might be reconciled, for example. The trouble is we cannot control our death.

People can, however, take steps to make death happy by ‘back-planning’. Starting at the end point people need to ask: in order to be in that state, what needs to be done the day before, the week before, the month before and so on.

This vision is at odds with many contemporary understandings of happiness. The most common assumption about happiness is that it is the same as pleasure; so being happy means feeling good.

The ancient Greeks had a better answer. Plato concluded that the contemplation of truth, goodness and beauty was the height of happiness. Our dislike of dishonest politicians, our admiration for the generosity of those serving the sick, and the popularity of art galleries, all show that our appreciation of truth, goodness and beauty is as high as ever.

Aristotle took Plato’s ideas a step further. He said that happiness consists not simply in contemplating the good but in doing good. He wanted people to be taught to act virtuously because virtuous living made both individuals and societies happy.

This approach to happiness is not dependent on religious faith yet all the major faith communities support it. Christianity offers practical steps to live out this view of happiness. The Church’s contemplative tradition shows us how to pray so that we can contemplate the truth, the goodness and the beauty of the Blessed Trinity. The Catholic moral tradition teaches us how to live virtuously and how to find forgiveness when we fail.

People should enjoy feeling good as a bonus that can accompany contemplation and good living.

 

Sob stories

Posted by Charles

The misery memoir – awful childhood, frightful beatings, Oliver Twist never had it so good, that sort of stuff, ooh – has, it seems run its course. The torment vultures have flown the well-picked corpse and are now feasting on bereavement. 

I’ve been aware of growth of this new genre and largely ignored it, mostly, I expect, because I am not presently freshly bereaved.  I think I feel very much as Bill Morris does in this very good article: “Is it mere voyeurism, or schadenfreude?  Or is something closer to empathy – a way of preparing ourselves for the unthinkable by witnessing the suffering of another?” I think he might have added that it can be very useful to hang out with others who are going through the same as you.  I’ve nothing against the genre in principle.  The biggest sob-buster out there now, in case you’re interested, is Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.  Everybody wants to be the next Joan Didion. 

Then I read an article about the grief memoir in the Guardian. It’s written by Frances Stonor Saunders. Ever come across her? Let me tell you, she’s seriously brilliant. Here are some of the things she says: 

We know that extreme physical pain drives out language,” Julian Barnes writes in Nothing to be Frightened Of, but “it’s dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same.”  … If grief drives out language, how can language be pressed into its service? How can the writer orient disorientation?  

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, founder of the modern grief movement (she gave us the “Five Stages of Grief” theory), insisted that “Telling your story often and in detail is primal to the grieving process. You must get it out. Grief must be witnessed to be healed.” This instruction comes straight out of the principle of catharsis, but there is little evidence to support its efficacy over other, possibly more reticent, ways of grieving. Barnes calls it the “therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy” – writing doesn’t help, he testifies gloomily, your suffering is not alleviated. 

Saunders surveys the field with a scholarly, wry eye. You have read it all. 

She also bequeaths us an excellent anecdote. Kerry Packer, recovering from a near-fatal heart attack, whispered to his sons: “I’ve been to the other side, and there’s fuck all there.” 

Read the entire Saunders article here

Sceptr’d loony bin?

Some invective from this week’s Spectator. It is by Florence King.

Being English-American can be depressing. For years I thought about giving up my American citizenship and becoming a Brit to get my blood and my nationality lined up without the interference of a hyphen, but then something made me change my mind with a vengeance: Princess Diana’s funeral.  I spent three stunned days staring at the TV screen and thinking My God, they’ve turned into us! It wasn’t England any more, just a sceptre’d loony bin set in a sea of rotting flora, a UK of Utter Kitsch where the crud de la crud built teddy bear temples to a gilded hysteric who resembled nothing so much as Judy Garland with a title. I told myself that if I must live in a country where people who once tipped their hats now tipped the scales, I might as well stay at home and save myself the trouble of remembering to look right instead of left to avoid an oncoming hog speeding up the wrong side of the road. My hyphen, right or wrong.


Grief memoirs

There’s been some interesting discussion of grief over at the New York Times.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg, the person who demolished the 5 stages of grief model (derived from Kubler Ross), has this to say:

In the past decade, social scientists with unprecedented access to large groups of widows and widowers have learned that, as individual an experience as grief may be, there are specific patterns to its intensity and duration that are arguably more helpful in guiding the bereaved in what to expect. They have found that most older people who lose spouses from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. In fact, for many, acute grief tends to lift well within six months after the loss.

The single largest group — about 50 percent — showed very little sign of shock, despair, anxiety or intrusive thoughts (the hallmark symptoms of acute grief) even six months after their loss. Those subjects were also screened for lethargy, sleeplessness, inability to experience pleasure and problems in appetite — the classic symptoms of clinical depression — and came up clean on those as well. That didn’t mean that they didn’t still miss their spouses, but that they had returned to somewhat normal functioning, contradicting the popular maxim of widowhood that “the second year is harder than the first.”

As for the remaining participants, about 15 percent exhibited grief symptoms that were moderately high at 6 months but almost completely gone by 18 months. For an additional 10 percent, those who were still having problems at 18 and 48 months, grief had become chronic.

There were two additional groups that had never been considered in the literature: people who were depressed before and after their loss whose troubles seemed to be a pre-existing condition (about 10 percent), and people whose depression improved after the loss (also about 10 percent), suggesting that the death of a spouse actually alleviated stress.

Loss is forever, but thankfully, acute grief is not.

Read it all here. There are some very good, trenchant letters in response to the piece here.

A second piece asks why there are so many grief memoirs being published. Megan O’Rourke responds:

We shy away from talking about death, not out of cold-heartedness, but out of fear. No one wants to say the wrong thing; and death is scary. I think this is part of why there are so many memoirs and movies about loss: they create a public space where we can talk safely about grief.

Read the whole piece here.

The Dead – Billy Collins

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and buy discount cialis when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

DADBA

There’s a nicely written piece over at Obit magazine, a review of a new book, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (Simon & Schuster), by Ruth Davis Konigsberg. It’s probably worth reading.

It’s a demolition job on certain schools of bereavement counselling — those informed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. I don’t know how prevalent it is in the UK now, the orthodoxy that bereaved people must, under the supervision of a well-meaning person who’s been on a course, be taken on a journey through the Famous Five Stages — possibly stage by stage to a strict timetable. Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance.

With acceptance, of course, comes closure, as the bereaved person finally ejects the dead person, wiggles her tail and swims happily away to join all the other carefree fishes. Something like that. (How I wish we could put WTF in tiny caps after a word, as we put TM after a brand name. Closure WTF)

If it misses the point bigtime, why should we be surprised? Kubler Ross was writing about the emotions a dying person might go through, not a bereaved one. And I don’t remember her prescribing the full five in the right order.

“When 233 people were interviewed [by Yale University researchers] between one to 24 months after the death of a spouse, most respondents accepted the death of a loved one from the very beginning.” I seem to recall that studies of those bereaved by the 911 attacks revealed that counselling had prolonged the grief of many of those unlucky enough to receive it; those who had none did best.

While I was researching my book I spoke to someone at Cruse who fielded this question: Have you done any research to discover whether a good funeral can be transformative of grief? (Ans: We’ve never thought of that.)

I am sure there are good things going on in the bereavement sector and I hope someone will tell us what they are. Counsellors take a bit of a bashing from sceptics (until they themselves need counselling).

The aloneness of the bereaved

I was struck by this post by a blogger in Canada concerning the aloneness of the bereaved. In this case, it’s Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of Germany, at the funeral of his wife of 64 years, Loki. She died on 21 October aged 91. The funeral was on 1 November.

Thirty funerals in thirty days

Over in Albuquerque, Gail Rubin has set herself the task of attending and writing up thirty funerals in thirty days. She got under way on Saturday. It’s going to make for a very interesting social document.

At this stage, of course, many of those whose funerals she will describe are as yet still alive…

Better read than dead

When Eulogy magazine came out in June there was excitement and chatter and speculation. Would it catch on? How long would it last? The lowest estimate I was aware of was a curmudgeonly six issues, volunteered by a funeral director in the west country.

In the event, it seems to have underperformed more grievously. There has been nothing since. I had £250 riding on it for an article I was commissioned to write about… I’ve forgotten. Ah well, where Eulogy has gone we shall surely follow. Ink to ink, ashes to ashes.

Over in the New World, Funerals Today goes from strength to strength, it seems (I’ve never read it).