grief is physical

and gratitude, alchemical

The Court of Death, 1820, Rembrandt Peale

The week of my mother’s funeral, we hosted visitations, afterparties, the burial. We wore black. Like sacraments, these religious and social rituals were an outward expression of an inward truth. Liturgy articulated and concretized the loss. Formal moments dedicated to mourning commemorated her life, punctuated our pain, and explicitly bound both to purpose. 

Dear friends departed with ominous warnings of what was to come after the formalities. I kept hearing, “You have to let yourself grieve.”

The regular set of clichés that cushion life’s tragedies don’t bother me. They exist for a reason. Unspeakable loss is, after all, unspeakable. People must rely on the reliable. The familiar aphorisms seem more a signifier of sympathy than a concrete denotation of meaning. I appreciate the sentiment. I appreciate the speaker. I appreciate the attempt to fill the swallowing silence with something. I won’t even call it clumsy. The bereaved don’t need to hear “original thought.” Presence is enough.

But the phrase lingers in my mind now, mostly because the subtext of letting yourself do something is that you could opt out of it if you wanted. It also raises the question, why must I? What is grief left unmanaged? Can it even be managed?

Truthfully, I feel I have extremely limited choice in the matter. Part of this is because grief has been far more physical than I ever anticipated. The day my mom died, I hemorrhaged, weeks before I was due to menstruate. It happened again two weeks later, and again after that. Jagging tears and insomnia come at bedtime whether I’d like it or not. I’m not “letting myself” do anything. Whatever the monster is, it’s coming, whether I like it, or feel like I need it, or not. It arrives from somewhere outside of time, in memories and smells and sleep. Sometimes I wake up with an unkillable rage, fuming, taking offense at life, until I realize, oh, no, I just had a dream that she was alive, but deaf, or trapped behind glass, distracted, phantasmagoric – always just inaccessible.

How can I square the fundamentally passive nature of my relationship to grief with self-government? This is a difficult question. The following is not advice.

The real choices that remain open to me seem to live in the mundane. My instincts lead me to minimize the amount of time I spend idle or alone. I prefer to bury myself in work and familial obligations. I still schedule my days. Routine — especially prioritizing exercise— really does help. Because the grief is embodied, relief comes through exertion. Massage, too.

So, this means that for better or worse, I am not spending so much time face to face with the fact that I’ll never touch my mom again. The therapeutic alternative – which while remaining unclear, seems to amount to a lot of “holding space” and “talking it out” – doesn’t suit my disposition at all. I suppose some might suggest that I am “running away” from pain. Perhaps I am.

I’m not exactly not thinking about death, even if distraction is my friend these days. By the way, I don’t think it’s bad to be thinking about death. Memento mori. It’s just that I find, in addition to keeping busy, I have to apply some discipline to my habits of mind, lest despair creep in.

Despair is a sin, I remind myself.

I’ve been reading fiction. In particular, I have enjoyed what is becoming one of my favorite novels, His Family by Ernest Poole (1917). Quote: “He saw each of his daughters, parts of himself. And he remembered what Judith had said: ‘You will live on in our children’s lives.’ And he began to get glimmerings of a new immortality, made up of generations, an endless succession of other lives extending into the future.”

The main character, Roger Gale, is a widower who, having been beset by years of depression after the death of his wife, is roused from his sleepwalking by his children and the sudden determination to get to know them again. There is more discomfort in the choice to live than to exist in limbo, but it’s how the story keeps moving. It lays the foundation for the rest of the novel, which explores the deep cultural and industrial shifts that brought forth the 20th century. 

It struck me that sense of gratitude – however tainted by nostalgia, urgency, or sadness – breaks through Roger’s trance. It is an imperfect gratitude, one that does not imply happiness per se, but one grounded in the determination to press forward nonetheless. The way I’ve experienced it lately, gratitude, like grief, is an energy. Rather than paralyzing the body, it flows.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tie grief, whatever it may be, up neatly in a package. I desperately miss my mother, and I don’t foresee a day her absence isn’t felt. But my children, especially, and like Roger’s children, bring something out of me that I doubt I could so readily access otherwise. Their presence is a daily invitation to gratitude. I wouldn’t have them without her. 

I can make the choice to reframe despair as gratitude. Sometimes gratitude feels forced, because, like Roger's, it's bittersweet. It’s never not tinged by tragedy. But I’ve determined that the bittersweetness of it, or whether or not I have to force myself to choose gratitude, does not take away from its potency. Gratitude does not kill grief, but it seems to alchemize it into forbearance. 

I’m new to this. I can’t pretend to know what challenges may come. But as it stands, nothing but gratitude shakes the paralysis of grief. So out of psychological necessity, or perhaps moved by a more mysterious grace, here I am, moving forward, grateful, despite myself.