The Endgame
Newsletter #89 - Grief
Toronto, December 8, 2024
Grief
Grief is great sadness caused by the death of someone you love. It can be overwhelming. It can plunge you into despair.
W.H. Auden tells of grief in his poem Funeral Blues. The poem’s last stanza: “The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,/ Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,/ Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;/ For nothing now can ever come to any good.” C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote in his book A Grief Observed, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Lewis wrote of his dead wife: “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
In the age of modern medicine, grief is a stranger to most young people. Their parents, siblings, friends, rarely die. A young person’s introduction to death may be the passing of the family dog or cat—sad, but soon forgotten. And grief is a mature emotion, not fully experienced by a child.
Later, when the child has become a young adult, grief comes calling. The husband of a beautiful young woman goes out one dark winter’s night to pick up a pizza and is killed in a car accident. A man in his thirties is sent by his company to a meeting in a tropical country and comes back with a fatal parasitic disease. A favourite uncle is felled in his fifties by a sudden heart attack. But, early in adult life, in the normal course of things, grief is still a stranger, an unexpected occasional intruder. It hovers in the dark background. It waits on the other side of the door.
When you become older, when you are in middle age, grief comes out of the shadows. People you love start to die. Grandparents. Then, parents. Uncles and aunts. Grief, once an occcasional caller, starts to become a persistent presence. It begins to make regular appearances. It has come through the door and sits at the end of the bed.
And finally, when you are truly old, a giant wave of grief sweeps you off your feet. A dear friend you knew intimately for more than sixty years, and talked to about everything, dies. An octogenarian who was skiing joyfully just a few weeks ago is suddenly killed by sepsis. An eccentric writer, who lived happily atop a windy hill overlooking a river, is dead. Beloved siblings and cousins die. Spouses die. Pronouns change. “We” becomes “I.” You move to the middle of the bed.
Queen Elizabeth, in the condolences she sent the families of those who died in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, said that “Grief is the price we pay for love.”. She borrowed the phrase from the book Bereavement by Colin Parkes, an English psychiatrist. Parkes wrote, “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.” In her condolences the Queen left out the important part of what Parkes said: “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love.”
Grief is the continuation of love, not the price of love. When a loved one dies, the pain may become muted over time but you don’t get over it, or forget about what happened, or transit easily through Kübler-Ross’s famous “five stages of loss and grief” and then feel better.
You weave the grief into your life. You give it a permanent place. It is there for ever. Your grief—a new expression of your original love—paradoxically becomes comforting, almost something to cherish. Your grief enshrines a sorrowful, but treasured, memory. A dulled pain remains, but there is happiness as well.
*****
Some reader comments on Newsletter #88 (“We need to talk about toilets”)
From Ian Scott: “I'm generally not a fan of tech titans like Bill Gates, but I have to hand it to the Gates Foundation for supporting a project to develop non-sewer toilets and save countless lives through higher levels of sanitation. The impact of lack of toilets facilities is particularly problematic in rural India, where vulnerable women have to go into the fields to care for their needs, and are sometimes subject to predatory behaviour. I am glad to read that you are pulling access to toilets out of the shadows.
A reader sent this picture of a public toilet in Hovland, Norway:
From a reader in Winnipeg: “When I lived in Japan from 1952-1955, very few European toilets were available. Often, they had beautiful ceramic toilets with flowers for decoration, but we had to squat, which is easy for most people, but tough in old age.”
This (slightly sarcastic?) comment: “I was so moved by your substack that I got out the scouring powder and scrubbed our downstairs toilet.”
A cheeky monkey drew my attention to something completely different:
And finally, from my severest critic: “6.30 am in the hospital. How do I reach the toilet? Difficult. What is extremely helpful is your usual smarty pants literary scope, Jonathan Swift, The Lady’s Dressing Room, with the vital information that Celia shits. I will unfortunately think of this far too often.”
On grief, …. You’ve described it perfectly. The pain of the loss and the hovering loneliness never leave. You just get used to them, After my husband died, some friends allowed me what they considered “enough:” time before I returned to what they considered “over it.” When I didn’t, they cut me off. But other people, whom I barely knew, came to my rescue and have become friends as close as family. I have no idea what I would have done without them, the loss of a spouse is not only the end of a married life and love; it is also the loss of a social life, of a lifestyle, plans, hopes, security and of self identity. It is terrifying. It is chaos. It is despair. It is confusion. I have been enormously lucky in having been found by my new friends who have never known me as one half of a couple, but who accept me as just “me.” And, there are many longer friendships that have survived and have kept me going. For those new and :older” friendships, I am grateful.
I’m not sure I agree with your statement that “grief is a mature emotion, not fully experienced by a child”. A child’s experience of grief is different to an adult's but no less intense. Losing a parent as a child can lead to lifelong trauma.
My father died when I was two years old. Unlike most 1950s fathers, he actively cared for me, changed nappies, fed, bathed me, etc. I don’t remember being told he’d died, but pictures of me before and after the event show a transition from a happy, smiling child to one who was always frowning and cranky.
But I think that whatever I felt then resurfaced when my first cat, Tony, died. I was eight years old, and I found his body in the backyard. I cried so hard and for so long that I made myself sick and was in bed for three days. I recall my unsympathetic mother muttering to my great aunt that I was "seriously wrong in the head" to react that way over a cat. It was only as an adult that I realised what I experienced may have been years of unexpressed grief finding an outlet.
A couple of years after that, my beloved budgie, Alfie, died as I cradled him. I still tear up at the memory and cannot listen to the song “Bright Eyes”. Those words “How can the light that burned so brightly, suddenly burn so pale?” have a more significant meaning when you have seen it happen in a being you love.
I lost a school friend when I was eleven, a cousin when I was fourteen, and then various friends and family over my adult years, culminating with my mother when I was 48. The grief I felt as an adult was no more intense than that I felt as a child.