Every Grief I Meet: On Missing the Dead

I’ve been missing my mother a lot lately, which is to say she’s missing, that elemental part of my life that included her: her voice giving me advice and encouragement, her hugs, sitting and having a drink with her, even arguing with her. These joys and comforts were such a part of my existence that, and now that they’re gone, I often feel like I’ve awakened in a house I don’t recognize, and I can’t find my way from this room to that. It’s like I’m looking for her in every corner but the only time I find her is when I’m asleep and dreaming at night. I don’t feel sad, even. It’s almost like a lack of sadness, or some void where sadness should be. I have moved on with my life and work pretty seamlessly – my grief doesn’t affect my daily life at all. But I so desperately want to feel what others who’ve lost their moms feel. I want to feel her presence. I want to know she’s with me – especially now when for the first time in a long time I feel things are starting to go my way.

I looked up to my mom as a career woman who put her work first and kept her passions alive, all while making room for other people in her life. She kept gardening year after year until she’d made an accomplished artist of herself. She dreamt of eventually running a greenhouse in her old age and I believe she could have done that. She wrote poetry even in her busiest years as a worker and mother. She advanced further and further in her career until she could be fully independent and completely secure and even support her child, me, who was not so much for such a long time. She had such incredible style, too. One of the things she hated most about being sick was that she was too tired to get dolled up.

I look back at the last couple of weeks, in which I have avoided any really terrible screw-ups, worked tirelessly and looked like a professional, and think how overjoyed she would be. I know she was proud of me anyway. I know she thought I was the world’s best daughter – she certainly told me enough. But I think she worried a lot too, and for good reason. My getting a solid job and a nicer place to live would have made her absolutely elated, as some of those worries would have been put to rest. It was exciting to call my dad and tell him about the job, and so great to see him happy for my long-awaited success. I just wish every day I could make that call to Mom.

But you can! I hear my fellow motherless daughters say. But it darkens my heart to know the truth. I can’t feel her or find her anywhere.

Part of this might be just the way I grieve. Not everyone goes through the perilous five stages of loss invented by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969. Actually probably nobody does in that exact same order. So I know I shouldn’t feel guilty. At first, however, when I went back to working and writing a week after Mom passed, I thought something was wrong. I hadn’t really even experienced “anticipatory grief” during her illness, either. I even went to my doctor and had my depression meds reduced, thinking they had unnaturally flattened me out.

A grief researcher named George Bananno wrote in a book called The Other Side of Sadness:  “As frightening as the pain of loss can be, most of us are resilient. Some of us cope so effectively, in fact, we hardly seem to miss a beat in our day-to-day lives. We may be shocked, even wounded by a loss, but we still manage to regain our equilibrium and move on. That there is anguish and sadness during bereavement cannot be denied. But there is much more. Above all, it is a human experience. It is something we are wired for, and it is certainly not meant to overwhelm us. Rather, our reactions to grief seem designed to help us accept and accommodate losses relatively quickly so that we can continue to live productive lives.”

A great article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic titled "The Secret Life of Grief" talks about Bananno’s theory and the way it refutes some earlier assumptions that grief is an arduous process that every mourner must endure in order to move on. I’ve been reading some old poems about grief, and many of them seem to convey that same idea. There’s a horrific (and therefore cool) poem by Robert Frost called “Out, Out” in which a child dies after losing a hand. It ends like this:

    He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

    And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

    No one believed. They listened at his heart.

    Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

    No more to build on there. And they, since they

    Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

But in some ways Bananno contradicts himself in that he observed a weird burning ritual after his father died. But writers on grief are quick to point out that in other cultures, people maintain an ongoing relationship with dead relatives and ancestors and suffer less long-term distress over grief. But talking to or seeing the deceased is considered a symptom of “complicated” or “prolonged” grief. I took a test online to see if my own grief was complicated and of course it wasn’t. I didn’t expect questions like “Do you see the dead person?” and “Do you hear their voice?” I answered “Never” on both, which precluded me from a diagnosis of “complicated.”

But I want to see her. I want to hear her voice in my ear, telling me how proud she is of my new position. I want to look over at my brand new nephew and see her standing over him grinning from ear to ear with joy. Instead I have to close my eyes and imagine it, working all the while to conjure something other than what I saw and heard at her death bed. There are times when that lack stops me dead in my tracks. It’s maybe a kind of what Bananno calls “oscillation,” in which a mourner has moments of heart-wrenching grief followed by getting on with their day until the next wave hits.

Thompson hits the nail on the head though, when he points out that the lack comes from losing the opportunity to make the person happy anymore:

“What makes me saddest isn't imagining all the things I’ll miss, but imagining all the things you’ll miss. The wedding dances, the wine-fueled parties, her birthday cards, each emblazoned with ludicrously incorrect ages. For Mom, who drew kinetic energy from every drip of living, as if by photosynthesis, and braved the winter of life with spring in her heart, smiling like a sweet little maniac all the way to the end, cancer was such cosmic robbery.”

Little Halen Gabriel, who I will insist on calling Strawberry as he was so named by his older brother, arrived in perfect health, and Mom didn’t get to hold the little peanut. I still write to her about my great new job and all the things that are finally working out for me, but I can’t convince myself she really hears it. Not to mention the sunny days at Bankson Lake, the spring revivals of her garden, and nighttime glasses of wine – of which there would have been so many more. Maybe one day Dan and I will have a house of our own, and I’ll have my own garden. Maybe one day I’ll publish a book or Dan and I will travel the world. How pumped would Mom be? I’d like to believe that she is pumped. That she’s seeing all of it. But I can’t sense it.

Part of it is my belief that the dead are no longer individual once they pass over. They become part of a collective of love and peace that include God’s love and peace and therefore exist somewhere beyond tropical vacations, and flowers, and first birthday parties and roofs. The dead don’t need shelter or the smell of beach or pinks or yellows or cuteness. The dead don’t have flesh and therefore don’t get drunk anymore and birth is just another transition. They become a part of everything good (if they were good in life, and with Mom there’s no question about that). Judy Hoenes Stewart Hoelscher Thorburn is now living in the very sunbeams she loved to bathe it, and that makes me glad.

And at the same time, I miss her and miss her and miss her. I wish grief in our culture was as communal as death is in my vision of it. If I did any “grief work” as Freud would call it, it was during the week I spent at my brother’s following Mom’s death. I halted work and wasn’t much use for anything else. I was so very tired all the time. But I needed to be in that house, with my brother and sister-in-law and nephew and people coming around. (It was Jameson’s 2^nd birthday around that same time, so family time was nonstop.) It was where I needed to be, though I didn’t think of it in ritualistic terms at the time. I do remember feeling like a loser for bowing out of work and lying around all the time. I think my brother felt the same way, but it was hard for us to talk about that.

    During that week I was that little boy with his hand severed by the buzz saw. Letting out a laugh as the hand comes off and then, as he feels life spilling out of him, begging..

    ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—

    The doctor, when he comes.

    Don’t let him, sister!’

    So. But the hand was gone already.

In the New Yorker article titled “Good Grief” by Meghan O’Rourke, she points out that Bananno’s argument’s flaw is that it buys into the American individualistic fantasy about being tough and “muscling through.” This attitude makes people who feel loss stifle it in order to avoid burdening other people with your feelings: “Many mourners experience grief as a kind of isolation—one that is exacerbated by the fact that one’s peers, neighbors, and co-workers may not really want to know how you are. We’ve adopted a sort of “ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out that it shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual inquiry. Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association is considering adding “complicated grief” to the fifth edition of its DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Certainly, some mourners need more than the loving support of friends and family. But making a disease of grief may be another sign of a huge, and potentially pernicious, shift that took place in the West over the past century—what we might call the privatization of grief.”

She notes that grief as an individual rather than communal activity contrasts older, Eastern traditions regarding death which involved very public display of certain rituals. That we might view such rituals as crazy time, might be the reason I keep my grief to myself. In an effort to be able to feel my mom with me again, I’ve been doing small rituals of my own, trying to get to that place where I can see and hear her again. But I’m embarrassed by these rituals, and I find myself avoiding talking about them. Ridiculous, a voice in my head (not Mom’s) keeps saying. This is dum-dum behavior. When you’re dead you’re dead and these bizarre little actions don’t matter to someone who’s dead. So in an effort to overcome this culturally-dictated stultification of my continued relationship with Mom, I now publicize the weird things I’ve been doing to try and connect with her.

I kept the purse Mom had with her in hospice. It smells like her. It’s a deep navy leather purse with gold zippers. The other day, I cleaned it out, and now I’m carrying it around with me. I listed its contents in my diary:

purple embellished glass nail file

black sunglass pouch (empty)

black-with-bling shades in a polka dot pouch

samples of color extend shampoo & conditioner

Ibuprofen bottle with 3 pills left

tissue wadded up and smeared with lipstick

2 Revlon lipsticks: Raspberry Bite and Love That Pink

small Bath & Body Works body lotion

Crabtree and Evelyn hand lotions – “Gardeners”

black plastic comb

lens cleaner

spot remover

$1.89 in change

I kept the nail file in the purse. I keep the lipsticks and the tissue somewhere safe.

I have decided that I got this job because of Mom. When I bought the suit I wore to my interviews this summer, I stand by the belief that Mom might have been in that suit. I can only dream of wearing a suit like she did, but her blessing worked, and now she can be proud.

I inherited my mom’s jewelry, and my plan is to distribute some of the pieces to our female friends and relatives. I will take the multiple sets, bought from flea markets and swap meets and garage sales, and free them from the tight-shut drawer in which they are crammed. I will distribute them the way her goodness and her love are being spread over all of existence. I even bought the gift boxes and took photos of all the different sets. But I don’t have time now. I have to work. A lot.

This moment of grief, in the meantime, is brought to you by the shared experience of grief, as articulated by Ms. Emily D.

I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, eyes –

I wonder if It weighs like Mine –

Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long –

Or did it just begin –

I could not tell the Date of Mine –

It feels so old a pain –

I wonder if it hurts to live –

And if They have to try –

And whether – could They choose between –

It would not be – to die –

I note that Some – gone patient long –

At length, renew their smile – 

An imitation of a Light

That has so little Oil –

I wonder if when Years have piled – 

Some Thousands – on the Harm – 

That hurt them early – such a lapse

Could give them any Balm – 

Or would they go on aching still

Through Centuries of Nerve –

Enlightened to a larger Pain – 

In Contrast with the Love – 

The Grieved – are many – I am told – 

There is the various Cause – 

Death – is but one – and comes but once – 

And only nails the eyes – 

There’s Grief of Want – and grief of Cold – 

A sort they call “Despair” – 

There’s Banishment from native Eyes –

In sight of Native Air – 

And though I may not guess the kind – 

Correctly – yet to me

A piercing Comfort it affords

In passing Calvary – 

To note the fashions – of the Cross – 

And how they’re mostly worn – 

Still fascinated to presume

That Some – are like my own –