#1 - on grief - when things fall apart
Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: ‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.’ - Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
Dear Reader,
First of all, given how scarce a commodity time is, thank you for finding time to be here. As a disclaimer, I thought it only apt to debut with grief as this is what led me to start writing to you in the first place. When I contemplated whether there would be any value in documenting my experience, two people came to mind: James Baldwin and Kristin Neff, and I started documenting anyway. Neff has found that one of three key components of self-compassion is accepting that the pain you experience is not exclusive to you alone: the commonality of being human lies in our suffering. Baldwin has said, and I quote:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read … the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who ever had been alive.”
Like many, I have been (and still am, sometimes) stubborn in my grief. I have refused to want to see that I am not isolated in my sadness, and that many others are hurting. No, this grief has been mine. And it has been big. This is the only way I could justify the gravitas of my father’s passing earlier this year. But this need to justify, and the sense of groundlessness that I have felt off late has increased ever since I tried to rationalise my grief by the need to choreograph what one should feel or do when grieving. There are the stock characters propagated by pop culture - the melodramatic widow; the son who (without a wince) takes over as man of the house; the parent who develops dementia. Will there be a recollection of only the good? Is it nonchalant and dismissive to have gone into complete acceptance from the second it happened? On the other hand is there something ‘worrying’ if one is overcome with hysteria? I did think a certain way to react existed. I judged myself for not crying in the days after it happened. I judged myself for crying too much. For things unsaid, for time not spent. For making a post on Instagram “too soon”. For everything I did and did not do - basically there was no room for no judgement. Both death and sex are similar in the sense that there is a taboo around speaking openly about either of the two to avoid making others uncomfortable. With death there is also the expectation that you will be in mourning - perhaps from others, but mostly from yourself.
Grief comes with no blueprint. And no one blueprint applies to everyone’s grief. Death is inevitable if there is life - but for there to be death, life must be inevitable first. Despite that, when it happens there is still denial and shock that follows. American novelist and essayist Joan Didion writes in the memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking:
“grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be…I do not remember crying the night before; I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do… I had needed to get a copy of John’s medical summary… My father was dead, my mother was dead…I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport.”
Artist spotlight: Johan Deckmann
A series of illustrations by Soosh (@vskafandre) from ‘Dad by My Side’
The Waves of Grief
Parameters of normality cease to exist within the realm of grief the more I have come to understand it. Time, too, does not function within its usual metric of minutes and days. It seems to stagnate - the seismic strength of the shock plateaus across the first few weeks breaking the illusion that each day is different to the next. I think time mainly stagnates because of the irreversibility of the fact. Didion would agree when I say that our naivety wants us to believe that things will go back to the way they once were. When we say time will heal, we are in essence saying that we will go back to feeling the way we once did before it happened. When someone dies, the thought of things going back to the way they once were feels unfathomable unless we exist within a soap serial and our person is resurrected to life again - impossible. And that’s when a wedge develops between our reality (where our person no longer exists) and our desired reality (where our person is alive): there is a paradox. We accept this paradox to be “normal” (if such a thing exists), not realising that it is but a paradox: life splintered in two disjunct but juxtaposed realities.
Functioning from the basis of this paradox, grief takes another form: association. Things in our daily life act as little alarms or reminders of our person. These alarms usually go off in full ring when least expected. With a sudden shove, you are thrown from your desired reality to what really is. I think this ‘sudden shove’ phenomenon would be the best way I could describe what is known as a ‘wave’ of grief. Didion describes these ‘waves’ as “sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” I am pouring myself a glass of water. My father was always thirsty after lunch. My father’s favourite song is playing on the radio. I am on my way to a work meeting for which I am nervous and running late. My father loved vanilla ice cream. Today I make it for the first time at home. She also quotes Erich Lindemann, Chief of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital who defined ‘waves’ in 1944: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves … a need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as mental pain.” Perhaps we don’t recognise the intensity of these waves to be so extreme when they arrive. But that does not mean that the intensity is not present. I am writing to you because I want to speak of death with acceptance - I know, morbid - but this year my body has grown to become a greenhouse of grief. I know that I am but I have felt that I am not. All this grief has led me to ruminate, in particular, on the writing of Buddhist author, teacher and nun Pema Chödrön. In her book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, here are some things she says that have stayed with me:
“Love of the truth puts you on the spot…we might have some romantic view of what that means, but when we are nailed with the truth, we suffer. We look in the bathroom mirror, and there we are with our pimples, our aging face, our lack of kindness, our aggression and timidity - all that stuff. This is where tenderness comes in…there is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness…sometimes it’s because of illness or death that we find ourselves in this place. We experience a sense of loss - loss of our loved ones, loss of our youth, loss of our life.”
There is a fertile chaos in the aftermath of any kind of breaking. The unbecoming and the undoing. The rain leaves the soil bludgeoned first before anything can grow. Sometimes a mess is needed in order to understand what needs tidying up. When things fall apart…we are forced to ask: am I being because I have to be, or am I making a choice to be?
More words by Chödrön which have lingered:
“…things fall apart is a kind of a testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy... In fact, thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara…suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last - that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.”
Simple and evergreen, these lyrics and Armstrong’s voice have been hitting hard
Cannot stop listening (reminds me that life can really be uncomplicated, if we want it to be) - an instant mood uplifter
Podcasts & other wisdom
Some compassionate wisdom from grief expert David Kessler on Coping with Grief after Death
Excerpt from ‘Talking to Grief’ by Denise Levertov
Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.
(read the rest of this poem here).
No Time by Billy Collins
In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.
Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
White Apples by Donald Hall
when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear
I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door
white apples and the taste of stone
if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes
Dressing for the Burial by Danusha Laméris
No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death —
the way the week my brother shot himself,
his wife and I fell on the bed laughing
because she couldn’t decide what to wear for the big day,
and asked me, “Do I go for sexy or Amish?” I told her sexy.
And we rolled around on the mattress they shared
for eighteen years, clutching our sides.
Meanwhile, he lay in a narrow refrigerated drawer,
soft brown curls springing from his scalp,
framing his handsome face. This was back when
he still had a face, and we were going to see it.
“Hold up the black skirt again,” I said. She said, “Which one?”
And then she said, “You look so Mafia Chic,” and I said, “Thank you,”
and it went on until we both got tired and our ribs hurt and now
I don’t even remember what we wore. Only that we both looked fabulous
weeping over that open hole in the ground.
Excerpt from Funeral by Wislawa Symborska
Translated from the Polish by Mikołaj Sekrecki
"so suddenly, who would've expected this"
"stress and cigarettes, I was warning him"
(…) "I've never been to this part of the cemetery"
"I saw him in my dream last week, must've been a premonition"
"pretty, that little daughter"
"we're all going to end up this way"
"give mine to the widow, I've got to hurry to"
"but still it sounded more solemn in Latin"
"you can't turn back the clock"
"goodbye"
"how about a beer"
"give me a ring, we'll have a chat"
"number four or number twelve"
"me, this way"
"we, that way".
(read the rest of this poem here).
More first-aid for the grieving heart:
What the Living Do by Marie Howe
Blank by George Bilgere
Follow them to connect with others who might be experiencing something similar:
Don’t hesitate - reach out for support: Cruse Helpline
This newsletter is so lovingly curated, so aesthetically put together, so beautifully written.
Wow, Vasvi.
Sunil (Bhandari)