I did not “lose” my sister. She died. I am deprived of her corporeal existence because she died. She could only be lost to me if I lived what remains of my life without the regular acknowledgement of hers. And of her death.
If I utter this ingrained expression, you will hear me correct myself immediately. What we say about death (and grief) is that powerful. Words can change everything.
The following personal essay, by Amy Tan, came to me printed on a brown paper take-out sack. It came with the nuanced significance of a truly brilliant synchronicity – particular meanings that I, and those familiar with our family’s stories, would immediately understand – in the form of a writer’s singular and profound truth.
I’ve experienced so many stunningly timed and emotionally charged coincidences since Kissie’s death (a year and a half ago today) – experiences that have left me in breathless wonder and tearful gratitude. I usually hesitate to share them directly (outside of my close, personal group), but I do sometimes risk it with other rational, intelligent adults who’ve experienced the death of someone close. When I do, I frequently find relief and enthusiasm, but the stories are told surreptitiously, as are mine.
I recently read a blog post where the author asked if we could just talk about these “random and precise” occurrences, and make it safe without having to defend our intelligence first. I concur. Beyond personal beliefs, and scientific explanations, there is beautiful, unperturbed mystery.
Two Minutes About Ghosts – by Amy Tan
Ghosts are among us. I am one of the 42% of Americans who thinks so. Then again, even if 100% believe something, that doesn’t make it true, does it? Like people who think they’re superior to others. Or voters who believe their candidate is best. Or those who say an invisible prankster is pounding up the stairs and making the sound of chandeliers crashing onto their bedroom floor. One of my ghosts used to do that. I thought it was my husband, a member of the 58% who did not believe in ghosts. But then he heard the tune to Jeopardy whistled behind his back—off-key, twice, and once when he was naked in the shower. Naked with a ghost! My husband now believes, sort of.
I bet many of the 58% have never heard a whistling ghost. They think ghosts are merely grief inflated by wishful thinking. Would they change their minds if the ghost named his murderer? One of mine did that, and the murderer was sentenced to life in prison. He also told me I would one day be a writer.
Defying science and reason, my mother sailed into my bedroom the night after she died, looking like a statically charged hologram of light. I was punched breathless with the strongest emotions I have ever felt and they are now stored in my intuition as a writer. From time to time, she brings me gifts—uncanny coincidences in the form of particular books, photographs, music, paintings, and people—at precisely that moment when I’m flailing in my writing. She helps me observe that happenstance can have meaning, that grief is beautiful, and that percentages are nonsense. There are things you feel because they are true. Like love, like loss, like ghosts.
This poem is dedicated to you, Dad.
It reminds me of the day you died – a day, and a time since, that I have pondered often these 17 years. A day I’ll continue to recall, along with many other days – significant and seemingly insignificant – that were your gifts to me.
After Years – by Ted Kooser
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
I agree with Amanda Bennett that we need this: a way to think and talk about death as the heroic act it can be, and sometimes is. An accomplishment at the end of a life well-lived. A good death.
I’ve asked myself the very questions she asks in the video that follows: why is our thinking and our system of dealing with serious illness not built to accommodate our tenacious hope? What do we do with the stories of ourselves as fighters, as invincible, as survivors? And not just patients and their families, but medical professionals, too, and maybe especially. Can we embrace a new story, in which, as she describes it, we move eventually toward a “graceful retreat?”
Christine did, and her graceful retreat was every bit as courageous and sublime, as it was painful and heartbreaking. Like Ms. Bennett’s husband, Terence Foley, Kissie was a force of life that few could resist. Though no longer tangible, that force is still very much discernible.
As soon as I watched this video, I wanted to read the book about their story, “The Cost of Hope.” I waited, hesitant about my capacity for reading a vivid recollection about a cancer death so soon. I read it last month, and while it was part-investigative report, it was above all the story of their fierce love of each other, and of life.
In this TED Med talk, Ms. Bennett wonders aloud, and with deeply felt conviction, about a “noble path to dying,” a heroic narrative for letting go that could be the capstone to our beautiful lives.
When I returned to work after my sister’s death in early January 2014, I couldn’t face the oversized year-at-a-glance calendar awaiting its annual mounting on my office wall. I’d found the dry-erase, overview style useful for the year-long planning I’m involved in, but the thought of putting it up just then, and seeing an entire year laid out before me without her in it, was just too overwhelming. It still is.
The first year of marking each first – the holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, seasons – has only just passed. Sixteen months is so very little time after fifty-one years. And all at once it was May again. I knew it was coming, of course, the glorious May that is Kissie’s birth month. The one, I think, that captures her essence most eloquently – boisterous, vibrant, radiant, and quicksilver – everything rushing to life – just like her. The whirling dervish, as I jokingly call her.
If I thought last May – and her first birthday since her death – was difficult (I did), I really could not gauge just how, and at which junctures, this one would trigger a deluge of acute sorrow. Yes, I anticipated it (a haphazard way of trying to prepare oneself emotionally), but that didn’t really equip me, so to speak, because this year is different. I am different. Last May was an incomprehensible ache. This year, my sadness feels like a kind of relentless sobriety, periodically (and often unexpectedly) punctuated with the wild unreality that has characterized so much of the last sixteen months.
As May spins shining into June, I am grateful. There have been unanticipated gifts, steadfast companions, and great beauty amid my grief and mourning. Each week, month, and season, has its own particular fierceness, its own distinct significance; and memory, its own calibration of what should be faithfully retold, honored, and held up to the light.
“There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled, one remains connected to the other person through it.
It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled, and thus helps us preserve – even in pain – the authentic relationship. Furthermore, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past, not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This hit me like a ton of bricks when I first read it, about three months after Kissie’s death. I was unfamiliar with the author, a German theologian who died in 1945. His words were a thunderclap, and a resonating voice to the gaping emptiness that overwhelmed me, and that I was unable to articulate. I had read nothing to that point, and little since, that openly advised an enduring connection by the conscious acknowledgement of absence, and the effort to “leave it precisely unfilled.” It was counterintuitive, and yet it made perfect sense. My irreplaceable sister.
In the past fifteen months, I have learned just how hard it is to “leave it precisely unfilled.” Culturally, we do not consider absence a state to be cultivated, with the living or the dead. We’re encouraged from every corner to fill our emptiness with something. Physical, intellectual, and spiritual distractions, compensations, and comforts abound. A philosophy for remaining connected to our deceased loved ones by staying in the presence of their absence is eloquently subversive. So is the idea that the torment of our separation could be transformative.
Choosing sympathy cards has become a lot more difficult for me lately. It’s the language. So many are written with such a pat sensibility that they’re almost cold, and I can’t bear to send one, even with a personal message. When I come across one that feels genuine, it’s not very sympathetic at all, it’s empathetic. I’d like to see them called bereavement cards, and would-be card writers (and all of us who want express our compassion in a heartfelt manner), might be well-served by watching the following video from Dr. Brené Brown. Dr. Brown is a researcher and author, whose TED talk on the power of vulnerability I shared in a previous post.
I discovered the term “grief police” while foraging for writing on grief in western culture. It showed up in Psychology Today as it pertains to grief shaming, and in other sources as it relates to cross-cultural examinations of bereavement.
So what does it mean? Basically, the term is applied when talking about a society’s or culture’s grief “rules” — how the associated emotions are to be handled and displayed, both privately and publicly. What intrigues me about the term is that it not only underscores a strong and somewhat fearful grief indoctrination, but also critiques it.
The “grief police” can be thought of as those in our personal and professional spheres who react to, and measure, individual bereavement experiences in accordance with mainstream social prescriptions for how grief should be expressed, how long it should last, what it should mean, and so on. As such, grief policing typically doesn’t acknowledge characteristics and circumstances of particular relationships, and it generally leans toward evaluation and comparison over empathy. Let me just say here that we are all subject to cultural imperatives. It’s impossible not to be influenced by them. I’m sure I have “policed” without even knowing it, or intending to cause any harm.
One of the realities of this cultural and social indoctrination around grief, (not all of it negative), and the policing that sustains it, is that those of us who are grieving the death of a loved one are subject to the shame and anxiety that sometimes result from not feeling “up to cultural snuff,” or being able to satisfy an appropriate social standard. This is hard on those in mourning.
It’s approaching 15 months since Chris died, and part of my struggle continues to be how my mourning of her is perceived, acknowledged, and supported. As social creatures we need feedback from each other to know that we’ll be okay, and to be comforted when our losses are immense and we feel most broken. Raising our own and each others’ awareness of these dynamics feels imperative to me. I hear my own experience reflected back when others share with me their fears of inadequacy as they face the reality of their grief.
I’d like to cover this topic in more depth in future posts, and examine external beliefs and expectations we’ve internalized that may not be accurate, helpful, or compassionate, and that, in fact, may be harmful and flawed.
Mitza’s Hands
Look at the hands
of the dying
to see the truth
about our dive
through the wave of time.
Look at the hands
of the dying
to break the shell
of your heart open
and feel beauty flow.
With a blindfold over her eyes
she begins to see everything.
With a cloth in her mouth
she speaks with the infinite.
*****************************
Mitza’s Hands was written by Kevin Lawler, poet and friend. You can read more of Kevin’s wonderfully evocative poetry on his blog, Winding Road.
When nothing else can comfort me, I often turn to poetry. Only to it, and music, do the stubborn vestiges of my intellect completely succumb, and then, I can sometimes find a knowing and quiet solace.
There is risk in vulnerability. In letting ourselves acknowledge and feel our wounds and imperfections, and then, in letting others see them. To be vulnerable – to let ourselves be seen as we really are – is to open ourselves to the possibility of rejection. The risk is one of connectedness. Will this vulnerability of mine bring us closer or push us apart? In my grief, if I show you my devastation, will you run?
I highly recommend this moving, informative, and humorous 20-minute talk by researcher Brené Brown. In it, she speaks to the power of vulnerability, the cultural avoidance of it, and the necessity of embracing it, if we are to be “whole-hearted” people. What makes you vulnerable, makes you beautiful.
A Map of Mourning 