Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is the author of Bearing the Unbearable, and founder of the MISSFoundation. She lives in Sedona, AZ, a place of special significance for Kissie and me.
hope
To Yearn for You
Is it okay to yearn, to long for, to pine? And for how long? Some grief research has characterized prolonged yearning as “complicated grief,” which is imbued with negative connotations for social and psychological functioning. I can’t fathom not yearning for Kissie. I do it everyday, and expect to for the rest of my life. My yearning is a mixed emotional bag, and the extent of it varies from day to day, month to month, season to season. Sometimes my longing for her is a vast and wordless comfort, and, sometimes, it’s a huddled ball of second thoughts and bone-tiredness. My yearning has taken me on hours-long email reading expeditions as I devour our mundane and exultant exchanges, and fueled excavations of long-forgotten photos and the hoped for, glistening memories. My longing for her is part of my ongoing connection to her. And just as I hunger for the company of those I love who live far away, I ache for those who have died, knowing full well that our time as it once was has ended. I find it nourishing to openly acknowledge my longing, and to feel its many facets as fully and honestly as I can.
Is love itself not yearning? Grief, you are all the love I’ve yearned for, and found, and yearn for still.
A Heroic Narrative for Death
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.
A Map of Mourning 