The central metaphor of 'moving on' is a slippery one, in which physical distance (leaving a place and travelling onwards) and perhaps time (forgetting the past) are equated in some way with emotional distance - a lack of attachment to the person who has died. I return in my mind to the quote from 'Lament for a Son' that I used in an earlier blog:
If he was worth loving, he was worth grieving over. Grief is the existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it.
With Jen's death I lost a relationship that we'd spent 17 years building up. I've lost a part of myself, who I was in relation to Jen. My grief is prompted by love. Why should I pretend to others that I'll get over it? The reality is that for the rest of my time on earth I'll miss her. At every important moment in the boys lives I'll wish she was there to see it. Even if I were to remarry, I think that sense of loss would remain.
Yet I can also see that grief can become pathological, that it can drain the colour out of everything else until there seems to be no point or purpose on going on. I do sometimes find myself wanting to re-experience an intense grief, because it's the strongest emotion available when everything else seems flat, because it can powerfully draw the attention and sympathy of others. Even this blog itself, which has focused much on grief, represents a temptation to dramatise my feelings by focusing on one aspect of my crowded and busy existence. I know already that grief has a whole spectrum of colour and intensity, and that my experience may oscillate wildly, rather than follow some linear progression.
A friend pointed out on entry on the Mulherin's blog about their son Ben, who died a year ago from cancer at age 23. The entry was an essay about theories of grief, written by his mother as part of a counselling course. It points out a tradition of theories going back to Freud, which see the 'process' as one of withdrawing our emotional attachement to the person who has died, and instead redirect it to a living person - hence the 'letting go' or 'moving on' idea. It reminds me weirdly of Emily Dickinson: "This is the hour of lead, remembered if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the snow. First chill, then stupor, then the letting go". Others more recently have instead suggested that we are not trying to detach ourselves from that person, but rather to change the nature of that attachment. At the same time we have to rebuild our world in a new way. I can't yet see the full shape of that new world for me, but I have begun to build it. I have started to make some small changes, and entertain new possibilities. Would you call this 'moving on'? Grief and memory are still my companions, as is love, in the long time ahead.
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I agree, the pat wisdom about "moving on" is odious. Its odiousness lies in its redundancy: the world and everything does continue to exist and each day we continue to live, learning bit by bit to do so without the physical presence of the person we loved, and love, and who shared every part of our lives more than any other. The loving and the missing never stops. I emphatically still love and miss my adored late aunt who died when i was 20. When I think of her I laugh with joy at the memories, and then cry briefly and bitterly, missing her deep in my core, wishing I could see her. Then I reflect on our time on earth together. The tears and the sadness become witness and reminder to the love and happiness we shared.
ReplyDeleteI feel that when it comes to emotional growth, change and adaptation, there's no need to "try" to do anything, only to be conscious about basic needs and simple pleasures - good food, good rest, spending a balance of time with others and alone (and for some people a lot of time alone is a very good and natural thing, again contrary to some conventional "wisdom"), nourishing the soul and the body alike with food, company, art, music and solitude in nature. When I have suffered difficult times (though nothing so profound as a death of a beloved spouse, of my true other half), I have found that what gave relief (the relief of honesty) was to let my emotions be, to sit with whatever I was feeling and feel it to the full.. and to then get up and make the cup of tea, make the phone call to a friend, cook a meal, go for a walk, even in the midst of deep sorrow that felt like lead in my bones dragging me down to the ground. To be reminded of the grace of life in seeing a gull fly up or a cat in a silly pose or some other beauty, poetry or quirky surprise of natural and human life, was deeply consoling.. "There was life, and there is life". Only when someone has gone do we sometimes tend to think of their life in the past tense, as if it was an unchangeable object. Indeed, the actual way life was expressed in that person did settle into a particular shape, but the living and creating of it was a quicksilver, vibrant, shivering, magical, unpredicable thing. The joy of life and what can and could happen and be created moment to moment! - dimensions of wonderful, zinging possibility for joy and fulfilment that were exponentially expanded for Jen by your presence and role in her life, and for you, by hers. There's no leaden "moving on" from that, thank God! That's a privilege and a wonder.
Once again, you've correctly sensed the spirit of denial, of LESSENING, that seems to be expressed in the conventional comforts that people utter (in their anxiety to somehow remove or heal your pain -- which only life/God itself can do). But we don't want less pain, but more - no - we want ENOUGH. Enough to reflect the truth and the importance of that person, our joy in them and their joy in us.
I feel that when we in sorrow attend to our daily practice, even if with difficulty, whether it be prayer or meditation or just living humbly moment to moment, that the higher or deeper principle will very gently guide us, in our own time, through the growth that leads to the necessary and honorable work of grief being done and done well.