- Email: [email protected]
No protocol for grief
Perspectives
The art of medicine No protocol for grief Terry Tempest Williams begins her grief memoir When Women Were Birds with a story about her dying mother who said she would leave Williams all of her journals, three shelves of them, but only if Williams promised not to look at them until after she was gone. Williams waited for the first full moon after her mother’s death to open them. When she did, she discovered that every one of them was blank. She felt at that moment that she had lost her mother twice. Although the details of this story are particular to Williams’s experience, the story is also emblematic of modern loss and grief. We think we know what to expect of mourning, but the intensity or the duration or the echo of previous losses is unexpected. In response, we, too, might seek guidance in books. Williams turned to her mother’s notebooks, but the most common sources of guidance for many readers are self-help books that encourage an orderly process of bereavement—such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. The idea that mourning progresses in predictable stages, widely accepted by doctors and patients alike, can amplify the sense that our grief is neither “normal” nor “healthy”. This may be one reason why literary grief memoirs are having a moment in publishing; they provide vivid evidence that mourning is more complicated than formulaic accounts of bereavement acknowledge. Joan Didion’s two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, depict her grief for her husband and daughter as a long and debilitating trauma, whereas Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confronts his fear of death in calmly detached musings. Like these memoirs, David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye push back against expectations. Together, however, they suggest how unprepared most of us are to face death and loss. It is reasonable to ask why we are so clueless about grief. O’Rourke, who studied the history of mourning as she wrote her book, concludes: “One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.” This argument can be extended to explain the steady stream of grief memoirs published in recent years. Writing and reading about the difficulties of loss have become modern rituals of mourning. Grieving writers publish their work and a growing audience of readers searches these texts for something more than easy answers. They seek thoughtfulness and opportunities to be thoughtful themselves. 848
Recently I’ve been drawn to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, both of which blur the boundaries between the memoir and the meditative essay to explore death and loss in startlingly original and beautiful ways. Neither work is maudlin or solipsistic. Instead, the writers focus on how small moments open up to deep questions, and how those questions lead, in turn, to new ways of understanding the place of death in life. H is for Hawk braids together three narrative strands: Macdonald’s father’s sudden death; her subsequent absorption in training a young goshawk; and the story of T H White, who wrote The Once and Future King as well as a lesser known memoir, The Goshawk, which she read as a child. Macdonald was hit hard by her father’s death. She admired and identified with him; like her, he was an observer, a watcher. When he died, she was without a job, partner, home, or child to anchor her life. So she purchased a goshawk and got to work. Why a goshawk? And why at this moment in time? The associative logics of myths and dreams are at work in Macdonald’s decision. Goshawks are birds of the deep woods, “spooky pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets”. She recalled from childhood that White’s The Goshawk ended with his hawk lost in the forest, and she imagined her father lost there, too. She wanted her hawk to slip “through a rent in the air into another world. [She] wanted to fly with the hawk to find [her] father; find him and bring him home”. In the fog of mourning, her father, the hawk, and White all connected in her desire to return to a life that seemed whole. It’s tempting to read Macdonald’s memoir as yet another tale about escaping loss in the natural world, a story “so old”, she says, “its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing”. Macdonald, however, doesn’t romanticise the natural world, which she recognised, even as a child, was endangered. She remembers that the rabbit population in the UK was wiped out by the myxomatosis virus, “hawk populations fell from agricultural pesticides”, otters vanished from poisoned rivers, “guillemots drown[ed] in oiled seas”, and people, including her, feared nuclear annihilation. Nature offers no refuge. As the year passed and Macdonald found her footing again, she came to a realisation: “there is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer”. Although Macdonald eases herself back into the human world, H is for Hawk resists what grief counsellors might call “closure”. In the memoir’s final pages, she leaves www.thelancet.com Vol 386 August 29, 2015
her goshawk in a friend’s aviary for the moulting season, knowing that the bird will transform into an adult and will not remember her when she returns. She is just beginning to find a way to live that makes room for loss, death, and wildness without losing herself in them. Navigating the three narrative threads of H is for Hawk is good practice for the complex lacework of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. Solnit writes about a year in which her mother descended into Alzheimer’s disease, a friend died of cancer, and she had her own brush with cancer. Her memoir, she says, is both “a history of an emergency” and a meditation on “the stories that kept me company”. Borrowing the digressive structure of The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, Solnit complicates the narrative of mortality with essayistic forays into topics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi, Dutch vanitas painting, Che Guevara, leprosy, Iceland, and many versions of a story about a sled made of frozen meat, a story that “had at its center questions about how to tell and how to listen”. Each digression offers new insights into impermanence. For example, Solnit begins and ends her book by writing about the hundred pounds of apricots her brother picked from their mother’s tree after they’d moved her into a residential care facility. “I spread them out on a sheet on the plank floor of my bedroom”, Solnit writes: “There they presided for some days, a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed.” Like Macdonald’s hawk, the apricots—some ripe, some damaged—become an objective correlative without a single or definite meaning; they feed Solnit’s imagination and her inquiry. At first, the fruit seemed “to be an allegory for something yet to happen”. But by the end of her difficult year, she writes, “I see the apricots as an exhortation to tell of the time that began with their arrival. As a gift from my mother, or her tree, they were a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts.” They were “an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories and locate the silences in between”. Like Macdonald, who risks romanticising nature, Solnit risks idealising stories. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, she writes, quoting the opening line of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”. But she immediately undercuts Didion’s certainty, adding that we also tell stories “to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment”. For Solnit, there’s no single story to tell, no certain path to a definitive conclusion. She, like Macdonald, is an essayistic mourner as well as an essayistic writer. The word essay, which stems from www.thelancet.com Vol 386 August 29, 2015
Jeffrey Conley
Perspectives
Wing Detail (2010) by Jeffrey Conley
the French verb essayer, means an attempt, and the fundamental work of essay-ing is to experiment with ideas. Solnit generates insights about her inner experience and the larger world by connecting the faraway and the nearby, the invisible and the visible, the unknown and the known. Solnit and Macdonald might seem to be anachronisms in an era that values certainty, standardisation, efficiency, measurable outcomes, and profits. One cannot reduce their work to self-help aphorisms or protocols. Both writers begin with the assumption that there is no “right” way to mourn. Instead of checking off, in order, the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, they approach mourning creatively. Their essays affirm their belief in the value of complexity and the fundamental desire for meaning in human experience One need not be a writer, however, to think essayistically about loss. Following Macdonald and Solnit, we could give ourselves (and others) permission to ponder mortality and grief in all their complexity instead of attempting to contain and simplify them. With practice, reflective and meditative modes of thought are available to all of us—doctors and patients, writers and readers—during mourning and other moments of uncertainty. Like Terry Tempest Williams, who learned to see the blank pages of her mother’s journals not as emptiness, but as possibility, we can, as readers, turn to Williams’s pages, or to those of Macdonald or Solnit, to contemplate the events that give life meaning and to create new possibilities of our own.
Ann Jurecic Department of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA [email protected]
Further reading Barnes J. Nothing to be frightened of. New York: Knopf, 2008 Didion J. The year of magical thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005 Macdonald H. H is for hawk. London: Jonathan Cape, 2014 Rieff D. Swimming in a sea of death: a son’s memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008 Solnit R. The faraway nearby. New York: Viking Penguin, 2013 Williams TT. When women were birds: fifty-four variations on voice. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
849
The art of medicine No protocol for grief Terry Tempest Williams begins her grief memoir When Women Were Birds with a story about her dying mother who said she would leave Williams all of her journals, three shelves of them, but only if Williams promised not to look at them until after she was gone. Williams waited for the first full moon after her mother’s death to open them. When she did, she discovered that every one of them was blank. She felt at that moment that she had lost her mother twice. Although the details of this story are particular to Williams’s experience, the story is also emblematic of modern loss and grief. We think we know what to expect of mourning, but the intensity or the duration or the echo of previous losses is unexpected. In response, we, too, might seek guidance in books. Williams turned to her mother’s notebooks, but the most common sources of guidance for many readers are self-help books that encourage an orderly process of bereavement—such as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. The idea that mourning progresses in predictable stages, widely accepted by doctors and patients alike, can amplify the sense that our grief is neither “normal” nor “healthy”. This may be one reason why literary grief memoirs are having a moment in publishing; they provide vivid evidence that mourning is more complicated than formulaic accounts of bereavement acknowledge. Joan Didion’s two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, depict her grief for her husband and daughter as a long and debilitating trauma, whereas Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confronts his fear of death in calmly detached musings. Like these memoirs, David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye push back against expectations. Together, however, they suggest how unprepared most of us are to face death and loss. It is reasonable to ask why we are so clueless about grief. O’Rourke, who studied the history of mourning as she wrote her book, concludes: “One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.” This argument can be extended to explain the steady stream of grief memoirs published in recent years. Writing and reading about the difficulties of loss have become modern rituals of mourning. Grieving writers publish their work and a growing audience of readers searches these texts for something more than easy answers. They seek thoughtfulness and opportunities to be thoughtful themselves. 848
Recently I’ve been drawn to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, both of which blur the boundaries between the memoir and the meditative essay to explore death and loss in startlingly original and beautiful ways. Neither work is maudlin or solipsistic. Instead, the writers focus on how small moments open up to deep questions, and how those questions lead, in turn, to new ways of understanding the place of death in life. H is for Hawk braids together three narrative strands: Macdonald’s father’s sudden death; her subsequent absorption in training a young goshawk; and the story of T H White, who wrote The Once and Future King as well as a lesser known memoir, The Goshawk, which she read as a child. Macdonald was hit hard by her father’s death. She admired and identified with him; like her, he was an observer, a watcher. When he died, she was without a job, partner, home, or child to anchor her life. So she purchased a goshawk and got to work. Why a goshawk? And why at this moment in time? The associative logics of myths and dreams are at work in Macdonald’s decision. Goshawks are birds of the deep woods, “spooky pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets”. She recalled from childhood that White’s The Goshawk ended with his hawk lost in the forest, and she imagined her father lost there, too. She wanted her hawk to slip “through a rent in the air into another world. [She] wanted to fly with the hawk to find [her] father; find him and bring him home”. In the fog of mourning, her father, the hawk, and White all connected in her desire to return to a life that seemed whole. It’s tempting to read Macdonald’s memoir as yet another tale about escaping loss in the natural world, a story “so old”, she says, “its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing”. Macdonald, however, doesn’t romanticise the natural world, which she recognised, even as a child, was endangered. She remembers that the rabbit population in the UK was wiped out by the myxomatosis virus, “hawk populations fell from agricultural pesticides”, otters vanished from poisoned rivers, “guillemots drown[ed] in oiled seas”, and people, including her, feared nuclear annihilation. Nature offers no refuge. As the year passed and Macdonald found her footing again, she came to a realisation: “there is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer”. Although Macdonald eases herself back into the human world, H is for Hawk resists what grief counsellors might call “closure”. In the memoir’s final pages, she leaves www.thelancet.com Vol 386 August 29, 2015
her goshawk in a friend’s aviary for the moulting season, knowing that the bird will transform into an adult and will not remember her when she returns. She is just beginning to find a way to live that makes room for loss, death, and wildness without losing herself in them. Navigating the three narrative threads of H is for Hawk is good practice for the complex lacework of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. Solnit writes about a year in which her mother descended into Alzheimer’s disease, a friend died of cancer, and she had her own brush with cancer. Her memoir, she says, is both “a history of an emergency” and a meditation on “the stories that kept me company”. Borrowing the digressive structure of The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, Solnit complicates the narrative of mortality with essayistic forays into topics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi, Dutch vanitas painting, Che Guevara, leprosy, Iceland, and many versions of a story about a sled made of frozen meat, a story that “had at its center questions about how to tell and how to listen”. Each digression offers new insights into impermanence. For example, Solnit begins and ends her book by writing about the hundred pounds of apricots her brother picked from their mother’s tree after they’d moved her into a residential care facility. “I spread them out on a sheet on the plank floor of my bedroom”, Solnit writes: “There they presided for some days, a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed.” Like Macdonald’s hawk, the apricots—some ripe, some damaged—become an objective correlative without a single or definite meaning; they feed Solnit’s imagination and her inquiry. At first, the fruit seemed “to be an allegory for something yet to happen”. But by the end of her difficult year, she writes, “I see the apricots as an exhortation to tell of the time that began with their arrival. As a gift from my mother, or her tree, they were a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts.” They were “an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories and locate the silences in between”. Like Macdonald, who risks romanticising nature, Solnit risks idealising stories. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, she writes, quoting the opening line of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”. But she immediately undercuts Didion’s certainty, adding that we also tell stories “to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment”. For Solnit, there’s no single story to tell, no certain path to a definitive conclusion. She, like Macdonald, is an essayistic mourner as well as an essayistic writer. The word essay, which stems from www.thelancet.com Vol 386 August 29, 2015
Jeffrey Conley
Perspectives
Wing Detail (2010) by Jeffrey Conley
the French verb essayer, means an attempt, and the fundamental work of essay-ing is to experiment with ideas. Solnit generates insights about her inner experience and the larger world by connecting the faraway and the nearby, the invisible and the visible, the unknown and the known. Solnit and Macdonald might seem to be anachronisms in an era that values certainty, standardisation, efficiency, measurable outcomes, and profits. One cannot reduce their work to self-help aphorisms or protocols. Both writers begin with the assumption that there is no “right” way to mourn. Instead of checking off, in order, the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, they approach mourning creatively. Their essays affirm their belief in the value of complexity and the fundamental desire for meaning in human experience One need not be a writer, however, to think essayistically about loss. Following Macdonald and Solnit, we could give ourselves (and others) permission to ponder mortality and grief in all their complexity instead of attempting to contain and simplify them. With practice, reflective and meditative modes of thought are available to all of us—doctors and patients, writers and readers—during mourning and other moments of uncertainty. Like Terry Tempest Williams, who learned to see the blank pages of her mother’s journals not as emptiness, but as possibility, we can, as readers, turn to Williams’s pages, or to those of Macdonald or Solnit, to contemplate the events that give life meaning and to create new possibilities of our own.
Ann Jurecic Department of English, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA [email protected]
Further reading Barnes J. Nothing to be frightened of. New York: Knopf, 2008 Didion J. The year of magical thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005 Macdonald H. H is for hawk. London: Jonathan Cape, 2014 Rieff D. Swimming in a sea of death: a son’s memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008 Solnit R. The faraway nearby. New York: Viking Penguin, 2013 Williams TT. When women were birds: fifty-four variations on voice. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
849