I don’t see death every day, but I hear it.
From where I sit, in my home office overlooking a little Bosphorus bay, the day is punctuated by recess at a large school below. Sometimes through the din I think I hear a high-pitched pain cry echoing in the valley. An intermittent wail. Out on the balcony I listen, some primitive hackle raised. The source: the government hospital on the waterfront. Not a patient. Someone realizing a loved life is over.
Yesterday I caught a grief panel live-webcasted from The Women’s Conference 2009, America’s foremost forum for women as architects of change. California’s First Lady Maria Shriver — whose mother and uncle died recently — and other high profile grieving women talked in raw terms about love and loss. Tremulous voices….courageous for getting on stage in front of an audience of 25,000 for what is usually a private conversation.
Buttoned-down American culture is “grief-illiterate”, they agreed, one woman appreciating the Middle Eastern tradition of ululating which she saw as stress relief. Celebrity means they mourn in the public eye. Shriver’s iconic clan has had a lion’s share of public bereavement — it’s practically the Kennedy family culture — yet she counted it as a benefit: people treated her gently, strangers transformed into supporters.
Many of us grieve in private, our mourning unnoticed outside of networks of family and friends. Restricting who we talk to about it can cut us off from people unafraid to hear about death, perhaps those even able to console us.
I know when my best friend died — 15 years ago today — I was on the opposite side of the planet from everyone who knew me, and her, which muffled my pain cry and made the isolation I felt even more acute.
What do you hear about death? What do you want to hear? What do you share?
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That’s a beautiful post, Anastasia. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.
What do I hear? Loss, pain, grief…
What do I want to hear? What happened, how, why, what we could do differently if at all, what I need to learn, heal, and share.
What do I share? How I feel, how I handle, how I got to that place.
Truth. It requires strength, introspection, bravery, dismantling our unhelpful shrouds of self-blindness, a shadow of death itself.
I wrote a blog post recently about someone who committed suicide, and received a phone call asking me to remove mention of suicide. No. It is what it is, and I work to operate in Truth. How can we heal without being honest? I’m upset that our friend is dead and that he was miserable before he died. I’m glad to be able to express how I feel and offer suggestions that hopefully help others now and in the future.
Your question about what do we hear is a very good one. Many people don’t want to hear or see. I try to do both.
http://blog.peacockandpaisley.com/be-a-ray-of-sunshine/2009/10/23/
Thank you.
I am on a palliative care & hospice social worker listserv. I hear a weird balance of discussion between helping people with loss & grief on the one hand, and managing personnel, paperwork, and regulations on the other. I also studied grief in school. Have you heard of disenfranchised grief? Where the bereaved has no sanctioned opportunity to publicly grieve? Some might argue that almost everyone in the US suffers this to some extent.
That was so meaningful and real Anastasia. I share your experience as well. Besides the fact that grieving publicly can be quite disturbing to the outer circle of you close family and friends, grieving alone in a foreign land is such an alienating position to be in. When my mother passed away 13 years ago due to a sudden automobile accident I flew home the next day. There I was united with family and friends who shared the mourning process with me and therefor somehow we were all in it together although I was grieving on a higher level because of her being my mother.
A few years later when I lost a very dear cousin who was one of my childhood best friends, I couldn’t fly home and had to grieve alone. I will never forget the feeling of alienation I had and what it felt like to cry by myself over his passing. I must say as the years went by other dear members of my family have passed away and each time it has been difficult to mourn alone. The group support of acknowledging the deceased and respect paid creates an immortalization or a commemoration in some way where as when you are alone you are left with the feeling that the deceased never made a difference in the lives of the people you see everyday. No matter how much they are nice and try to support you. As a foreigner you always have to explain and talk about things that were a part of you previous life where as when you live in your (hometown) you really never have to explain anything!
In the US, we had tons of experience with disenfranchised grief during the height of the AIDS crisis, when partners of those who died were barred from funerals, were not allowed time off work, couldn’t be out of the closet, and more.
I had some experience with this myself when my ex died. I’m a woman; he was a man; but his family had heartily disapproved of me when we were together, were very glad when we broke up, and didn’t notify me when he died. (His best friend’s mother made sure I got word.) I was invisible at his funeral; our relationship was edited out of his eulogies and the story of his life. And since most people in my circle of friends and colleagues had no idea how to react, I got little comfort there. I eventually got some good support from other people and places in my life, for which I am still grateful.
I think that you are right — when we as a society do a poor job of sanctioning expression of grief in general, many if not most of us will suffer this way.
Thankfully, there are subcultures in the US where such behavior as weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, sitting shiva, rending garments, and keening, are acceptable expressions of grief. Larger society has tended to frown on these groups… but we are learning from them, too.
Great post — I was also very moved by the comments at the Women’s conference yesterday.
My aunt died last Christmas day. It was a sad day for our family, especially for my mother who had lost her sister and the last living member of her family (aside from her children.) During the days following her death, my sister and I spent a lot of time with our nieces talking about our feelings and listening to their feelings about the experience. It was important to me to help them understand that death is not something to be feared, it is something to experience and to mourn and it is a part of life, a difficult part but one that should be honored.
When I returned home, one of my friend’s children asked me if her eyes were closed when she died. I began to answer him and his father shushed me and said, “no offense but no one wants to hear that.”
I was reminded of how difficult the discussion and expression of death remains for so many people.
Thank you everyone for your willingness to talk about this and share your own experiences. It seems to me that the taboo topics of our lives are the ones we truly need to talk about the most.
I’ll respond in more detail soon. For now, wanted to let you know video of the grief panel can be found in the lunch session at 1:40
Anastasia – thank you for sharing this. I think it’s important to discuss pain — as important as it is to discuss joy. Emotional expression is something that unites all cultures and ties us together, particularly women. It’s the forum that becomes the challenge or the barrier. If we are able to accept that death and grief are acceptably “public,” perhaps we can break down the walls that we create for ourselves.
Thanks Liz. I know when I first heard about this gathering I thought “Only women would have a grief panel at a huge general conference.” I wasn’t sure if it had a place there…
Related coverage of the conference by Darryle Pollack at the Huffington Post points out that “emotions are a source of strength” rather than weakness. In particular, the power of women comes from embracing those emotions.
Stasa, Terri, Laily, Mog, Heather, thanks for weighing in. It sounds like we all have the urge to be more open about grief, and should, even if others object because they’re not ready to be. Laily, grieving so far from ‘home’ is one of the worst experiences I have ever had.
Sometimes we grieve for things the people around us don’t value or understand, and that brings a similar alienation. For instance, in the grief panel one of the speakers remarked that mourning a beloved pet doesn’t compare to how she felt losing her husband or son. I disagree — and don’t think anyone else has the ability or right to decide how deeply we are affected by a loss. I’m just sorry she wasn’t able to receive comfort from someone who tried to share her mourning by mentioning a loss of hir own.
I know people who have found serious solace with specialized online grief groups at support networks. You can go there and talk about your parakeet and post pictures and bad poetry as much as you want, and there will be other people who understand and share your pain. We shouldn’t have to apologize for loving something we’ve lost.
I remember traveling hundreds of miles with my mother to go to her father’s funeral. I cried as we left the church and had tears running down my cheeks. Mother sharply reprimanded me and asked why I was crying. It was her dad that died. I told her I was crying because she lost her daddy. The current idea that we should be happy the loved one has gone to heaven seems a little premature to me. It may be selfish, but I cry at funerals because I will miss them.
glitrbug, I don’t see how being honest about our feelings is selfish.
I believe firmly that most funerary customs, including funerals and memorial services, are for the living, are part of our grief process, and therefore are an expression not just of our values and beliefs but of our grief, of our feelings of loss.
I’m a clergy person, and I work with people in a wide range of cultural and religious traditions. I know that many traditions hold that funerals, memorials, and other funerary customs are actually about helping the dead cross over, about helping their journey to the other side. That may be; I don’t pretend to know. But I think we are being dishonest when we pretend it’s all about the dead and not also about those still living. After all, they are dead, even if their spirits still hang around for a little while; we are still living, and grief is a process, a natural process, that takes its own time.
Anastasia, thanks for the resources. I was just reading a CaringBridge entry last night from a dear F/friend whose wife just died, and who is needing something like a grief support group, and lives in a somewhat isolated location.
Another interesting resource:
I just heard today about GRIEFGIRLFRIEND a new site for grief education and “for those who do not understand the grief expressed by others”.