The Screen Behind the Story in the House of Grief

By Erik Thompson

One fall not long ago I joined a group of family systems colleagues from around the country at our first in-person, weeklong Transcendental Meditation retreat at a spa in Iowa. From about the second day, my mind settled down. I experienced the streaming silence that has become second nature to me. But I felt the most notable result during the week that followed, which I spent in Boston with my grieving younger brother and his family.

My sister-in-law had just passed. Ten days of sad yet precious grieving and funeral planning were interspersed with long talks with my brother, my niece, and my niece’s boyfriend in the light-filled house my sister-in-law had renovated. The rich simplicity of her sense of design supported us even as her absence was palpable. We touched the curtains and pillows she had crafted at her cluttered sewing table in the living room, where abandoned scraps of lush fabric lay scattered, pieces of a tapestry forever unfinished.

My sister-in-law was born in 1960 to working-class parents, part of a close-knit family in a small Boston suburb. On the way home from elementary school, she would often stop at her grandparents’ house for cookies. When she grew up, she bought a home a short walk up the hill from the humble split-level where she had shared a tiny room with her sister. When her parents passed away, a favorite cousin of hers bought their house. Her brother’s and sister’s homes are a few blocks away.

After her marriage to my brother in 1996, my sister-in-law often seemed uncomfortable in our geographically scattered family of psychotherapists, and the three of us siblings who were children of divorce. For all involved, it could be an itchy connection, adding distance to the already wide orbit my brother has occupied in the solar system of our family since he was a teenager. As the family scholar Peg Donley has noted, evolution has shaped a husband’s primary dependency to tend toward his wife, whereas the wife’s tends toward her children. I once asked my brother’s old friend how he viewed my brother’s marriage. “She is his bride,” was his reply. He was right.

Charged by my Bowen mentors to function as a family leader, I made efforts to meet her on her own turf over the years. I developed relationships with her parents even though my brother told me I would be embarrassing myself if I dropped by to visit them. My heart was in my throat as I pulled into their driveway unannounced, but I kept going, and they welcomed me inside with tea. Her Irish father was disabled by then and seemed to enjoy sitting with me for half an hour. I made the drive from Vermont to attend their funerals. When my sister-in-law began her own decades-long struggle with serious health issues, her strong sense of privacy tightened her circle.

But my years of trying to build connection helped me hold fast to an image of the generous and relaxed sister-in-law I had encountered in her own territory. And it softened another image that sometimes invaded my mind, of someone who had once pushed against my wife in a way I found hard to take.

My slow but steady efforts paid dividends when my sister-in-law died. My parents and siblings knew I was the one who should go and stay with the family. My brother wanted me there.

During these days there were tears when my brother got loving texts from his tennis pals and lots of stupid jokes from me. As I took care of the flowers that poured in daily, we recalled our florist grandmother, whom he was named after. I kept people fed, too, insisting that my exhausted brother have lunch. I cleaned up the basement after the plumbing explosion that resulted from my brother’s accidentally flushing wipes during his weeks of round-the-clock care for his wife. You should have heard the gorilla cry that rose from the basement when my brother discovered dirty water pouring from a pipe two days after his wife’s death—and the self-deprecating humor in his sigh when the plumber diagnosed the cause.

I reminded him how skilled he was at giving speeches and was the first to read the draft of his eulogy. After asking me to review it, he left the house to go shopping. He didn’t want to see my face as I read it, but he let me serve as his copy editor in the following days as he polished it. He practiced it aloud with me seven times. “Slow down,” I advised. “Let them savor this.”

All week I asked him, “What do you want to do now?” We played pickleball, took fast walks, raked leaves, and watched the Celtics with my niece’s equally NBA-obsessed boyfriend of three years. I made sweet tea for my sweet niece. I asked my brother questions to help him think through some in-law politics. He let me teach him a bit of yoga.

I will always remember hearing him stir at 5 o’clock each morning. I kept him company while he made his coffee, to talk for as long as he wanted before I meditated. Sometimes we talked for two hours.

In the process of deciding to leave our retreat experiment, traveling to Boston, and taking care of my brother’s family in the days that followed, I felt an unmistakably expanded sense of personal flow.

In the ancient Indian meditation tradition that TM emerges from, the term smooth is often used to describe progress in human development, when an orderly inner stillness starts to infuse the waking mind. I found myself using this word, smooth, whenever my wife and I checked in by phone while I was with my brother.

What was I describing? It was, like that of my sister-in-law, another distinct absence. But this was an absence of friction in my mind. This smoothness was as thick and all-encompassing as the mist that hung in the morning air, yet it lasted longer. Rather than appearing in momentary glimmers as it used to, after the retreat the mental smoothness seemed to stretch for hours.

Where was it located? It was within. Smooth was the lens through which I looked at the grieving world. And by some intimacy between what we see and how we see it, smoothness was without as well. Smoothed were the falling yellow leaves, the face of a grieving elderly neighbor, the testy group decisions, and tearful mourning. Smoothed was my nervous fear of change.

In the Bowen wisdom tradition, the word presence has a special place. We speak of being “present and accounted for during key family transitions.” We speak of “simply being present” as more helpful than giving anxious advice. We speak of the ability of presence to infuse strength into the systemic relational field. The retreat honed my ability to live these principles, enriched by this smoothness.

Perhaps the most notable example of this newfound capacity was in my relationship with my niece’s shy boyfriend. Just as I had wanted to become closer to my sister-in-law, I was also determined to know my brother’s daughter as well as I do my other nieces and nephews. Multigenerational connectedness is another practice of Bowen theory. It predicts diminished risk of serious symptoms in future generations.

Each day I stayed in my brother’s house, the young man opened to me a bit more, and by day five we were friends. He talked about his favorite colleagues, shared his careful politics, and laughed with me in a way my brother said he hadn’t seen before. I wondered if our time together augmented his confidence in a potential future union with my niece. They are coming to visit us in January for the first time as a couple.

When I look at the impact the Vermont Center for Family Studies’ meditation retreat had on how I related to my family system when it was under pressure, I am convinced that we have found an efficient pathway to differentiation of self. Even the moments when I was called on to be authoritative were strengthened, as when I quietly informed an occasionally intimidating family member that I could not reassure him about the timing of post-funeral gatherings.

THE SCREEN BEHIND THE STORY IN THE HOUSE OF GRIEF

As I tried to shape this immaterial smoothness into words, the metaphor of a movie screen satisfied me. The unmoving screen is part of every movie. Yet it is flat and colorless. It has no story and every story. It has no character and every character. It has no setting yet is there, on time, at every location. It shimmers diamond white. Its corners are precise, a geometric abstraction behind our flickering story frames.

The screen wins no Oscars. It gets no reviews, has no promotional budget, is absent from the cast list. Plainly visible before the projector rolls, it makes moviegoers impatient for the coming attractions.

Lost in the show, we forget our silent screen. The screen of consciousness itself is silent, transcendental. There has never been a show without it, nor will there ever be. It unifies all dramas. During the practice of silence, we come to better know our screen as the differentiated, universal self. As we learn to rest there, our storyline briefly disappears. In rushes the peace of differentiation from our story. We discover our vastness. We are not our endless cliffhangers. As it intrigues us more and more, the fullness of our screen awakens. It glistens even during grief.