Grief the Shadow

I wrote a poem recently about returning to my job one week after losing my son. The poem draws on draws on what I remember of that day nine years ago, of walking back into a classroom after being away for a week, and standing before a silent class and not knowing what to say.

I’d post the poem here, but I’m still working on it.

What I remember vividly from that day is that to get to that class, I had to walk down a hallway past shelves of books of sociology that were part of what the university was then calling its “Strength Finders Institute,” which was well-funded and dedicated to doing research on helping students, faculty, and the larger community to work from their strengths.

That hallway, with shelves of books and ink drawn images on the walls of the founders, is not in my poem. In the current draft, I’ve mainly tried to evoke that place through other images that capture the sunlight, cleanliness, and emptiness of it, and of the persona of the poem trying on the mask of normalcy for the first time after trauma.

As I’ve noted already, I returned to class and stood in front of a silent room frozen in a quiet confrontation. There seemed an impasse over which view of the world was going to be considered normal during that period. Almost immediately, to get through the morning, I found myself assuming a mask that allowed me to begin to address their concerns.

The class went on as though nothing had ever happened to my son.

That doesn’t mean that it went well. It means that I let their version of what was normal pass. I could have wished for something else. But I was now back to work.

In the poem, I’m currently capturing all this in the line “No one asked about the abyss.”

This was the first of what would be many mornings of assuming a mask, of discovering that whenever I worked, or whenever I went anywhere socially, I was going to have to wear the mask. I discovered that this is the face everyone assumes. It’s just the necessary shorthand, the act made every morning to pledge to keep things simple.

Many people, maybe most people, face varying kinds of grief.

The poem I wrote about that day ends with the persona of the poem leaving the mask at the teacher’s desk, walking out of the room, and finding that the mask he wore for the class follows him out of the classroom and into his day.

It’s not a poem of realism. No mask literally followed me. What I literally do remember most from that morning came when, walking out of that classroom with my books and, with the sound of the door closing on the room, my whole body dropped the mask of professor and assumed the weight of the grieving father of a suicide. I had successfully worn a mask, even almost forgot I was wearing it, and now the mask was off.

From that point on, I began to discover that I was assuming a certain dualism. I inhabited parallel tracks, one the rail of the grief I was facing, and the other the mask—which after a year I began to wear with some sincerity.

The image in the poem of the mask following the speaker may read a little bit like a move in a horror movie. But it also seems, in a strange way, to be an image with a bit of hope in it.

******************

A little over two years after my son Michael took his life, my daughter Rachel got married. One of the songs she chose to include in her wedding ceremony was a Judy Collins cover of “In My Life,” an old John Lennon song.

Though I didn’t tear up at the time, I sometimes tear up now when I think about it.

I didn’t see it nine years ago, but today I suspect that the song, popular and even as general as it is in its statement, gave her language for what she was thinking and feeling. It has taken me nine years to get to the place of understanding this, and where I think she was after two and a half years.

I think that artistic expression is a major way of helping us to clarify and come to terms with grief. In the first year of my loss, too many people tried to give me theology. But I think that in the first few years of grieving a loss, music, art, literature, more than theology, provide us with a way of inhabiting and then moving through grief.

I know that my daughter and her spouse had conflicted feelings. They were excited to get married, but they were also facing a lot of grief over losing her brother.

The problem, especially for survivors of suicide, is that we do go on living. And we too often feel we are leaving our loved one behind. As Sloane Crosley puts it in her book Grief is for People, “By living, I am, by default, leaving him.”

“In My Life” captures the rare vision of the place where we continue to live and enter new relationships, and we can also keep those we’ve lost with us in some way.

I should add that I grew up with the John Lennon song. I first heard it while listening to the Capital Records version of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album in my cousins’ basement one summer in the late 1960s. I even learned how to play it on an acoustic guitar. But also, because I had heard the song so many times in so many different contexts over many decades, I think I had stopped hearing it. At least I didn’t really hear it until Rachel had it as part of her wedding. In that context, it is, without being at all specific, a song about grief.

There is a turning point that happens in most grief. Perhaps there have to be several turning points. There is no time line by which to predict them. But “In My Life” captures the moment when someone decides to go on and live a life that will honor those she’s lost. I wish I could quote actual lines from the song, but I would have to get permission first, and that is usually costly. Besides, I’ll bet it’s still popular enough that most of us will be able to recall it.

**********

At the end of her grief memoir, Sloan Crosley addresses her best friend and former boss at a publishing house who took his own life in 2019:

I still want to know where everything I loved has gone and why. Perhaps if I knew more about God, I would know it’s blasphemous to want answers, and perhaps if I knew more about philosophy, I would know it’s foolish to suggest there are answers. Maybe one day, in a world that looks reasonably enough like this one, you’ll tell me. But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life. If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living.

I must learn to accept that we are not the same.

My grief for you will always remain unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it. (191)

This passage, coming at the end of the narrative, shows the honest turning point in Crosley’s grief, the point where she turns from her questions, most of them not answered, and still feels the spread and run of her grief throughout everything around her. And yet she also begins to live “on the side of the living.” I’m not sure if this is language that comes from the stage of grief we usually call acceptance. It seems as close as I am able to come.

But for Crosley, this turning point does not seem to be faked.

There are different kinds of grief. My daughter, at 28, was ready after two years of grieving for her brother, to begin carrying his memory forward into the life she was choosing. Nine years later, as the father, I still may not be ready, though I see the emotional contours of such a move.

I’m also almost at the seven month mark after losing my wife. At the same time that I am trying to learn to live alone, something I never expected to have to do, I’m also grieving for two people, though much of that grief is leading me into new understandings about them that I lacked before. Some of it is still me missing things my wife and I used to do, even things like taking her to doctor appointments. I got used to doing that as a form of hope. It certainly was preferable to the empty apartment today.

I’m a pretty slow learner. I’m still not in a place of getting rid of my wife’s clothes or her belongings. I did move her rolling walker to one of the closets. But I still haven’t moved her shampoos and conditioners and hair products from their place in the bathroom. It’s as though she is going to come home soon.

*********

I don’t think we should avoid any of this. The best way is to go through it.

I’m not anyone to state what the norms are today, but it does seem to me that grief is something that everyone faces. But it also seems that it is not something anyone wants to share. The way I have put it in the most recent draft of the grief memoir I’m currently finishing is this: Before we lost Michael, I lived on a plane of positive thinking. Most of my religious values and reigning philosophy about being positive fed into and supported that. But this was also a kind of optimism that could prevent me from seeing what other people were really carrying. It prevented me from really helping my son. And when I did get a glimpse of his pain, it was too late. Before that, I was busy with my tendency to urge him to get on board with the positive program.

Grief is our shadow. We wear the mask. The mask is the norm.

Sometimes, it can begin to inform us of some other day not yet here. We don’t have to accept it yet.

******************

Friends, I hope you have a great month as you make the turn from summer into the fall. May our fortunes change for the better.