ON THE RIGHT PATH
When I turned away from the stages and grief-work theories and toward the narrative of grief, it felt as if I were practicing on a cultural and professional island. The only affirmation for my new way came from my clients, as I watched them shed their shame, which opened them to tears of love. Where once I referred grieving people to orderly models as a map for their loss journey, now I walked with them as I waited for outside confirmation that we were on the right path.
That confirmation came in the late 1980s, when I was creating a training program for volunteer facilitators at The WARM (What About Remembering Me) Place, a local center for bereaved children and their families. While gathering teaching material, I remembered a film I had seen several years before. Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980) was about a family torn apart by traumatic loss. As I watched it again after so many years, it felt like one of those “hidden in plain sight” experiences. My evolution as a therapist from stages to story could not have been more powerfully validated.
Rarely, in my experience, has art so faithfully portrayed real life. The movie lays utterly bare so many realities of grieving, such as how a husband and wife typically grieve so differently and the stress that the difference puts on a marriage. The crippling anguish of survivor’s guilt is another.
The tragedy is a sailing accident involving two teenage brothers, Buck and Conrad, who are caught in a sudden storm. When their boat overturns, Buck slips from Conrad’s grasp and drowns.
Timothy Hutton played the role of Conrad, who is consumed with feelings of self-blame and guilt to the extent that he attempts suicide. This attempt is what lands him in the office of his therapist, Dr. Berger, played by Judd Hirsch.
What most resonated with me in the movie was the relationship between Dr. Berger and Conrad. After much sparring between the two, the therapist’s office becomes a safe place for his client. Conrad’s story of loss and his profound guilt eventually come pouring out during one of their sessions.
“I’m scared,” the boy says, starting to quietly weep.
“Feelings are scary,” Dr. Berger says. “Sometimes they’re painful. And if you can’t feel pain, you’re not going to feel anything else, either. You hear what I’m saying. You’re here. You’re alive. And don’t tell me you don’t feel that.”
In the next scene, the light is back in Conrad’s eyes. It was a light I recognized, one that I had seen so many times myself, when my clients felt safe enough to discard their self-judgment and simply tell their stories of loss. The fictional therapist in Ordinary People made no mention of theories, steps, or stages. He attempted instead to reach this young man through his presence, his ability to listen and create a safe place for Conrad’s true story to emerge.
Ordinary People went far to assure me, to remove any lingering doubts about whether I was on the right path with my clients. I continue to recommend it to them. I’ve used the film to teach hundreds of volunteers at The WARM Place, stressing the importance of a caring person and of creating a place of safety for the suffering of another to be witnessed and received.
As a graduate student and young therapist, I conscientiously devoured the writings of giants of my field — from Freud to dozens of contemporary clinicians. I was always adding to my home library books about promising new theories that might help me alleviate the suffering of my grieving clients, as well as my own. But as the narrative of grief became more and more central to my practice, my reading habits changed as well. I was drawn to writers and poets who chose to explore, commemorate, and share their suffering through their craft.
I found authenticity there. The stories and poems were not written through the lens of what should be happening but what was happening. They were beautiful, soulful, and they seemed to cut to the core of the grief experience. These I also recommended to my clients.
I can only assume that Joan Didion, one of our most celebrated contemporary writers, was searching for meaning, not a bestseller, when she began to explore the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Nonetheless, she more or less created a new literary genre with her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of loss.
Few of us have Didion’s facility with the language, but all of us can learn from her honest, fearless, nonjudgmental self-observation:
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004. Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death . . . This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.1
She described the hours before and after her husband’s death in that telling, writerly detail. As they will in your story, those details, so mundane before, took on haunting significance.
I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat . . .
I finished getting dinner. I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat in sight of the fire . . .
John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.
John was talking, then he wasn’t . . .
I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless.2
She wrote about how, in the months to come, she could not give away some of her husband’s clothing, in the “magical” belief that he would someday return. She excavated favorite memories, like the time he read her a passage from one of her own novels. Their times apart when they racked up huge long-distance telephone bills. The short white silk dress she wore to their wedding. The navy blue suit he wore for the occasion.
And this: “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”3
Another book I recommend to my clients is Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye, a memoir about the death of her mother. O’Rourke, a critic and poet, began writing about her experience of loss in the early days after her mother’s death. Her narrative is from a poet’s heart and is completely devoid of clinical analysis.
In the weeks after my mother’s death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me right in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was — as the expression goes — flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience in the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I did not care much about work I had to do. I was consumed by memories of seemingly trivial things.4
O’Rourke and I agree on the ultimate reality of grief, though she expresses it more elegantly that I ever could.
I was thinking about how hard it was to say how much I missed my mother, yet how central the feeling was. It is heartsickness, like the sadness you feel after a breakup, but many times stronger and more desperate. I miss her: I want to talk to her, hear her voice, have a joke with her. I am willing for us to be “broken up” if she’ll just have dinner with me once. And as I was walking I thought: “I will carry this wound forever.” It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.5 (Italics added.)
Scott Simon, an award-winning journalist and host of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday, first told the story of his mother’s dying and death in a series of Twitter posts. The tweets, which went viral, were poignant, humorous, lyrical, and full of grace.
That moment-by-moment sharing on social media inspired not only much praise and support but also some criticism. In his memoir, Unforgettable, he explained why he had felt it was important to tell his story:
I hadn’t implied — and this was important to her — that my mother’s death was any kind of tragedy. She had lived a long full, and rewarding life, and then she died. I posted messages in which I confided some of my fears, and shared some of my mother’s sagacity and wit as we went through what is, after all, a universal experience.
My mother died and I mourned. That’s as much a part of life as love and taxes. Why be quiet about it? . . .
Life-changing experiences can transform and teach us and move us to share what we believe we’ve learned. We want to . . . place the face of someone we’ve loved and lost in the stars. We want people to know. It is an utterly human response, imperfect but invaluable.6
Finally, I’ve read and reread Edward Hirsch’s book-length poem, Gabriel, dozens of times, finding my own feelings and experience in it. Gabriel is the name of Hirsch’s dead son. The following passage always speaks to me:
I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night.
The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief
I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
Without an upward path
Because there is no path
There is only a blunt rock
With a river to fall into7
The words and stories of my clients, though perhaps less artfully told, were no less compelling.
Over the years, I’ve been gratified and delighted to discover a number of kindred spirits — professionals who share my belief in the importance and healing power of stories.
One is Dr. Candi Cann, a professor of world cultures and religions at Baylor University, who specializes in the study of death and human rituals of mourning. She is also the author of Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century.8 I was struck initially by a magazine essay in which she wrote that we tell our stories “as a way to piece together our narratives of bereavement and to remember those we love. Stories keep the dead in our lives, help make sense of their deaths, and communicate our losses to others. Narratives order lives in a timeline that we can recount and to which we can give meaning.”9
She was kind enough to elaborate in a recent conversation with my coauthor:
Part of what I’ve noticed about narrative-making is that the maker is creating their place with the dead, and putting that person in time, creating a place in history for them. I think that’s really important. They construct meaning. These timelines are a way of sorting through and sifting through everything, so we can say, “Here is the high point. Here is the purpose.” Some of it is artificial and very false, but some of it is valuable.10
Furthermore, she said, grief narratives push back against the dictates of a death-phobic society in which people no longer know how to mourn.
There needs to be a counternarrative to society’s overarching belief that we’re supposed to “get over” people we’ve lost. We’re supposed to stop grieving and move on . . . I just don’t agree with that. The grief story allows people to have a voice that society is trying to either ignore or silence.
Grief will make itself heard, no matter what. It may be in pathological ways, because it’s been suppressed for years. Grief storytelling is particularly important because when we embrace grief and these stories, we also embrace the fragility of life. These are things that our society, with the tempo of our times, encourages us to ignore.
Death is a part of life. This is the whole thing, an everyday part of life. I tell people that when you give birth to a child, you also give birth to them dying someday. We just have to accept that.11
I had heard of the narrative medicine movement for years, but it was not until my research for this book that I sought out its founder, Dr. Rita Charon. The author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, she is a kindred spirit, indeed.12
The daughter of a physician, Charon had also been a voracious reader as a child. When she began to practice medicine herself, as an internist at a clinic in an impoverished New York City neighborhood, she soon realized how her early passion for literature was also central to her life’s work as a medical healer. As she explained in a 2011 TEDxAtlanta talk,
What patients paid me to do was to pay exquisite attention to the narratives they gave me, which were in words, in silences, in those facial expressions, . . . in the tracings and pictures that we had of their body, in what other people said about them. And it was my task to cohere these stories, so they at least provisionally made some sense; to take these multiple, contradictory narratives and let them build something that we could act on. So that’s what we did.13
Inspired by her belief that she could better serve her patients by understanding stories and how they were told, Charon went on to earn a master’s degree and PhD in English literature from Columbia University. She then founded the narrative medicine program at Columbia’s medical school, which has been emulated in many others, and she lectures around the world on the topic.
What I learned, right from the beginning, was that persons were not only able but deeply thirsty to give profound, detailed, eloquent accounts of themselves. They didn’t always know how to start. One woman said, “You want me to talk?” Another man . . . started to tell me about the death of his father, and then the death of his brother, and then the trouble he was having with his teenage son. And then he starts to cry. I broke my silence, and I said, “Why do you weep?” He says, “No one ever let me do this before.”14
So how could the embrace of the story, the creativity, help grieving people? The question was put to Dr. Charon by my coauthor in a recent conversation.15 She responded by recalling a primary loss in her own life:
I could describe my father’s death with dates and times, what medicines he was on, who was with him when he died . . . That’s one way I could tell the story. I could also tell the story of my father’s death by starting with my very first memory of him, when I was a year and a half old and he was in the Army. He had me on his shoulder because we were at St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. That’s very different, isn’t it?
When I say creative writing, I mean writing for discovery. If I was not trying to write creatively, I might not have remembered this experience of being a year and a half old. I would not have known that was going to come to mind. And what comes to pen is not always what comes even to mind. People read what they have written, and they say, “I had no idea I was going to write that.” This is standard. That’s the kind of writing that would help people in grieving or anything else.
On that point, Dr. Charon and I certainly agree. She continued with her explanation:
In a way, [this kind of writing is] not really about grief; it’s about life, whether someone lost a loved one or not . . . It’s about experiencing one’s present and past deeply. I can see how it could be useful for grief, but I can imagine it could be useful for a lot of other things, like loneliness or feeling embittered or just plain old depression . . . Grief is just one of the potential applications.
The practice of listening to patient/client stories . . . is one of deepening that nurse or social worker or chaplain or physician, so that that person can see, can perceive, and then [can] appropriately respond to what the client or patient is going through.
According to Charon, this practice enlarges our “capacity to witness life.” She went on to explain, “Some of the doctors I train [in narrative medicine], I ask them afterward, ‘Has this changed your teaching? Has what you’ve learned changed your practice in pediatrics?’ One of them said, ‘Come on. This has made me a better father.’”
The examples of grief narratives in literature and film showed me not only that I was on the right track by encouraging my clients to tell their stories of grief, but also that telling these stories is a deeply human, instinctual need. The insights offered by Cann and Charon began to explain why. We are all, as Charon says, “deeply thirsty to give profound, detailed, eloquent accounts” of ourselves. Because few stories involve only a single “character,” our accounts of ourselves must naturally incorporate the other people in our lives, including those we have lost. Indeed, the story of loving and losing someone is a classic human story, as storytellers have been reminding us for centuries. Letting go of the idea of stages, grief work, and other psychological methods frees us to meet our grief in a way that I believe is organic, as well as truly valuable.