My records show that I saw Alice P. for a consultation in June 1988. She began our meeting by telling me, ‘I haven’t felt myself for years. I don’t know how to pull myself out of it.’ She told me a little bit about her family. She and her husband wanted to give their two daughters a good start, and ‘the girls’ had done well – this year, their younger daughter would get her degree in medicine from Oxford. Towards the end of the consultation, Alice sat forward in her chair. She told me that nineteen years earlier, their third child, Jack, had died unexpectedly. He was three months old. ‘It was a Friday – the 27th of June, 1969 – just after lunch. I fed Jack and put him down for his nap. When I came back he was dead.’
I listened as Alice then described a passage from C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, in which Lewis fears that, bit by bit, he is losing the memory of his dead wife: ‘like snowflakes settling down on his memory of her until her real shape is hidden, is how Lewis puts it. It’s not like that for me,’ Alice said, ‘I remember everything about Jack – the smell of his skin, his smile, everything.’
Keeping absolutely still she said, ‘A couple of days ago I was in the kitchen making breakfast, listening to the radio, and there was that dreadful news story about those kids that got killed in a boating accident. I thought – “Jack’s safe from drowning.” I think like that: Jack’s safe from drunk drivers. Jack won’t ever get cancer or have a heart attack – my baby’s safe. That’s crazy. I shouldn’t be thinking like that.’
Six months ago, Edmund K. asked to see me for a consultation. At twenty-nine, Edmund was already the director of an international humanitarian aid organisation. During the previous five years, he had visited over thirty countries, supervising relief work in Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq. He had been on antidepressants since the age of nineteen, when his father committed suicide. ‘I shouldn’t have to be on antidepressants,’ he said to me. ‘But every time I start to come off them, I find myself back where I was when I was nineteen – angry with my dad for killing himself. It’s so stupid. I should’ve had closure on this thing years ago.’
Alice P. and Edmund K. are grieving, each in their own way. What they have in common is this: they suffer more because they’re stuck on the idea of closure.
They suffer more because they both expect to make progress, to move through certain stages of grief. And when they don’t, they feel that they are doing something wrong, or, more precisely, that there is something wrong with them. They suffer twice – first from grief and then from a tyranny of shoulds: ‘I should have pulled myself out of this,’ ‘I shouldn’t be so angry,’ ‘I should have moved on by now,’ and so forth. There is little room here for emotional exploration or understanding. This way of being leads to self-loathing, despair, depression.
The notion of closure – of having finished with grief – almost certainly has its roots in the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In the 1960s Kübler-Ross identified five psychological stages in the experience of terminally ill patients, the last of which is acceptance. About twenty-five years ago, Kübler-Ross and many bereavement counsellors began to use these same five stages to describe the experiences of both the dying and the grieving.
I’ve long thought that Kübler-Ross was wrong. The ‘psychological stages’ of dying and grieving are wholly different. For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person who grieves. The person who mourns goes on living and for as long as he lives there is always the possibility of feeling grief.
Each of us mourns differently, but in general the initial shock and fear triggered by a death does diminish with time. Through the work of mourning, we gradually feel better, though some heartache remains. Holidays and anniversaries are notoriously difficult. Grief can ebb and then, without warning, resurge. The loss of a child, a loss through suicide – these losses, and many others, can and do cause enduring sorrow.
Nonetheless, closure is what the counselling trade tends to promise. ‘Grief Lit’ – a burgeoning sub-genre of ‘Recovery Lit’ – offers these recent titles: In the Presence of Grief: Helping Family Members Resolve Death, Dying, and Bereavement Issues; Grief Steps: Steps to Regroup, Rebuild and Renew After Any Life Loss; and The Grief Recovery Handbook. This last book is Amazon-recommended: ‘As a grief facilitator, this is my one and only text for my participants. It is wonderful!’ reads one comment, and, ‘Add this book to your grief toolbox!’ You get the picture: your grief is something that can be fixed. You can recover. You can have closure.
My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us – even years after our loss.
On Friday 15 November 2008, a brush fire swept through the hills and canyons above Montecito, California, injuring more than two dozen people and destroying 210 homes. One of those homes belonged to my sister. Though unhurt, she and her husband lost everything but the clothes they were wearing.
A month after the fire, when we were speaking on the phone, my sister told me about the way that the community had pulled together – restaurants were donating free meals to those who’d lost something in the fire. She described the process of getting federal aid, the various loans available, and told me how helpful a government employee had been with her application.
I told my sister that I admired her pragmatism, her ability to pick herself up and get on with things.
Then she told me that she’d been to see a clairvoyant.
I was surprised by this, but still more by my own reaction. When my sister told me that she’d talked to our mother – who has been dead for more than twenty years – I became tearful and heard myself ask her, ‘What did Mom say?’
After we had finished our phone call I had the thought that we turn to clairvoyance when we need our dead and can’t accept death’s finality. We want to believe that the clairvoyant can bring our dead back into the world of the living. Closure is just as delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.