Grief: Longing for the Lost One

As a child you think death is so strange. You anticipate that when it comes, it will be accompanied by major drama. Yet so often death arrives with uncanny quiet. It steals into a room and leaves an awful silence. A loved one is gone. The first time that death takes someone close to you, it breaks your innocence and your natural trust in life. It is strange to lose someone to death. The shock should paralyse you, but the disturbing quiet somehow makes everything sufficiently unreal, and the force of the loss is dissipated. Unlikely as it may sound, though death has indeed occurred and you were there, you do not truly know yet that your friend has died. You go through the funeral days, their drama and sympathy buoyed up by the certainty and shelter of rhythm which this whole ritual provides. It is only later, when the new silence gathers around your life, that you realize your awful loss. You have been thrown out of the shelter of a belonging where your heart was at home.

The time of grief is awkward, edgy, and lonesome. At first, you feel that it is totally unreal. With the belonging severed, you feel numbed. When you love someone, you are no longer single. You are more than yourself. It is as if many of your nerve lines now extend outside your body towards the beloved, and theirs reach towards you. You have made living bridges to each other and changed the normal distance that usually separates us. When you lose someone, you lose a part of yourself that you loved, because when you love, it is the part of you that you love most that always loves the other.

Grief is at its most acute at death. There is also a whole unacknowledged grief that accompanies the breakup of a relationship. This indeed can often be worse than death, at least initially, because the person is still around and possibly with someone else. The other is cut off from you.

Grief is the experience of finding yourself standing alone in the vacant space with all this torn emotional tissue protruding. In the rhythm of grieving, you learn to gather your given heart back to yourself again. This sore gathering takes time. You need great patience with your slow heart. It takes the heart a long time to unlearn and transfer its old affections. This is a time when you have to swim against the tide of your life. It seems for a while that you are advancing, then the desolation and confusion pull you down, and when you surface again, you seem to be even further from the shore. It is slow making your way back on your own. You feel so many conflicting things. You are angry one minute; the next moment you are just so sad. After a death there are people around you, yet you feel utterly isolated: no one else has the foggiest notion of your loss. No one had what you had, therefore, no one else had lost it. Yet when friends try gently to accompany you, you find yourself pulling back from them, too. In a remarkable collection of modern elegies to mourn the loss of his wife, the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn ends his poem “The Clear Day” with this verse:

I shall sieve through our twenty years, until

I almost reach the sob in the intellect,

The truth that waits for me with its loud grief,

Sensible, commonplace, beyond understanding.

Because your loss is so sore, something within you expects the world to understand. You were singled out. Now you are on your own. Yet life goes on. That makes you angry: sometimes, you look around at your family or the others who have been hit by this loss; it does not seem to have hurt them as much. But you remember that behind the façade they are heartbroken too. You have never experienced anything like this. During grief, the outer landscape of your life is in the grip of a grey weather; every presence feels ghostly. You are out of reach. You have gone way into yourself. Your soul lingers around that inner temple which is empty now save for the sad echo of loss.