LBmuskoka
Grieving - A Recommended Read
Posted on: 11/14/2010 10:39
For all who have lost someone....
I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
It was one of the best books I have ever read about the aftermath of dealing with loss - now this woman had a double whammy, the illness of daughter and death of husband, both within a week, to contend with but she addresses that in the book; it doesn't matter the degree, loss is loss.
She captures that feeling of losing one's sense of balance. The fog that descends and the automation that assumes control....
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.
Near the end, she talks about "self pity" - the feeling that one is indulging in their grief and how this is a construct of how we are all raised incorporating our primal fear of death and how this attitude places an added burden on the grieving. She does not view the indulgence as wrong or, frankly, even an indulgence - which for me is what made the book special.
She writes too of getting pulled into the "vortex" - those memory triggers that send one back in time and make reality painful with the absence. In the beginning these vortexes are painful because of the freshness of the realization the person will not return.
I could relate to those vortexes. They still happen to me 20 years later, but I can also say that, for me, the pain, still present, is softened with the realization that I have not forgotten. It is this realization that makes grief easier, because I believe that one of our greatest fears, the ultimate fear of death, is that we will become forgotten.
I highly recommend this book for anyone dealing with grief, either present or past, or for anyone who knows someone going through this process - which I suspect is all of us.
LB
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
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busymom
Thanks for this
Posted on: 11/14/2010 11:57
Thanks for this recommendation LB. I've just placed a hold for this book at the local public library. Looking forward to reading it.
somegirl
I'll have to look this book
Posted on: 11/14/2010 12:16
I'll have to look this book up at the library.
The OP was a vortex for me. One hinderance to my grief was the death of my aunt five months after my mom died. We could talk about my mom together and cry over her being gone. Now they are both gone and I feel like I don't have a connection with my mom in this world. Something that helps is my husband who lost his father when he was 12. He assures me that although he thinks about his father every day, and although sometimes it hurts, he mostly gets comfort from thoughts of his father.
carolla
Ah yes ... I read this book
Posted on: 11/14/2010 13:54
Ah yes ... I read this book many years ago lb - thanks for the reminder. It was an excellent book - so much to contemplate on that grief journey.
Pilgrims Progress
Joan Didion's book was
Posted on: 11/14/2010 15:55
Joan Didion's book was recommended to me not long after John died.
I had to lay it aside - it was ironically too well-written, my grief too raw.
But in the New year I will return to it, time does get us into a more accepting place.
In a sense grief is like falling in love, surreal - a kind of madness.
All you know is that you've been catapulted into a different world, a world where you've lost your sense of self, just as surely as you've lost the other.
I hadn't been prepared for the anger - sudden fits of rage over inappropriate concerns and with inappropriate people.
A case in point was an elderly neighbour.
John died five days before my birthday. She rang me, saying she'd arranged for me to have a massage.
It was a thoughtful gesture. The masseur prattled on - I lay there in a daze as she placed these hot rocks on my back.
Then a strange thing happened. I began to take a strange dislike to this poor neighbour.
She kept bringing me soup and cassseroles - I rudely told her I didn't need her to cook for me.
Put simply, she became a focus for my anger at the loss of John.
With hindsight, I can see that it was her very kindness that in some strange way was too painful for me to accept.
Needing a focus for our rage at loss seems to be a feature in my extended family. When my cousin's Dad died my cousin was furious with the hospital - and wanted to sue them.
LB, you mention that one of our greatest fears is that in death we'll be forgotten.
I think there is another fear - a fear that relates to losing a loved one.
I have a framed photo of John in my living room.
When I'm troubled, I "talk" to that photo. Should I do this - should I do that?
But will there come a time when John in the photo becomes more "real" than the man?
(My best friend's mother died when she was only six. To her, her mother is that photo.)
But I don't think this will happen.
I adored my Nana, who died when I was in my thirties. When I gaze at her photo her image is a key that unlocks a treasure trobe of memories.
The love hasn't become a thing of the past - it's part of me.
For me, it's this very knowledge that frees me to become a part of the here and now and enjoy what life has to offer.
trishcuit
When I lost my second baby
Posted on: 11/14/2010 16:05
When I lost my second baby and was in hospital having just delivered her, I had a book that came to me for free from a Billy Graham offer. It was called "The Up Side of Down". It really helped me. Talk about God's timing.
trishcuit
That does sound like a great
Posted on: 11/14/2010 16:07
That does sound like a great book LB. I will keep an eye out for it.
LBmuskoka
Pilgrims Progress wrote: Joan
Posted on: 11/15/2010 06:48
Joan Didion's book was recommended to me not long after John died.
I had to lay it aside - it was ironically too well-written, my grief too raw.
But in the New year I will return to it, time does get us into a more accepting place.
I can understand that. In fact, I think that is what Didion is writing about - that that first year one shouldn't do anything more than grieve and mourn, that one is incapable of doing anything more.
It is why I think the book is not just for those who have lost someone but for those who have not. Modern society is in such a rush. We seem compelled to "get things done" and "move on", without knowing where or why - in the restaurant trade we used to call it the "hurry up and relax" syndrome.
Past generations understood grief could not be rushed. It needs time and it needs to be expressed. Perhaps we no longer need Victorian black and memento moria but we have not replaced those expressions with anything concrete that gives solace to the survivor over the duration of that year or more where the mind and the body operate under a law of their own.
For those who have lost someone, the books does give solace that you are not alone in the madness which I believe is the result of the significant component of grief; that feeling of being abandoned. The more people demand that you "move on", the more your mind rebels. The question that those other people never answer, the answer the survivor is really seeking, is "move on to where?"
Didion doesn't answer that question either because she recognizes that each of us is moving to our own destinations. What she does, is let you know you are not alone...
LB
People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.....These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
busymom
I picked this book up last
Posted on: 11/16/2010 19:11
I picked this book up last night at the library LBMuskoka and I'm having a hard time putting it down. Thanks for pointing me in this direction. I am finding it very helpful, and as soon as I'm done with it (which could be tomorrow at this rate!) I am giving it to my mom. Thanks again.
SG
My dad died when I was just
Posted on: 11/16/2010 20:41
My dad died when I was just starting school, almost 40 years ago. In some ways, it is like it never happened, like he never happened. (except the PTSD). What I mean is, he was only in 1/10th of my life. I have spent more time without him than with him. He exists not so much in memories as he does in a photograph.
Yet, I remember his smile and laugh- the way he sang Good Morning Starshine and me helping in the nonsense chorus and us laughing, the feel of his five o'clock shadow, the appearance of his overalls and that he smelled of apple cider and sang. I smell apples being peeled and am there, sitting with him. So, in other ways, it is yesterday, like he never left.
I remember thinking people expected me to forget him and me thinking "how rude /cruel/unloving....?" It felt like betrayal or that he never mattered. The urge they offered to move on, made me think "to what?". They wanted me to get on with it, meaning life. But, he was in all of the IT I had planned for my whole life. He was in my thoughts of coming to school plays, a first car, of falling in love, of walking me down an aisle.... Some offered the comfort that I had a "new" dad, like he replaced he dead one. Like the one I had was a standard model and there were tons on a shelf someplace. Again, like betrayal and that he never mattered. I needed to mourn to show he mattered, to mark his place and know that space could never be completely filled because it was his.
I kept wondering my whole life how people just moved on, beyond, past... I was surrounded by death (mom caring for elderly in our home). Grief did not consume us, but it was expected. It was expected to be expressed, not bottled. I came from a culture of wailing and ripping clothing and sitting shiva. It was expected to last for a year at least and then last until it no longer lasted. People were parts of our lives, they mattered, we cared... and it was ok to mourn, grieve, be angry, rail against God... It was ok to have it rush back because we heard a song, smelled a smell, marked a date, or just because it did....
Do we not value life and thus death as much as when people died of influenzas and all that all around us?
Are we to used to tv dinners, minute rice, microwave popcorn...and think everything should be quick, without effort and painless?
I don't know.