LECTURE 5
Donna Wyckoff-Wheeler
When Hansie asked me to do the Wednesday Night Live this week, I said, “Oh, Hansie, that’s not my area of expertise.” He simply handed me Mitchell and Anderson’s book All Our Losses; All Our Griefs and said, “You’ll think of something.”
So I did what I usually do when faced with such a challenge, I skimmed through the chapter before going to bed and then turned my imagination loose on the issues. So what you will get tonight is a combination of the material in Chapter 5 in Mitchell and Anderson’s book All Our Losses; All Our Griefs and some of the products of my imagination.
Let’s start with a review of a few of the basics we've learned in the past few weeks. First, the 6 major types of “loss” we have, or will be talking about:
Six Major Types of Loss
1. Material: loss of a physical object or of familiar surroundings to which one has an important attachment.
2. Relational: the ending of opportunities to relate oneself to, talk with, share experiences with, make love to, touch, settle issues with, fight with, and otherwise be in the emotional and/or physical presence of a particular other human being.
3. Intrapsychic: the experience of losing an emotionally important image of oneself, losing the possibilities of “what might have been," abandonment of plans for a particular future, the dying of a dream. Although often related to external experiences, it is itself an entirely inward experience.
4. Functional: loss of some of the muscular or neurological functions of the body; we call this functional loss.
5. Role: loss of a specific social role or of one's accustomed place in a social network is experienced as role loss.
6. Systemic: loss of an element within an interactional system in which (objects and) patterns of behaviour have interacted over time to create a meaningful, interdependent whole. Loss of an “element” disrupts the system as a “whole”. (adapted from Mitchell and Anderson)
And the variables that affect how we encounter and/or understand loss:
Variables
• Avoidable / unavoidable
• Temporary / permanent
• Actual / imagined
• Anticipated / unanticipated
• Leaving / being left
(adapted from Mitchell and Anderson)
In tonight’s talk, I’ll be wandering in and out of categories.
Chapter 5: The Characteristics of Grieving.
In the past few weeks we have been given a lot of very valuable theoretical information about loss and grieving.
In a writing course, I might explain to students that this approach has been essentially “telling” us about loss and grieving. This is a perfectly valid approach when writing non-fiction. But if we wanted to create a story – a narrative, a novel – that would demonstrate those concepts, we would need to do more “showing” than “telling”.
We could do this by creating a character, putting her or him into a situation of “loss,” and then having that character “embody” various aspect of grieving. We would show grieving through the character’s facial expressions, body stance, gestures, words spoken—and words not spoken, through actions and interactions with others, through hesitations, avoidances, and so on.
Our lives are, after all, not lived in theoretical abstractions. They are lived in our daily activities, and in the stories constructed out of the dynamics of our settings, events, and reactions to events as these are understood, filtered and shaped through our individual personalities.
On the other hand, even unique individual experiences have common elements. So I’ve decided to combine “telling” with “showing” for this presentation and to add a bit of my own theory around some that Mitchell and Anderson hint at but which I think could use more development. I’ll be using some personal experiences as well as some imagined ones as demonstrations.
First the definitions: (quoted and adapted from Mitchell and Anderson: All Our Losses; All Our Griefs)
Grief: the normal but bewildering cluster of ordinary human emotions arising in response to a significant loss intensified and complicated by the relationship to the person or the object lost.
There is no loss without grief. When there is significant loss, grief is the inevitable response.
Grieving, however, is not inevitable. It is possible to experience loss and not to grieve: to not acknowledge the loss and/or to not express the grief.
Notice that grief is a concept noun – a thing – no matter how abstractly we may discuss it.
Grieve is a verb – something we “do”. Grieving is a process, something that moves, has states of being, is engaged in, is shown through actions. One may choose to acknowledge the feelings that accompany loss – or not to acknowledge them; to express those feelings or not to express them.
And then a reminder of the “goals” of grieving:
Grieving is goal oriented: Grieving is a process moving toward a receding goal, a goal never fully reached; the relative "normality" of the process is judged by its effectiveness in helping the grieving person to approach that goal as closely as possible.
The goals of grieving include
• to recognize and live with the reality of the loss and the feelings occasioned by it.
• to enable a person to live a life relatively unencum¬bered by attachments to the person or thing lost;
• to remake emotional attachments
. . . attachments to the lost person or object are not entirely given up, but are sufficiently altered to permit the grieving person to admit the reality of the loss and then to live without constant reference to it.
The goal is not . . . to forget the lost object entirely, but to let that object or person "go" sufficiently to make new attachments and new investments in life.
Moving toward these goals can involve a variety of activities, and any activity that moves one in this direction is "normal" and is a “successful” move toward the overall goal of grieving. When the grieving process is inhibited, prevented or avoided, movement toward the goal is delayed or prevented and the grieving process will be “unsuccessful” and may be considered abnormal or unhealthy.
Systemic Loss is number 6 on Mitchell and Anderson’s list of types of loss. They define this type as: loss of an element within an interactional system in which (objects and) patterns of behaviour have interacted over time to create a meaningful, interdependent whole. Loss of an “element” disrupts the system as a “whole” (adapted from Mitchell and Anderson)
It is this type of grieving that I think Mitchell and Anderson short change in their discussion. And it is the one type for which they do not give a specifically worded definition. So my definition is compiled from their discussion and goes beyond what they suggest, because I think all loss is systemic. Every aspect of our lives is inter-connected to other aspects in multiple ways. Lose one piece and many others are affected.
Try losing your car keys some day. You can’t go to the store until you find the keys. You can’t bake the cake you promised to take to the church for the bake sale until you go to the store to get the milk and eggs you need to bake the cake. And then you said you’d pick up Sally on the way when you took the cake to the church, which you can’t do until . . . .
So maybe you should call Sally and warn her; maybe she can arrange another ride. No, Sally already thinks you are scatterbrained and not very reliable. So maybe you could call Mable and ask her to pick up Sally and then call Sally. Oh, but Sally and Mable don’t get along very well under the best of circumstances. And now the gardener wants to cut the grass and you can’t get to the lawnmower, which is in front of the car, until you back your car out of the garage which you can’t do until you find the keys . . . .
The relationship between the keys and being able to drive the car is linear, but the overall effect of losing the keys is scattershot. Losing the car keys affects other objects, actions, needs, promises, and one’s own sense of self (duty, reliability, competence — and perhaps sanity?).
The loss of the keys is suddenly consuming enormous amounts of your physical, emotional, intellectual, and psychological energy – energy which is now not available to you to use for other things.
Grieving – the process of dealing with loss – is affected by all this interconnectedness. I’ve decided to label this interconnectedness: Habits of association.
Habits of Association
Someone once told me that it takes 30 days to form a habit. Or that you had to do something the same way for the same reason 30 times before it becomes automatic behaviour. The “30 days” comes from the fact that much of our habitual behaviour is related to daily tasks and that the body needs time to assimilate the connection between a new action and the attention needed to accomplish it. We need to “sleep on it” a bit, and let the body and brain “relax” into a new pattern.
Until an action becomes a habit, you have to invest physical, mental, emotional, and psychosocial energy into completing the task. Once you establish a habit (a pattern), the action involved goes into a kind of behavioural “autopilot” — stimulus produces action: brain in neutral / body in motion. Or at least a kind of functional “cruise control” — you only have to engage part of your brain to get desired results.
And habits are not only physical actions. We have habits of thinking, of relating, or perceiving, of planning, of remembering, of thinking, of . . . the list goes on into just about every area and aspect of our lives.
The advantage of a habit is that it frees up enormous amounts of energy and attentiveness for other things. The problem arises when we have to unmake or remake a habit. And a loss in one area of our lives always requires us to unmake and remake habits in other parts of our lives – and not just of habits of behaviour but also habits of emotional responses, as well as other patterns of life that seem to be only tangentially related to the lost object.
The grieving process therefore involves all the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological energy we must expend to de-link from habitual associations, and to unmake and remake the habits of association we have developed over time with the lost object as well as with the emotional associations and social relationships we have had with and because of the lost object.
In fact, habits of association may be fundamental to understanding the process of grieving.
I’m going to use as an example a loss my husband Tom and I have suffered recently. Our 15 year old dog died about a month ago.
[Do not even think of running out and getting us a replacement!].
Tom had acquired the dog as a street mutt when it was about a year old. My acquaintance with Billy was less long; he came with the marriage – a “step-dog”. Billy was a South African dog but Tom had taken him back to Turkey with him after his first wife, Marie, died. Billy then returned to South Africa with us, ten years ago.
Since Billy died, we have been struck by how many ways the dog was, and still is, integral to patterns of both our conscious and unconscious behaviours.
1st level association: daily reminders
Billy always met us at the door when we came home. At first it seemed so strange that he didn’t. Though I can’t say I regretted – even once – not being met by his hysterical barking and enthusiastic jumping, or by having to re-lay all the mats he’d rolled into balls to keep himself amused, it did feel odd that he wasn’t there. Especially when I came home alone; his hysterical barking meant everything was alright inside the house.
It’s taken at least a month to break that habit of association – the expectation that opening the door = barking dog = being greeted by Billy. Thirty times of opening the door, expecting the dog to be there, and having that expectation not met. It has taken at least 30 days simply to break that original pattern, that unconscious habit of association.
Does it then take another 30 times of not being met to establish a habit of non-expectation? And will it be only after that we can begin yet another 30-day process of establishing a habit of non-association between dog and door: of making a new habit of opening the door that does not automatically call up the loss or even a reminder of the loss?
It’s not that we won’t think of Billy occasionally once such a habit is established, but the memory of the dog, or the emotions related to losing him, won’t – eventually – be automatically triggered simply by opening the door.
And we both commented that it seemed strange not to have Billy doing his “guilt trip” routine every time we started to eat anything. It didn’t matter what we were eating; he was sure he wanted some of it.
I was eating cookies with my coffee one afternoon and when I got about halfway through the second one, I realized I didn’t want it all. Why had I taken two to begin with? Oh, yeah, I’d always had to share with the dog. I still catch myself holding onto the last piece of a cookie and then realizing I don’t need to. And then feeling slightly guilty about eating it.
Since I am consciously aware of the feeling and the association, it becomes simply a poignant moment. If I were unaware of the connection, I could be on my way to forming a habit of association: cookie = not sharing with dog (loss) = guilt. Or simplified as “loss of dog = guilt” or potentially even loss = guilt.
And what if, while he was still alive, I used to resent having to give away part of my cookie to the dog: “Just once I’d like to eat a whole cookie without you racing up and demanding part of it”.
And now I have my wish? What then might I start to associate with the dog, the cookie, myself?
And what if I had, while he was alive, developed a habit of resentment connected to “giving in” to him every time he wanted something -- the same way I had to give into my little sister whenever she wanted something of mine; and habits of thinking “he isn’t even my dog anyway; I’m just the evil step-owner”; and habits of prejudice – I was a reluctant dog owner at best because I’m really a cat person? [And don’t get me a cat either; I’m allergic to them.]
And all these associations would have been mixed up with the feeling of spite I would sometimes have from eating the last piece (which I would then have felt guilty about) and the resentment of feeling guilty (then as well as every time I remembered him) and the anger that would result from feeling all these negative emotions.
And maybe the bottom line here is that I’m really angry at my mother for making me give in to my sister and I’m still resentful of my sister because “Mom always loved her best. “ And I just wish the memory of the dog would “go away and leave me alone” so that all these associated emotions would also go away and leave me alone.
But every time I ate cookie there it would all be again, even though most of the associations would not even part of my conscious awareness anymore. I would have formed a new habit of thinking and reacting which had combined with older, established, perhaps deeply buried ones.
And the truth of the matter would be that I never “had” to share my cookie with the dog. I could simply have said “no,” resisted the heavy sighs, and let him deal with his disappointment. I could have taken 2 cookies each time, eaten mine and fed him his in pieces. But instead I took two and “shared” – eat a piece/feed a piece – so that I never had a whole cookie to myself – because I “had” to share in order to be a “good person.” A pattern of thinking and self-perception I’d been forced to learn earlier in life.
Fortunately, my real relationships with the dog, my mother and my sister were/are not quite so negative. (Even though I am really a cat person, and Mom did love her best.)
But you can see how unrecognized habits of association – habits built in other times and places and with other people and objects – could get incorporated into the formation of new habits of association.
Problems of a new relationship may arise when conflicts within an old relationship re-habituate into the new.
One of the goals of grieving process then is
• to enable a person to live a life relatively unencum¬bered by attachments to the person or thing lost.
Without denying the loss or forgetting the attachment, we must de-link in some ways from the person, place or thing that was lost. Part of this means recognizing the “habits” of association we had with them so that we can engage with the persons, places and things in front of us now, “relatively unencumbered” by earlier habits of association and attachment. If we can do this, we can better enter into new patterns of association that are free of the “baggage” – good or bad – that were part of former attachments.
Carrying unrecognised and firmly entrenched habits of association from one location to another inhibits integration into a new community. Carrying firmly entrenched habits of association from one marriage into another is a recipe for disaster. Expecting a new dog to be just like the old one will probably lead to disappointment. And it’s not fair to the new dog either.
2nd level association: non-daily reminders of loss that throw us back, unexpectedly, into the loosing.
Shortly after Billy died, I noticed that both Tom and I were avoiding going down the pet food aisle when we went shopping. I recognised this as a particular kind of “defense mechanism” -- avoidance behaviour. It was an association we weren’t “dealing with.”
But, I figured we didn’t have to do everything at once. Sooner or later we’d walk past the dog food, and, yes, it would “call up” the grief, but if we waited a few weeks the pain of the loss might not be so strong before we started the 30 rounds of de-association between Billy, buying pet food, and our loss. The danger of course is that we might instead form a pattern of avoidance, a form of denying the loss and refusing to engage with the grieving process connected to this habit of association.
I wasn’t worried because I recognised what we were doing. But when I mentioned to Tom yesterday morning that I would include this behaviour in the talk, he began to tear up. The association was still strong enough to call up grief. But I had now named this connection he was avoiding, and having named it, he would no longer be able to deny or hide it from himself. But we will probably still both chose to not go down the pet food aisle for a couple more weeks.
But this raises another issue: If we only go shopping once a week and it takes 30 passes to de-link the pet food aisle from grief over loosing Billy . . . ? Just how long is a “month of Sundays”? Which means this association is going to trigger the loss a lot longer – in terms of actual time passing – than the front door. And since pet food is a unique type of link to him, in the way the generic front door is not, the association will not fade easily.
And if we don’t “process” the relationship between the pet food aisle and the dog, and continue to avoid it, consciously or unconsciously, we might one day forget to avoid it, and we could be suddenly blind-sided by the association and “thrown back into” the grief unexpectedly.
Mitchell and Anderson call this the “immoderation” shape of grieving: “feelings of grief are experienced as invading us suddenly, sometimes when we least expect them. An image or a memory strikes suddenly, opening the door to a flood of feelings that we suppress at our peril.” (89)
Associations that have not been de-habituated are likely to retain much of the emotional involvement of the original connection. We can be “thrown back into” profound grief years after the loss.
How long is a month of Sundays? How long does it take to experience 30 Christmases? Thirty birthdays? Thirty anniversaries of the loss? Thirty times of . . . . . ?
This is why Mitchell and Anderson say that grieving is spiral, not linear. We don’t just do it once and move on. We re-enter the grief – and the grieving – again and again. They describe the spiral as follows:
The spiral would begin at a low point representing the emotional "low" brought on by Loss, and would move circularly upward as the griever climbed out of the "pit." But from time to time the spiral would bring the mourner to a point directly above the beginning low point; that is a moment when many of the intense feelings would suddenly return. 91
As Mitchell and Anderson write: “Grieving is a disorderly business.” (89).
CS Lewis described it this way: "Grief is like a long, winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I've already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one: you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you ponder whether the valley isn't a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn't repeat." (A Grief Observed, p 47) (91)
Other habits of association that have been disrupted by Billy’s death:
Tom walked him around the neighborhood every morning and evening. Tom has tried taking me for a walk some evenings (mornings are a “no-go” as far as I’m concerned), but it’s not quite the same. For one thing, he has to engage in conversation with me. With the dog he could just enjoy his own thoughts and unwind from the day.
Tom doesn't go for his walks in the mornings at all now. And evening walks are getting few and far between. In some ways it’s more convenient; his schedule can be more flexible. But he knows all the people in the neighborhood and has kept up with much of the gossip and goings on through the casual conversations he had when running into neighbors while he was out walking the dog. Those contacts aren't going to happen in the same way and with the same frequency now.
I miss going out last thing before bed to “enjoy” the night. I love starry skies, the phases of the moon, the cooler air. I could still go out, but I don’t have to take the dog out “one last time” anymore, so usually I don’t go out at all after dark now.
When I sit down to work at the computer, I now tend to sit for longer periods before getting up. Which does mean my concentration isn't disrupted as often by the dog asking to be let out, fed, watered, or whatever else he thought he wanted and usually didn't, which also meant walking back and forth through the house with him while he made up his mind. On the down side, I sometimes now sit longer than it is good for me. And I don’t get nearly as much exercise as I used to get from following a dithering dog around for ten minutes.
There are probably a number of other patterns I haven’t noticed yet — and unexpected consequences we haven’t yet encountered. But we are on our way to accomplishing one of Mitchell and Anderson’s goals of successful grieving:
• to recognize and live with the reality of the loss and the feelings occasioned by it.
Compulsion to look for lost object
Mitchell and Anderson also write that we have a compulsion to search for lost objects. It comes from a human (and non-human) impulse to recover (and to scold!) a lost object.
Of course we look for the keys because we “need” them. But it is also normal to search for what is lost even when we know that it is irretrievably gone. If your wallet is stolen in the park, you will still look for it in your house – where you could (previously) usually find it. And one day, when you see a brown leather thing peeking out from under the bed, you will suddenly feel that rush of pleasure at having “found” you wallet. Only to discover, of course, that it is a shoe.
It is “not surprisingly,” they write, “the searching sometimes results in a kind of finding.”
A person in the midst of acute grief may sense of the continued presence of the deceased, or experience a return visit. If your loss involved a close relationship, you may look up in a crowd one day and “see” the person across the way. Some people hear or sense the loved one close by at times.
When a lost loved one is unconsciously called into the present by the grieving person, this is an undoing of the loss – for a brief time.
Mitchell and Anderson say this form of defense mechanism is different from the types of defense mechanisms which deny the loss. Undoing calls the lost one into the present life of the grieving person.
Time-freezing is another form of defense mechanism. The grief-stricken person attempts to stop the passage of time at the moment when loss occurred, thus denying the need to grieve, or even denying that the loss occurred. Time-freezing prevents successful grieving, according to Mitchell and Anderson.
Moving House
I want employ a more generic example now to demonstrate some of the complexity of loss, using what may seem like a “simple” loss: moving house. Which, of course, is “simple” only in the sense of being perceived as a “single event”.
The first days in the new house require you to establish new habits of association with the house and its contents. Habits of association between contents and spaces have been abruptly severed in the move. Now you have a new space to get used to. You have to locate – as in “place into a setting and subsequently find it when you need it” – every item of daily use: the spoons, the cups, the cleaning supplies, the dishwashing liquid, the brooms, mops, rags, cookbooks, product guarantees, product directions, the washer, the refrigerator, the couch, the beds as well as the bed linens, towels and the spare towels, toothbrush, hand soap, toilet paper, tissues, underwear, and so on.
You have to form habits of association with every door, every lock and key, light switch, electrical outlet, table lamp, every water tap that has a personality quirk (and all water taps have personality quirks!), every window catch, every cupboard and closet – and their contents, and on and on.
You have to form habits of association with the layout as well. You need to form a habit of association concerning the route to the bathroom from the bedroom, to the bathroom from the kitchen, to the bathroom from the living room.
Until you form a habit of association among these things, locations, paths and yourself, you have to expend mental, physical, emotional and psychological energy to accomplish any task involving any item, space and/or route.
So . . . you put the tea spoons into a drawer that seems appropriate to you. If you go to that same drawer each time you need a spoon, you will soon be able to find the spoons without thinking.
But if the third time you need a spoon you go to the “wrong” drawer, you have disrupted the habit formation with a “wrong” association. Now you’ll need to add a few extra times of getting it right to the necessary “30” to make up for the disruption. But twice more in the same day, you go to the “wrong” drawer. And then you get angry and you start shouting at the spoons:
“Alright, I get it; you don’t want to be in this drawer. You want to be in that drawer over there; which is probably where my mother would have put you to begin with. And undoubtedly where you would be if I’d let her come and “help” the way she wanted. But this is my house, and I want you here!”
You realize that yelling at the spoons probably isn't really going to impress – or intimidate – the spoons, but you are yelling all the same.
And your husband walks in just then and states the obvious, “You’re shouting.”
“The spoons won’t stay where I want them! And I’m so angry at them!” you respond.
“You’re angry at the spoons? Honey, you’re losing it.”
And you really didn't need to hear that, because you’re pretty sure that is what’s happening. And what you really want right now is some sympathy (and maybe a little supportive unity against the spoons), not confirmation of your impending insanity. Your husband is, of course, completely calm. He has decided to deal with the stress the move involves in a rational and reasoned way. He has delegated the “emotional” responses of the move – including his own – to you. It seems like a perfectly good division of labour to him, and he is probably not consciously aware that he is doing this.
But now your emotional output is beginning to exceed his comfort level, and it’s getting a bit scary, too. You on the verge of losing control, which means he might be on the verge also. Besides he needs you functional; he’s going to need clean socks in the morning and he has no clue where you’ve put them.
So, he says something really helpful: “Don’t you think you’re over-reacting – just a bit?”
At least you are not yelling at the spoons any more. You are now either screaming at your husband or you have gone into complete meltdown and are sobbing hysterically. Either way, your husband can kiss his clean socks good-bye.
Moving house is actually one of the most stressful things you can do in your life. And you are probably trying to do it while making other life changes as well: jobs, location, life-style, and so on.
But if someone had just told you about the relationship between habits and change and stress, that conversation with the spoons would have been very different.
Ok, spoons, I’m getting tired of not being able to find you every time I want a cup of tea. It’s becoming apparent to me that you are not happy being in the drawer where I put you in, and that you’d rather be in that drawer over there. The one my mother would have put you in, because (as she says often enough), I’m hopeless at organising my life properly without her help. But we’ll leave that issue aside for the moment. Right now I want to be able to find a spoon without hunting all over the kitchen every time I need one.
So, here’s the deal. You want to be over there. OK, I’ll put you over there. But, after 6 weeks, we are going to review this arrangement. And if I decide then that I really do want you over here, in this drawer, then I’m going to move you. Yes, I know I’ll have to start over on re-forming a habit of association between you and this drawer and we’ll both have to tough it out for a few weeks, but I’ll have more energy then.
Of course, while you’re trying to settle the insides of the house, you have to start dealing with the surrounding world (shops, schools, filling stations, etc.) and start to do the same thing with a thousand other aspects of your life as well. No wonder people often have accidents soon after they move. They don’t have a spare functioning brain cell in their head when they get behind the wheel of a car.
Moving house is stressful. But every habit you form frees up resources to deal with other necessary adjustments.
So if you move house, drink lots of fluids. At least you will be able to find the bathroom from anywhere in the house without thinking by the end of the first week.
In the first month after a move you can expect to feel overwhelmed and exhausted just from trying to negotiate new habits of association into place. Meanwhile, you are probably grieving for a lot of things lost in the move.
Even if you moved into another suburb in the same city, you have to establish new relationships with routes and local facilities. If you move across country, you sever all the habitual connections and associations that were part of the old location. You will probably “loose” most of your “friends” because your relationships were built on habits of association with place, activities, local organisation, etc. – and those habits no longer work to keep you easily linked. Relationships of place and people are like an intricately woven web or cloth. When you move, you pull out your thread, but most of the cloth, the web – and its pattern – remain.
With some people you will form new ways of keeping connected. But the inter-related contextual web of your life as it was lived in that place is gone. And your attempts to “catch up” and “re-connect” when you go back two years later, may not work terribly well even with people you were “close” to before the move. The habitual links that were integral to the relationships are either no longer active or are not as strong as they had been. Your new experiences and their new experiences since you parted have not been incorporated into the weave.
If you move country, you will deal with loss of cultural familiarity to one extend or another. You may also need to deal with a new language or an old one spoken in new ways. Move continent, and you start disrupting habits of geographical perceptions.
I lost my sense of east and west when I moved from the US to Turkey. Europe was now west and north of me – not east. All of the US was west of me, not just parts of it. The Atlantic Ocean was west of me instead of east. The Mediterranean – which I eventually swam in and which was an important geographical marker locally – was west and south of where I lived, not sitting mysteriously somewhere far off to the east beyond my previously imagined horizons.
Shift hemisphere, and you add seasonal disruption—new climatic conditions and unfamiliar weather patterns as well as holidays divorced from their expected seasonal correlations. The moon waxes and wanes in opposite directions in the two hemispheres. And most of the stars will be strangers.
Other Shapes of Grieving
Time Distortion
One aspect of time distortion is difficulty in getting past the moment of loss, past the time the now-gone person was last seen. Mitchell and Anderson tells us that all time collapses into that moment. Calendar pages may not be turned. "I can't think that far ahead," a grieving person might say.
We are often advised to take life "one day at a time," but for a bereaved person there may be no “progression” of those “one” days—no remembrance of a past before the loss, no future of plans for moving on. This helps the person avoid fully acknowledging that the loss has taken place.
An extreme form of time distortion is “time-freezing”: for example, a room kept as a shrine to a dead child, with all his toys still on the shelves.
When loss is somewhat ambiguous to begin with – such as a missing person, or when a soldier is “missing in action” (or the body is not returned from a foreign war) – a room may be kept cleaned and ready for the person’s return. This represents a form of desperate hope that the person is not really dead.
Time freezing is denial of loss and as such represent an unfaithful response to loss according to Mitchell and Anderson, because the lives of the bereaved are “ordered by death rather than by God who is always making something new.” (89)
Searching for what was lost, on the other hand, they write, can represent a faithful response to loss if such searching does not ultimately deny the loss and prevent grieving from taking place.
Mitchell and Anderson write:
When grieving people allow themselves to be stuck at a particular moment in time without either past or future, the process becomes stuck. In order to assist in the painful process of embracing a future without the lost object, we will suggest that an alternation between remembering and hoping is the proper central focus of work with those who grieve. . . . Reminiscing is intended to liberate the bereaved from emotional claims of the past in order to think hopefully about the future. (emphasis added)
Grief is Self-oriented. The self-oriented shape of grieving is the tendency of the person to turn inward after a significant loss. The initial grief may be so intense and so overwhelming that there are no resources left to do anything but grieve. No resources for going out, for chatting with well-meaning friends, for getting out into the world again.
A valid response to this sense of being overwhelmed, according to Mitchell and Anderson, is to retreat. And others should let the person withdraw a bit, to have some time alone. They don’t say not to check on the bereaved persons; they say don’t overwhelm the person with your attentiveness and don’t hassle them to “get on” with life.
And because loss involves so many interconnect aspects of one’s self, it is easy to become overwhelmed by it all. The grieving person cries, “I can’t do this anymore.”
If this means, “I need a break” / “I need to delay this for a while” the person is not in denial of either the loss or of the need to engage with the grieving process. In fact, these might indicate a healthy conscious response to the loss – as long as the delay does not become a habit.
Grieving never ends
Some types of reminders – some habits of association -- occur only annually. The habit of expectation related to a significant annual association, such as a holiday or birthday, will take many years to gradually defuse to the point that the anniversary can move toward non-expectation. It is easy to see why grieving for a significant loss does not ever completely end. We don’t live that long.
And because some associations are intimately or uniquely linked to the loss, some habits of association cannot be broken. At best the pain associated with the loss will ease and the association become a poignant memory.
To live is to lose. Loss in one area is compounded by losses in other areas. And we do not “recover” fully from one loss before the next occurs. It seems almost a miracle that we ever recover enough from our significant losses to “move forward.”
A Personal Reflection
In 2001, after five years as a resident and university lecturer in Turkey, I moved to South Africa with my fairly recently acquired second husband. I left (and lost) a job I loved, a familiar place of residence, a life-style I enjoyed, an adopted nation, and many friends and acquaintances. I changed country, cultural landscape and hemisphere. Connections to my 3 American sons and extended family and friends had already been stretched temporally and geographically. Moving to South Africa further extended both distance and time-away factors.
I arrived in South Africa with the need to incorporate myself into a new family and family dynamics, and settle into a new place of residence. I soon began to suspect I was facing not only temporary joblessness but a loss of career altogether. I had to try to integrate myself into a confusing, conflicted and unstable cultural landscape as well as to negotiate with unfamiliar surroundings. And do all this while driving on the wrong side of the road as well! Emigration is not for sissies.
My only support system for all this was my South African husband, Tom.
I had arrived in South Africa in late August 2001. Less than two weeks later, I lost my nation as well. Yes, the country was still standing, but after 9/11 so many habits of association in so many areas of physical, emotional and perceptual life were disrupted there that when I went back to the US in November it was not the same nation I had left 3 months earlier. At least when I had been travelling back and forth between Turkey and the US, most things seemed to stay “the same”—the framework, background and overall composition didn’t changed, even if some of the personal specifics of the picture blurred a bit here and there. After 9/11, an event which I had not shared directly with my countrymen, the entire work had altered. It was as thought the country itself had moved away from me, and left an alien landscape in its place. The scatter-shot effects of that event are still active; many new habits of association are still unformed or unstable, both there and in many other places and relationships as well.
At least most people in South Africa thought that “grief” was not an inappropriate response to such as loss. Not everyone; some people told me directly that “you got what you deserved”; “it’s your turn now”; “you brought it on yourself” – meaning both me as an individual and the US as a whole. At best, my grieving took place in isolation, sometimes in a hostile atmosphere.
Most of the other 300+ million Americans who also lost their nation that day got to share their grief and “group-process” to one extent or another. They lived with and through the trauma and the ensuing changes, adapting over time as they went. My pre-9/11 habits of association have not been so well defused for me; I get “thrown back in” occasionally because I haven’t processed that loss and de-linked those lost associations connected to my prior experience of being an American in the same ways.
Those familiar habits cause disorientation sometimes, because my associations often no longer exist in that cultural landscape. And I do not have all the new associations formed there by those who went through the long process of grief, adjustment and reformulation of patterns together. This is not all bad; some of those new patterns I am not sorry to have missed. But it does mean I don’t “resonate” with other Americans in some ways quite so deeply any more. Perhaps this is inevitable under any circumstance if one lives “abroad” for an extended time and adopts new perspectives and habits of thinking.
I mention this last set of experiences of personal loss because I think it is similar to what many South Africans have gone through in the past 20 years. Not only have many South Africans emigrated or had members of their families emigrate to other countries around the world, but those that remained have also lost the “nation of habitual associations” that were once the perceptual and social grounding of much of their lives.
And while the changes that took place in the transformation of South Africa have resulted in many essential gains in terms of social equity and human dignity, there were losses as well. In effect, the entire population of the “old” South Africa “emigrated” to a “new” country – one still in the making.
All change involves loss. All loss causes grief. South African were not expected, nor even necessarily allowed to “grieve” for this loss. All South Africans were expected to celebrate, even to rejoice the loss of what came before. Some segments of the South Africa population were led to believe that any loss they had incurred was of their doing and “they deserved it.” Other segments are only now realizing they, too, may have incurred loss in the transformation and are desperately searching for ways to recapture old cultural identities, language and customs, morals and values.
The changes in South Africa were not perhaps as traumatic, in the sense of suddenness, as those in the US, but they have been even more dramatic, and traumatic, in terms of disruption of habits of association. The scattershot effects of the change are still being negotiated and will be for a long time.
At the very least, much of what was familiar is now gone or altered. For worse and for better, the patterns of mindless habits of association are largely altered. We must now all invest a lot more energy into social relationships and interactions than we once did. But we also have to grieve – in positive, successful ways – what we lose, so that we may move forward relatively unencum¬bered by what was lost while we negotiate new ways of thinking and interacting and making new attachments.
Impediments to Grieving
Mitchell and Anderson discuss some impediments to grieving. Impediments to grieving, such as:
• Intolerances to pain. The person may the loss but refusal to engage with the loss because of the pain it causes. Such a person may “isolate” the emotional aspects of loss off from the rest of his/her life.
• Need for control. Cultural (or family) inhibitions may prevent a person from expressing her or his emotions. Expressing emotions may be seen as improper and as a sign of loss of self-control.
• Lack of external encouragement and support. Pharmaceutical intervention; isolation; cultural imperatives that one must “move on” and “get back to work”; negative connotations of the language of grieving; being the “responsible one” are a few of the ways that the process of grieving can be inhibited.
They also suggest ways of overcoming these impediments. In particular they insist that grieving must acknowledged; it must be heard. This begins by:
• Offering space: essentially attentiveness, acceptance and support for the process.
“It should be possible for the grieving person to discover and to express the pain, anger, guilt, and other feelings that are the common consequences of loss. To express these feel¬ings also requires that they be heard and responded to by others. Crying out one's pain may be largely done alone, but some of that crying needs to be heard and responded to by others who care. Withholding or denying one's feelings will almost inevitably block a person suffering from loss from finding the relief and growth that come with what Granger Westberg has called "good grief." (96)
• Engaging in “Good grief”. This allows us to incorporate the myriad of meanings and consequences of our loss in ways that allow us to continue to function and to make new attachments -- to risk loving again –to attach again.
“To grieve properly is not to forget the lost object entirely, but to let that object or person "go" sufficiently to make new attachments and new investments in life. A lost loved one really does live on in memory, and that memory will colour our lives from that point onward, but it need not and should not dominate our living. Proper grieving makes new attachments possible while living with old memories.
It is not necessary or even possible to clean away all memories, but it is important to prevent the loss from being the point around which we build our future lives.” (96)
Or as I would put it: Grieving does not de-link us from our lost object; grieving de-links the habits of association we have with the lost object. It diffuses the automatic triggers between elements in our environments and the object which has been lost; and thus between the loss and overwhelming feelings of grief.
The purpose of de-linking, of grieving, is to be able to form new links, new relationships of love and commitment.
Mitchell and Anderson write; “In successful grieving, the mourner gradually becomes able to make attachments and investments in other persons and things once again. . . . healthy grieving enables us in the long run to reattach ourselves to the world and to persons with whom we can have deep and satisfying relationships.” (96)
A theology of Grieving
For Mitchell and Anderson, one final aspect of “successful grieving” is that “for the person of faith, grieving is a process in which a belief system, [which may have been] significantly challenged or altered by loss, is restored.”(96).
Mitchell and Anderson reject Biblical interpretations that say a person should not grieve. Such interpretations often claim that “we have no business feeling sad or hurt when someone we love dies. Our focus should be only on the resurrection; and, if we do experi¬ence grief or allow ourselves to feel the sadness, hurt, anger, and other emotions of grief, it is to be taken as a sign that our faith is deficient.” (101).
Mitchell and Anderson point out that even Calvin interpreted passages such as 1 Thessalonians 4:13 ("We wish you not to remain in ignorance, brothers, about those who sleep in death; you should not grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope") meant we should “restrain from excessive grief” rather than we should not grieve at all.
Mitchell and Anderson, however, reject even Calvin’s call for “restraint”. It is the “love that will not let us go” that allows us to grieve and to grieve fully they write.The hope that nothing will separate us from the love of God is the hope that endures; it is the hope that encourages us to bring our angry, clamoring, hurt, guilty selves to the throne of grace. Because of that hope, we are free to grieve more rather than less. It is hope that makes grieving possible. (103)
Grieving is a part of life.
Even without traumatic upheaval, if we live long enough, it is inevitable that we “lose” our nation, our town, our neighbourhood. The passing of time inevitably changes the contexts of our associations and of our habits of association.
It sometimes seems as though aliens come down in the middle of the night and alter whole segments of life and make them unrecognisable. We start searching for the lost object and look back in grief or with nostalgia for worlds that no longer exists.
We can get stuck the past. Reminiscing, without blinders, can help us both honour the past and cope with the present, leaving us to “think hopefully about the future.”
Grieving never ends. But grief mellows. Like a jagged piece of a broken wine bottle, like the sharply-etched scalloped shells of ocean creatures, edges smooth when tumbled in the seas of life, colours become translucent. We no longer cut ourselves when handling them. We are left with things of beauty and wonder.
Psalm 30 tells us “weeping may last for a night; but joy cometh in the morning.”
Joy does come in the morning. But first we must get through the night.
Donna Wyckoff-Wheeler
St Columba’s Church, May 2011
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