Do I Grieve

“Rising Cairn” (1999-2000), Celeste Roberge

A friend called me last week to tell me her partner, unvaccinated, had died in the hospital from Covid. She asked me to call her back. I waited till the next day.

The time difference between us was an excuse; it was very late, my time, when she called—too early, the next morning, my time, to call back. But the excuse is as labored as this sentence. I didn’t want to call her and when I finally did, two days later, I could only offer the wooden nickels of consolation—”I’m so sorry for your loss” and so forth. But I was not sorry for her loss. I didn’t feel it. What I felt was anger.

How can conscientious individuals continue to kill themselves and endanger everyone they meet? My friend didn’t tell me she was unvaccinated during the recent months when I saw her from time to time. I am not sick. But does that excuse her for exposing me? And should I remain silent now she has paid the ultimate price?

Do I think grief is catching, like some new variant of the pandemic? Having learned, for my survival, to avoid grieving—although not mourning—for my losses, have I become numb to others? And gratefully, so unwilling to be moved, to reach again that bare place from which it is so difficult to escape.

Possibly. Grieving is painful and solitary and we all try to avoid solitary pain even when we know the consolations we are offered in public are usually wooden. And for me, grief—but not mourning—is always tinged with shame.

Shame?

Yes, crying is as intimate as anything else we do. It exposes our soul and that soul may be raw or it may be as dim as a small candle going out in a draft but whichever it is, it is our core and it may be as embarrassing to reveal as our private parts.

Mourning is different because it is public. Once it meant wearing black and, for women, a veil and going to a funeral service. These rituals are nearly gone now, replaced by social gatherings called “Celebrations of Life.” Wearing black, weeping and wailing would be inappropriate where friends are eating, drinking, and having a good time. There’s no coffin in sight.

As for weeping and wailing beside a grave, the industry of “undertaking”—an odd word, meaning, I suppose, shouldering all the practical problems of doing away with a dead body as expeditiously as possible (and as expensively)—has, by organizing, overseeing and smoothing the process of burial made mourning seem out of place. The obsequious black-clad stranger standing beside the widow may be trying, genuinely, to offer comfort; but how can anyone cry in front of a stranger?

Now that most bodies are cremated, we may find it difficult to shed tears over a container. Not too long ago, one of my mother’s young granddaughters peered over the edge of the coffin to see if Granny was really dead. Longer ago, photographs were taken of “the deceased,” flowers or crucifix between clasped white hands. Make-up and hairstyling were required, sometimes changing the appearance entirely. But all this is no more. Perhaps we all agree it is better not to look on the face of the dead.

If grieving is private, hidden, tinged with shame, where can it be expressed? Maybe only in bed at night or in the woods. What does this hidden, dwarfed and truncated process do to the human heart?” “Better to strangle an infant in its cradle,” William Blake wrote, “than to nurse unacted desires.” We have a desire, passionate and deeply rooted, supported by the traditions of many religions, to grieve, to howl to “rend our garments” as we mourn.

I’m not sure celebrating a life, especially when there may be little to celebrate, heals our grief: laughing not through tears but without tears. I’m not sure memorials, usually held long after the deaths with no sign of “the departed”—although many grinning photographs—help us to remember who that person was.

After all a party is still a party.

In My Family