"What We Grieve"

READING
"The Year Of Magical Thinking"
Joan Didion

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it." We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it." Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. "A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in "Western Attitudes toward Death." "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud." We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn't I see that, why am I so selfish.) The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given. "Our worst enemy," Helen Keller called it. "I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself," D. H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. "A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself."

This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die. In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life - both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections - have all vanished. John and I were married for forty years. During all but the first five months of our marriage, when John was still working at "Time," we both worked at home. We were together twenty-four hours a day, a fact that remained a source of both merriment and foreboding to my mother and aunts. "For richer for poorer but never for lunch," one or another of them frequently said in the early years of our marriage. I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

SERMON

My mother died this summer. I had seen it coming, prepared myself, said goodbye like I meant it each time I left her. She was ready. The last few weeks of her life, we both hoped the end would come sooner rather than later, though we never said so to each other. Finally, in a stroke of good timing I managed to get back to New Jersey to spend her last couple of days with her and was present when she died. My relief at having finessed what could have been an absence I would regret forever, carried me through the first days and weeks after she was gone. That strange, surreal feeling of loss was diluted by my triumph over the barriers of distance and time, and the unpredictability of death itself. I felt I had fulfilled some unspoken promise, more to myself than to her.

The day after my mother died was a Sunday. I was staying at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, the very same place where David and I were married seven years earlier, almost to the day. I had little to do. I signed off on a few items at the funeral home where my parents, in characteristically practical fashion, had already made all their arrangements. I went for a long walk.

When I came back to my room, my phone was ringing. It was Phyllis, my mother's caregiver of the last five years, calling to see how I was. I told her I was all right. "You can't spend the day by yourself," she said. "We'll come over and get you."

But I wouldn't let her. Sunday was a big day for Phyllis and her family. Her mother was the minister of a Pentecostal church, and they worshipped all day long. No doubt they were lifting up my mother and probably me as well at that very moment. We had already been on the prayer list for some time. That was enough. I wanted to be alone, not enveloped by their concern and good will.

We bereaved have an odd sense of pride. As Joan Didion notes, there is always "the question of self-pity." I don't mind having it, but I don't want others to witness it.

So I went to the movies instead of the Pentecostal church. I ended up at "The March of the Penguins," a drama about the life cycle of birds, played out against the backdrop of the frozen tundra. It didn't have much of a plot, but I could barely follow it - all I could think of was parents and children. But grief felt more natural to me in that darkened movie theater than it would have in the embrace of someone else's family, and of course, I wept.

Grief is an individual activity – even a solitary one. Joan Didion observes, "Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone." In her book "The Year of Magical Thinking," she goes over the circumstances of her husband's death, how one minute he was there and the next minute, "life as you know it ends." She can't get past the unreality of this fact. The book is a memoir of their life together, informed by her knowledge of its outcome.

That knowledge is torture for her. Even ending the book is another way of having to let go of precisely what she does not want to give up - her marriage to John Gregory Dunne. "I know why we try to keep the dead alive," she concludes. "We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us." The best she can do is accept that "You have to go with the change," as her husband once told her.

Reading her book from my vantage point, as someone who has grieved and attended the grieving of others as well, I had to observe that after one year, she hadn't made much progress. That's the way it is. Grief has its own timetable and we are not in charge of it. Moving on is what the rest of us want people who are grieving to do. Joan Didion notes, "We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwelling on it.' Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation." Let her dwell on it, I say. It's one of the few activities that actually helps.

In the weeks after my mother died I made a note to myself to remember to preach about how to talk to someone who is grieving. It's an awkward situation, not just because it reminds us of death, but also because it fills us with inadequacy. We don't know what to say.

What I realized this time around that it is not so important what to say, but rather to allow the grieving person to speak: to hold forth, actually, and to give the narrative version of the loss. I found that each time I told my story to a sympathetic listener, my heart was a little less heavy. I became accustomed to hearing myself speak of my mother's death. This simple act diminished the sense of unreality, helped me integrate my story into myself. Give those who grieve that time. It helps them heal. As for self-pity, it has an important place as well. Joan Didion writes, "People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it." And go right on having it, I might add.

What I grieved, when my mother died, was not just the loss of my mother, the person she was, and the relationship we had. I also grieved the mother I never had, the person I wished she could have been, the relationship we never came close to having. My grief was just as much for myself as it was for my mother. "The question of self-pity" may be unavoidable. Any loss makes us aware of everything we never had and anything we have ever lost. After my mother died, I grieved as much for my father again as I did for her.

"The very language we use when we think about self-pity," Joan Didion writes, "betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it." A grieving person is vulnerable, pathetic even, a reminder not only of death but of how fragile we really are. We don't like that reminder. And yet, grief is one of the most universal experiences a living creature can have.

Just as I was sitting down to write this sermon, I received an odd email message. Someone thinking I was a Judith Meyer she knew from many years ago, wrote to say she wanted to get back in touch. I knew immediately that I wasn't the person she remembered. I'd never lived in Connecticut. And I definitely wasn't the person who produced the beautiful embroidery she admired so much. She added that her husband of many years had died recently, and how many fond memories she had of times they had shared with the other Judith Meyer and her husband. I wrote back to tell her that I was not the Judith Meyer she was seeking. Then I added, "I cannot help but feel for your loss. You have my condolences." I thought about how a random message from a person I've never known reminds us that the experience of grief can make us feel close to each other, even to strangers.

I wrote back to her again, asking if she would mind if I related this experience to you. "Not at all," she responded. "Share it!"

We may be "truly alone" with our grief, as Joan Didion rightly notes. But we are also truly with other people. There is tremendous comfort in that.

The fable of the mustard seed captures this truth as well. After thirty-four years of happy marriage, a husband dies and a wife is overcome with grief. She is inconsolable. A holy man gives her a mustard seed and instructs her to find a family that has no sorrow. The woman sets off on her journey, listening to each family's story of loss. When she meets the holy man some time later, she's forgotten that she is carrying the mustard seed, and she is healed of her grief.

Whether you or I or Joan Didion is ever healed of our grief, I cannot say for sure. There is a sense in which we are never healed, nor do we want to be, for our grief keeps us connected to the one we have lost. But we are changed; we have gone with the change, as John Gregory Dunne would have put it, and that change makes us more vulnerable - but also more open to each other.

As the widow in the story of the mustard seed quickly discovered, we all will have our sorrow in life. We will all be changed by what we cannot change. Though we will feel truly alone, we will also never be more truly aware of others and the human bond, our grief, that we share. Surely some good will always come of it.

Resources used to prepare this sermon include Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).