Levels of Life by Julian Barnes (2013)

On the most important level this a meditation on Barnes’ grief.  The chapter,

‘The Loss of Depth’, which comprises around half of the book’s length, is Barnes’ examination of his grief after the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh.  It is candid to the point that when he moots the idea of suicide he reveals his preferred method (‘a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife').

In ‘The Loss of Depth’ the love story is entwined in the narrative of grieving rather than parenthetically set aside, and entanglement this is the heart of the book.  There are many books in this genre, some on this blog.

Coloring Your Way Through Grief

Deborah S. Derman, a professional grief counselor has suffered more than her fair share of grief. “The field of grief counseling sort of found me,” she said, “because I had such a long history of loss.”

Now, Dr. Derman has produced an intriguing new tool – an adult coloring book intended to help others “get through tough times.” Called “Colors of Loss and Healing,” the book consists of 35 pages of lavish illustrations to color, each relating to a word or phrase, like “one day at a time,” “bitter and sweet” and “resilience,” meant to evoke thoughts and feelings that can help to promote healing.

The book is meant to help people with losses of every kind, including illness, divorce, financial ruin, post-addiction — anything that might force people to redefine their identity.

Read Jane Broody’s excellent article in the March 17, 2016 NY Times: “Coloring Your Way Though Grief.”

Ghosts in the Machine

Social Media Has Changed the Way We Mourn

In an essay they contributed to the ‘‘Handbook of Death and Dying,’’ the sociologists Wood and Williamson observe that people in the developed world have managed to banish death from their everyday lives — no small feat. ‘‘In the United States and Western Europe, dying is now primarily a private and often technical affair, hidden behind the closed doors of the hospital, the mortuary and the funeral home,’’ they write.

Proof enough of the change in our culture is that Facebook and other social-­media platforms have introduced procedures for handling profiles after their owners die. Families may decide whether to preserve a loved one’s old accounts; if they do, the accounts become memorials, designated places to lay a digital bouquet.

Sermon on ""Grief and Woleness"

Our friend, Bill Zeckhausen, WC '56, recommended a sermon by Tony Fisher, a minister of the United Congregation church, of Greater Naples, Florida entitled "Grief and Woleness.  (November 15, 2015)

It's an eloquent and moving homily that most will value listening to (15 minutes).

How Therapicts Grieve

A therapist may spend hundreds of hours, perhaps more than a thousand, hearing about a patient’s most exalted aspirations and most murderous, hateful fantasies. During this time, the patient may endure excruciating losses, unbearable shame, bitter sadness and great triumphs. You may accompany patients through torturous adolescence into adulthood. Or you may meet them in middle age and be with them as they age and eventually die. You collaborate in a deep process of discovery.

Few encounters are this deeply honest, and therefore intimate. The attachment engenders profound feelings, a particular kind of love.

Dr. Robin Weiss' sensitive essay in the NY Times (July 5, 2015) is a good source of insights.

About My Mother

Marla Kissing Mommy

Yesterday was the anniversary of my mom's death. On that day back in 2006, in the afternoon, my mom took her last breath, in her own bed, just as she had wanted, just as it should be. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia one year after my dad died. It was terminal.

I remember when I went to say the mourner's prayer for 11 months at synagogue. I met so many people in the same situation. They were of great comfort to me. This daily prayer and those people there helped me get out of bed every morning. It was there that I met one of my now dearest friends, out of my tragedy...

Here is page with a link to the whole essay.

Complicated Grief

Jane Brody's Personal Health column in the February 17th, 2015 NY Times is an informative and comprehensive discussion of "complicated grief."

Image from Times article

“Complicated grief is like a wound that doesn’t heal and can follow the loss of any close relationship. The risk of complicated grief is greatest — 10 percent to 20 percent — among those who lose a romantic partner and even higher among those who lose a child. It is more common following a sudden or violent death and most common among women older than 60, she reported."

See:  Brody: "When Grief Won't Relent"

Also referenced:

1) Shear MK. Clinical practice. Complicated grief. N Engl J Med. 2015 Jan 8;372(2):153-60.

2) The Center for Complicated Grief (Columbia University, NY)

Grieving in the Digital Age

“The social norms for loss and the Internet are clearly still evolving. But Gen Y-ers and millennials have begun projecting their own sensibilities onto rituals and discussions surrounding death. As befits the first generation of digital natives, they are starting blogs, YouTube series and Instagram feeds about grief, loss and even the macabre, bringing the conversation about bereavement and the deceased into a very public forum, sometimes with jarring results.”  NY Times, “An Online Generation Redefines Mourning” (March 14, 2014)

Modern Loss: : Modern Loss is a place to share the unspeakably taboo, unbelievably hilarious, and unexpectedly beautiful terrain of navigating your life after a death. Beginners welcome.

This project grew out of two friends’ separate experiences with sudden loss, and their struggle to find resources that weren’t too clinical, overtly religious, patronizing or, frankly, cheesy.

[This is just the beginning of a new phenomenon - we may add more information to this post periodically]

#Grief

#R.I.P.:Grieving My Dog Offline is a moving essay in the NY Times by a Yale student, Spencer Bokat-Lindell     

When I joined Facebook in 2007, my first profile picture was a photograph of Ginny and me lying next to each other on my living room floor.

To make an R.I.P. post about Ginny was to secure her a spot in the chronicle of my life, to recognize — in words and pictures — that she mattered.

For the rest of the world, it seemed, my grief wasn’t real until it could be screenshot.

Spencer's beautifully written pense gives insight into the mindset of some digital natives and opens up many, many avenues for thought. For me, at least, it was not to be skimmed.

No Worst, There is None

G.M. Hopkins sonnet that deals with grief.

No worst, there is none

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Spring and Fall

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

On the Death of a Colleague

I was fortunate to hear Ranjana Srivastava speak at a conference last year.  So, when an essay of hers appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, I eagerly read it.

Dylan Thomas famously intoned. “After the first death there is no other” – but perhaps there are many types of “first deaths.”  That of a child, that of a parent, a lover, sibling, and in Dr. Srivastava’s case – that of a beloved mentor and colleague.

“I marvel that in a hospital that routinely and efficiently deals with life, death, and all the intervening drama, the passing of our colleague has shattered the established structure for coping with loss."

"There seems to be an expiration date to grieving, a point when it becomes

tedious to others.”

If you go to the pdf of On the Death of a Colleague, you will need to scroll down on page one to get to the essay.  NEJM does not make it easy to share its pieces.

Getting Grief Right

A friend, Dr. Brenda Dintiman, suggested I send this essay to our Winter Study class.  I would like to thank her for alerting me to notable piece.

Getting Grief Right 

by Patrick O’Malley

NY Times January 11, 2015

Many people and those around them believe that there is a time limit to their grief. "The truth is that grief is as unique as a fingerprint, conforms to no timetable or societal expectation."

Grief can cause “profound emotional chaos.”

“’All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them,’ said the writer Isak Dinesen. When loss is a story, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. There is no pressure to move on. There is no shame in intensity or duration. Sadness, regret, confusion, yearning and all the experiences of grief become part of the narrative of love for the one who died.”

Image from Times article

Deborah Alecson Poetry Reading

Deborah Alecson's recent Poetry Reading in Great Barrington.

On December 20, 2014, Deborah Golden Alecson read from her recently published collection of poems entitled Complicated Grief  (Finishing Line Press, 2014).  These poems were generated out of her bereavement following her mother's suicide.  

The term "complicated grief" is used to describe a grieving process that goes outside the boundaries of normal grief.  This can be the result of the psychological state of the bereaved and/or the nature of the relationship with the deceased when he or she was alive and/or a death from suicide.  

What makes the grief complicated are the plethora of emotions that are not just errupting because of a single loss, but include a cascade of frightening feelings that come from a lack of resolution or comprehension.  

In Alecson's case, the complication came not only from the shock of the suicide, but from a history of abuse from her mother.  A manifestation of complicated grief can be an inability to concentrate that can then result in an inability to work.  In her experience, she had to take a few months leave of absence from teaching.  This time was necessary for her to integrate her loss; and one of her ways she did so, was to write these poems.

Gabriel: A Poem

by Edward Hirsch

Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.

 New Yorker Review. 

Wild Messengers

Jennifer Holland’s fine article in the November 1, 2014 NY Times, is a meditation on death and grieving.  It is a personal statement that speaks to many of us.

“About a decade ago, a brain tumor came to steal my mother away. It was diagnosed after she’d exhibited a series of strange behaviors (stranger than usual, I should say, as she was a quirky lady to begin with), and she very quickly went to a dark, quiet place that none of us could reach.

Escorting a loved one through her last days wrings your heart dry. You keep smiling, helping and hugging, knowing that soon enough you’ll be able to collapse and grieve. But until then, you stay strong."

Read  Wild Messengers.

When We Accept What Is

my sweet sweet Andrea

there was a lesson

to be learned

by your loss

my little baby girl

who died in your isolette

as if it were a manger

and that is not to take for granted

who I have birthed into this world

your brother who came

a year later

upon whom I bestow

all of my devotion

breaking the cycle

of harm imposed

by abusive parents

generations of them

all that is required

of motherhood

you have taught me

is to love our offspring

shower them with care

be blessed in our sons and daughters

these are the gifts

scattered beneath tragedy

waiting to be found

when we accept what is

this gold filament of grief

Deborah Golden Alecson

September 16, 2014

My Girl (1991)

(from IMDb) The movie is set in Madison, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1972. Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) is a 11-year-old tomboy and a hypochondriac. Vada's father, Harry Sultenfuss (Dan Aykroyd), is an awkward widower who does not seem to understand his daughter, and as a result, constantly ignores her. His profession as a funeral director, in which the Sultenfuss' residence is also a funeral parlor, has led Vada to develop an obsession with death as well as disease. Vada also thinks that she killed her own mother, since her mother died giving birth to her. She regularly tends to her invalid grandmother (Ann Nelson), who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Harry's brother Phil (Richard Masur), who lives nearby, also stops by frequently to help out the family.

Vada is teased by other girls because her best friend, Thomas J. Sennett (Macaulay Culkin), is unpopular and a boy. Their summer adventuresfrom first kiss to last farewellintroduce Vada to the world of adolescence.

Vada's summer begins well. She befriends Shelley Devoto (Jamie Lee Curtis), the new make-up artist at her father's funeral parlor, who provides her with some much needed guidance. She is also infatuated with her teacher, Mr. Bixler (Griffin Dunne), and steals some money from Shelley's trailer to attend a summer writing class that he is teaching.

But before long, things start to fall apart. Her father and Shelley start dating and get engaged, she cannot bring herself to tell her father that she has experienced her first menstrual cycle, Thomas J. dies from an allergic reaction to bee stings while looking for Vada's mood ring in the woods, and she finds out that Mr. Bixler is engaged to someone else.

Vada's grief, however, manages to mend the rift between her and her father, she learns that she didn't kill her mom during childbirth (since her father tells her that things like mothers dying in childbirth just happen), and by the end of the movie, Vada has not only managed to deal with her pain and grief, but has also overcome some of her previous issues as well.  1991, 102 munutes

Note:  This is a sweet movie about death and dying and grief.  It's light entertainment with some moving moments.  DJE

Why We Write About Grief

Image from NY Times article

The authors Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O'Rorque opine in the NY Times about why they, and others, write about grief.

In this insightful e-mail conversation, "Ms. Oates and Ms. O’Rourke discussed how they wrote about their own grief and why the literature of loss resonates with readers today. The dialog, which has been edited for length and clarity, began by asking them what led them to write about their experiences."

Dealing With Grief (Liam Neeson)

Anderson Cooper interviews Liam Neeson five years after the death of his wife, Natasha Richardson.

"Dealing with grief, dealing with loss-- there is power in hearing how other people have dealt with it and power in hearing how other people have faced it and live with it," says Cooper.

This 60 Minutes Overtime Interview is a fine introduction to this subject.