Musings on Grief

By Syd Walter

I have come to learn grief as partial and distant, not quite something that can be fully felt, but is instead grasped at. Like trying to find keys in a junk drawer; frantically searching for something you think you know the shape of. I first learned grief not through someone dying, but someone almost dying, and there are no scripted condolences for attempts, and there are no stages of grief that can be described to an eight-year-old about things that were almost. For the people who have passed in my life, on the other hand, were people I was only just getting to know or would never have thought to know were I not standing at their memorial wishing I had something more insightful to say. 

I crave in that  moment, and have craved before, having ownership over grief. Knowing a grief that is not something I am trying to concoct together—but is real, grief that is sustained on a love that both parties would remember their last active encounter of and others would affirm is true. 

I sometimes try to imagine getting a call that I have lost my parents. I do it because I know that in that moment, I could be the one who could claim the most grief. People would not question if I was loved by them or loved them or needed care without asking for it. It would be obvious. I was important in my parents’ lives. My tears would make craters. Grief would not be an attempt, or partial, it would take everything from me. 

In my fantasies of grief, it takes me a year to cope. I would get praise for getting out of bed and people would urge me to slow down and they would care about how much I am resting and what I eat. I would look at the world dimly and be a poor daughter to my poor deceased parents. Then something would turn in me. 

I would start to write, and record daily diaries of my heaviness, and soon I would write a book which would go on to win awards and people would not believe my resilience. I would have done something with my grief that made grieving worth it, and the world would learn from my ability to be “vulnerable.” Although when I would be alone and catch my reflection in a spoon or on the glint of a knife, a question would rise to the surface, am I being vulnerable? Or is this an attempt to make myself feel important and martyred? 

I have thought about my own death too. Once, when I freshly turned eighteen, I responded on one of those forms that they give you at the doctor that I was a one—on the scale of one to nine—in terms of thinking about killing myself. I was mortified to admit it because I did not think my doctor would understand. I had those thoughts in a transitory, “how would they memorialize me?” way. A kind of It’s a Wonderful Life reflection on the wonderful life I am so privileged to live. That’s how the doctor painted it when I tried to explain what I was thinking, and I was surprised she got it right. 

My fantasies of the ripple effect from my own death are similar to what I hope I would learn to do in grief. My friends would change their careers to support a cause in my name and my parents would write a book about my life.

I realize these renderings of grief are quite selfish interpretations of the truth; the world keeps going with or without me. Realistically, my friends would not always be thinking about the life that could have been, and my parents would not create a Booker Prize novel from their grief. My friends would move on with their lives, maybe have an altar and twice a year—on my birthday and the day of my passing—pause for a moment of remembrance. My parents would crumble because that is what heavy grief does, maybe any grief does.

When I was in high school, I took a class called The Good Death. It was a class about death and the importance of looking it squarely in the eye and acknowledging it as a force. It was taught by my favorite teacher, Terrance McKittrick. He had us watch a documentary one day and in it, the man in the documentary explained that when someone passes away, the living get to feast on the dead. I was mortified, that sounded awful and cruel. I imagined a carcass like in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when the unsuspecting guests realize they are all eating Eddie. When the lights came up and class ended, I lingered and asked Terrance what that meant.

“Oh, it’s what dying reveals,” he said opaquely. 

“When someone dies everyone who knew them comes together and shares stories about their life and you learn wisdom that you would have otherwise never learned if they were still alive. This is feasting on the knowledge of a life.”

We stood in the corner of the classroom where his desk was surrounded by bookcases and drawn windows. 

“And what happens,” I asked, “if you didn’t know them at all?”

“Then you may be the luckiest, because not only can you learn all the wisdom of their life, but you can bring the people who remind you of that person, deceased and alive, to the feast as well. There is always room at the table of someone who has passed away and the table has no time limit. You can sit there as long as you like.”

In that class we didn’t learn anything we didn’t instinctually know. Rather, we became affirmed that our instincts were to be trusted. That grief was not linear, that it lasted often longer than people would console you for, and that the world may move on quite quickly, but you could still be sitting at the table of their feast and eating alone.  

One class began by Terrence reminding us that every death makes us re-negotiate grief. That this negotiation is one of the courses of the feast, and you must negotiate grief, and grip, and grapple with it when the passage has opened, because life will keep moving and you ought not to forget that you have grieved before. 

“To forget that you have grieved, is the same as forgetting you have loved.” Terrence said. 

“And you need both. You need to invite both to the table.”