I have had cause lately to think about
grief, and about rebirth. My 24 year old cousin was killed in an accident in
November, and when I was in the US in April I went to the ceremony interring
him in Arlington National Cemetery (he was a soldier, a first lieutenant, an
apache helicopter pilot, and one hell of a fantastic kid). As we walked behind
the horse drawn casket and to the graveside, I thought about the rituals we
have for working through our grief in all different kinds of ways.
The US Army really understands how to mark
this kind of grief. The ritual of it was magnificent in its way, cathartic and
powerful. Twenty one gun salute, marching band, taps at the graveside set to
the percussion of our tears. James’s funeral in November was another kind of
catharsis—more personal, more raw, and perhaps the most perfect funeral I have
ever seen (can one say that a funeral for a young man not yet in the prime of
his life is perfect? I now think I can: James’s death was horrific, but his
funeral was perfect). James’s presence was palpable there in the stories from
his friends, his three grieving (but so articulate) siblings, his aunt and
uncle. The church was alive with the sobbing of the hundreds of people who were
there, but it sparked with our laughter too as we remembered his quirky half
smile and outrageous hijinks.
These two ceremonies for James have
bookended my wondering about grief and ritual in a more daily way. The image of
my aunt and uncle holding hands as they walked behind the casket at Arlington
will stay with me always. United by their grief as well as torn apart by it, I
watched their love for one another deepen as they moved through the tragedy
each parent fears the most. There is some way the enormous loss of my cousin
has shone a light for me on what it means to grieve in large and small ways,
and what it means to mark it well—and how grieving changes us in some way and
brings us together.
And here is what we know about heartbreak:
it hurts like hell. It sends us into a dark so black we almost forget what
light looks like. We curl up, wounded and howling (or, perhaps worse, wounded
and silent). And we know that the pain changes over time, but those changes
themselves are variable. Heartbreak can tear us apart and make us smaller. We
all have images of those who were ruined by their grief, whose lives fall, Miss
Havisham-like, into a cobweb-draped stasis. Or it can bring us together and
make us bigger than we were before, more able to connect and feel more deeply,
more compassionate to others in their grief, more alive and more able to love.
What makes the difference between these two
outcomes of the same event? And what about the other, more common heartbreaks
we feel: the loss of a job, of a lover, of an image of ourselves we realize will
never emerge? I have been working this
week with a group of leaders in a changing market, trying to help their
colleagues mourn the passing of an era when business was easy and plentiful and
come into a time when business is hard and confusing. I have been watching the
grief of those who lost everything in Nepal, the body bags of Ebola victims in
Liberia. The world is made of hardship
of such variation that it’s hard to even know how to deal with it. The scale of
heartbreak is hardly relevant to the heartbroken; thinking of someone else’s
greater misfortune has never actually cheered me up; it has just made me sadder
for all of us (and perhaps a little guilty about feeling so sad for something
so trivial as my own personal sadness).
But perhaps what I learned from my trip to cancerland,
from the grief of the cancer of others, from the heartbreak of my aunt and
uncle and cousins and the ordinary grief of our everyday lives is this:
heartbreak peels us open. It shatters the normalcy of our former lives, of our
former relationships. It reveals our innermost secrets to ourselves. And beyond
the searing pain is a new possibility for how we could love, work, laugh again.
Rilke says "It seems to me
that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis
because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar
presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is
for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition
where we cannot remain standing."
In the US, cracks in art works are mended
as carefully as possible; we want the broken thing to appear to never have been
injured. In Japan, when a crack appears, sometimes the owner fills it with
gold; it’s called “wabi-sabi”—the embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Here
the broken thing sparkles though its imperfections, because of its imperfections.
It is months—perhaps years—too soon to know
whether James’s death will bring beautiful things in the world. And of course
none of those things will be as wonderful as his capacity to weave a story I
would totally believe until his sly grin gave it away. None of those things
will make up for the loss of the children and grandchildren he might have had;
none of them will save his comrades in the US Army on their next tour of duty.
But James’s friends and comrades and family will live in new ways because he’s
gone. We are all changed now.
This week marked the death of the other cousin
I’ve lost far too young. Mary Ellen’s death more than 20 years ago changed the
course of my life—helping me understand that life is short and uncertain, and
that love is the only thing that really matters. It was because Mary Ellen died
that we moved to Augusta, and it might well be because Mary Ellen died that we
moved to New Zealand. The cracks are horrific, and they are coated with gold.
This week I honour Mary Ellen. I honour
James. I honour the pain of my clients in their changing worlds, the pain of
those who live with grief that never shows up on the news. I believe that it is
heartbreak as much as joy (more than joy?) that connects us, ultimately. We
could descend into cobwebby darkness; we could caulk over the cracks so no one
notices them. But each of these is a loss of the utility of our grief. It is
our scar tissue, far more than our perfection, that allows us to see and love
one another. Let us hear “our astonished emotions living” and let us hear the
astonished emotions of those around us. Let us paint the heartbreak and craft a
golden net that holds us all together as members of the heartbroken human race.
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