Why We Say We Lost Someone When They Die

Recently someone said they thought it was odd that people will say, when someone they love has died, that they’ve ‘lost’ that person. I used to think it was odd too…until my husband died. Now I find myself saying, “I lost my husband.”

This came to mind tonight because I wrote in my journal: Oh my love my heart aches for you. The anguish at your loss is still overwhelming.

Of course—this is why we say we ‘lost’ someone when they died. Not because we’re saying death is like losing your car keys and we think the person will be found (although there is that wild irrational hope). It’s that death is loss. Profound loss. When someone we love dies, that means we have lost a part of our life, a part of our self, the part that was that person. I have lost Arthur. I am suffering the loss of his physical being in my life.  

Books about Grief I

I love to read, so I’ve been searching out all the books on grieving I can find. I’ve read mostly memoirs, personal accounts of the author’s passage through grief. Interestingly, the books I’ve found so far are about the loss of a spouse or a parent. For some reason the best-known books in this genre don’t seem to include books by those who have lost a child. Is that loss too painful to write about?

My favorite book, by far, and clearly a favorite of many because it is often mentioned, is C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. The book is very short but quite powerful—raw, immediate, passionate, questioning. There were many passages when my eyes were too full of tears to see the page. I felt like he expressed my feelings over and over again.

Lewis is remarkably honest about the details of his grief and about how his wife’s death caused him to question both his faith and the nature of God (you can read pertinent passages here).

His questioning of God rang true for me. I was shocked that the other writers I’ve read didn’t talk about this. Grief was an existential crisis for me that entailed the questioning of everything. Lewis doesn’t question the existence of God, but asks whether God is a Cosmic Sadist, or a Vet intent on Vivisection, tearing our guts apart while we’re still alive for some reason of His own. I wanted to know what the purpose of life was—what’s the point if we’re just going to die?

Lewis describes how he desperately wants to know where his beloved wife is, and hates platitudes like “she’s at peace” or “she’s with God.” His experience was that once he passed through the early days of desperation and was less passionately seeking her presence, he began to experience her presence in a unique way. Not in the ways he would have thought, but with an unemotional, almost intellectual knowing.

This book gave me the sense that I wasn’t alone, that others had been here before me.

New Year's Eve

I’m not celebrating. I just wrote my friend to tell her I wouldn’t be coming to her party tonight.

Today is the last day of the last year my husband was alive. How can I be glad that it’s ending, this fragile link to his life? How can I celebrate the end of this most horrible, most precious year?

I wrote yesterday about the ‘strange logic of grief.’ This is another example. Ordinarily I think of New Year’s as just an arbitrary day of the calendar; we have to pick one day to start a year with, after all. But this year the meaning is all twisted up with my sadness and loss: as long as it is 2015 Arthur was alive this year. Tomorrow it will be last year.

My last photo of Arthur, taken February 2015

The Unopened Letter

From the NY Times article

Last weekend the New York Times published a beautiful essay called “The Unopened Letter.” One day a friend gave the author a letter. A letter from his mother who had been dead for seven years. The letter had been misplaced when the author was training to be a pilot; the story is irrelevant here (but interesting!).

The question became: should he open the letter? Of course it would be wonderful to have the experience of hearing his dear mother’s voice coming through a letter one more time. But then that experience would be over and done for the rest of his life.

The author says he has had the letter now two years and still hasn’t opened it.

For now it’s enough to look at the blue stick-figure airplane my mom drew on the envelope. To emphasize the word “airmail,” of course, but surely the angle of the climbing jet’s nose is jauntier than necessary, except perhaps for an aspiring pilot. For now it’s enough to look at her handwriting, at my name in her hand, and to remember that until I open it, I know I’ll hear from her once more.

Some of his friends say they’d have torn the envelope open immediately. Others say they understand why he’s left it unopened.

I understand. I am so blessed: I have 52 hours of Arthur and I talking with each other. These are episodes of our A Question Of Meaning TV show, which we recorded over the course of a year, five years ago. Watching them is a bittersweet joy. So far this year I’ve watched 21 episodes and uploaded them to YouTube, but I’m already feeling the reluctance to finish. Once I’ve watched them all, there will be no new video of Arthur to watch. 

I described this to a friend as the ‘strange logic of grief.’ Things that seem right to me now would have made no sense to me before.

Fertile Emptiness

In the last year my mantra has been ‘everything that has a beginning has an end.’ Sometimes I would turn it around and say, ‘in order to have beginnings, you must have endings.’

This gave me some peace, because it placed Arthur’s death in the nature of things, but I still felt myself floundering. I was focused on endings. All I could see was that everything in my life had ended. I felt a deep and profound emptiness.

Then I met a new friend a month ago, a very loving and compassionate woman named Kitty. When she heard me talk about what I am going through with Arthur’s death she recommended a book that had helped her in the past, called Transitions, by William Bridges. Kitty sent me a one-page synopsis she had made for herself. What really grabbed my attention was Mr. Bridges’ suggestion that transitions include a ‘period of fertile emptiness’ between an ending and a beginning.

Reading that phrase brought a flood of relief. I could see that I had been scared by my feelings of emptiness. I thought I felt that way because there was something wrong with me: I didn’t have enough close friends, or a ‘real’ job to distract me, or family living close. Reading that phrase allowed me to accept the emptiness: this is a fundamental aspect of the transition I am going through.

Many years ago Mr. Bridges was going through a transition in his own life; he had quit a job without a clear idea of what to do next. At this time he held his first ‘transition seminar.’ He discovered that endings and transitions take all kinds of forms. There was a woman in that first seminar who had just had a baby. She seemed out of place amongst all the people suffering from endings like divorce and job loss until they realized that this was her first baby and she was mourning the loss of the childfree relationship with her husband.

Mr. Bridges talks a lot about how traditional societies had rituals to help people cope with the transitions in life. Since our culture has lost these tools, we have to find our own way. But by recognizing the basic elements of those ancient rituals we can get an idea how to bring their essence into our lives.

Think for example of a standard ‘coming of age’ ritual. The young people are removed from their families—their childhood has ended. They spend time apart from the group, often alone in the wilderness. Then they return to the tribe, often with a new name—a new chapter of their life has begun. The section in the middle of the ritual—the time apart—is the crucial element in the story. This is when the young person has the visions that define the rest of their lives.

I can see how I had the assumption that beginnings grow immediately out of endings. Mr. Bridges suggests that this is one of the reasons so many in our culture have trouble with endings; we don’t know how to allow ourselves the space for emptiness. We’ve lost the concept, the wisdom, of fallow time. The ancient rituals allowed for a time out-of-time, an empty space, a fertile emptiness.

Mr. Bridges gives some suggestions to help you in the empty time. Among these are: find time to be alone; keep a journal of your feelings, dreams, thoughts, and/or unusual happenings; write an autobiography, which is a way to get a fresh perspective now that this ending has occurred; and do a private retreat.

This last week I have spent in solitude. I felt the dark days around the solstice calling me to be quiet. In this time of aloneness I sketched out an autobiography and I can feel its power, helping me understand who I am and where I’ve been, readying me to move into a new beginning.

Love and Beauty

Before Arthur died I tended towards agnosticism, if not outright atheism. I have always had a skeptical mind. Arthur was deeply spiritual and this was a thorn between us.

One of the components of grief is a searching for meaning: Why does life exist if it’s just going to end in death? What is the meaning of being alive? How can someone be so vital one moment and in the next moment the light goes out of their eye and they are gone even though their body remains? Why does this universe exist? What’s the point?

These questions swirled in my mind in the first grueling months of grief.

In those months there were also moments where I had undeniable feelings of connection to something deep and true underlying the material world. These moments gave me a lifeline, a spark of hope in the gloom.

Eventually I had enough of these experiences that I realized I could no longer be an agnostic. There is something deeper, something more than the physical. I know because I have felt it.

I refer to my new faith as STM: Some Thing More.

The two pillars of this faith (at least so far) are the existence of love and beauty.

Beauty spoke to me in the deepest hours of my grief, lifting my heart and giving me the strength to carry on. On hikes last spring I was regularly struck with the bounteous beauty in all things (Bounteous Beauty blog post).

Nature kept whispering to me: Beauty is the underlying essence of the All.

Love. In my grief I felt the love in my heart expanding. How does love endure past death? How could I love Arthur more now than when he was alive? Why is love one of the greatest needs of the human heart, the need to love, and the need to be loved?

Love is a force at the heart of human life.

And not just human. Recently I saw videos of two very unlikely animals enjoying having their stomachs rubbed: a bat and a penguin. Not long ago I went on a tour of a local nature center with a woman who works there, and when she called to the wolves in their open enclosure they came running, wagging their tails like dogs, and hung out near the fence with our group. 

How many videos are there on FaceBook that show animals from different species caring for one another? 

Perhaps when humans remove the need for survival from animals’ lives, by providing all the food and shelter they need, we create the environment in which the lion can lie down with the lamb.

Why? Because Love is the underlying essence of the All.

Love and Beauty. Some Thing More.

Off Balance

I’m a fairly coordinated person. Ordinarily. But in the months after Arthur died I had some painful falls.

The first was on my first hike after Arthur’s death, early last spring. As I was coming down a series of switchbacks on my way home I stumbled and fell flat on my face. I had my camera slung over my shoulder; how I kept from breaking it I don’t know. But I did slice open my left thumb next to the nail, and abraded some skin on my left hand and right elbow. All in all I was very blessed not to have hurt myself worse. The weird thing is I stumbled on the way up the trail in almost exactly the same spot.

Then ten days later I wrote this in my journal:

Here’s something weird: I’m often uncoordinated, still, after all these weeks. It’s like I’m a different person. I just did a little housecleaning. I was walking backwards dusting on top of the screen and fell over the center speaker, falling flat on my back. The center speaker has been sitting in that same position on the floor for five years. Then half an hour later I mopped the wood floors. When I finished I tried to position the mop in the bucket so it would sit without tipping over, and I ended up tipping the bucket over and spilling most of the water on the office rug and floor. And I still have a bandage on my thumb reminding me of that horrible fall on the hike ten days ago.

These accidents were brought to mind by something I read recently. A woman had fallen and broken her foot not long after her husband died. While the orthopedist was working with her foot she asked him whether this was a common injury for people who are grieving, and, she wrote: “The orthopedist, without even looking up from my injured foot said, ‘Of course, someone who is grieving has lost their balance.’”

In my worst moments of grief it feels like the ground has been pulled out from under me and I’m falling…

Death Cafe

Last spring I spent some days wandering around downtown Asheville; I felt a strong need to be around people. I was surprised to find a ‘Before I Die’ wall on one of the major thoroughfares. This was a chalkboard with one sentence repeated over and over again: “Before I Die I’d Like to_______________.” Passersby were invited to fill in the blank with chalk that was always available in a little cup.

People had written things like: make a difference, go to Paris, be loved, be happy. I filmed there one day, which you can see here: 

There was a sign on the wall that told who sponsored the wall. It was a group called “Third Messenger.” Another thing they sponsored was something called “Death Café.”

When I got home I looked the group up online and found that, unfortunately, they weren’t going to be having another Death Café for a few months.

When the Café finally happened it was totally different than I’d imagined. I thought it would be a bunch of grieving, lost souls like me, sharing about people who had died, like a grief support group. Instead it was in the spirit of the ‘Before I Die’ Wall: What can you do in your life now to make your death a time of peace, not regret? What shift do you need to make in your priorities? What do you need to start doing? What do you need to stop doing?

We started with a guided meditation where we were asked to imagine ourselves on our deathbed in extreme old age. What would we want to have done in our lives? Who would we imagine to be with us as we die? Then we imagined dying in 10 years, then 1 year, then 1 month, then tomorrow. By that time the reality of death was quite vivid.

After that we broke into small groups of 5 or 6 and talked for an hour. At first it felt awkward, of course, but it was amazing how quickly my group began to share at a very deep, intimate level. And from the way none of the groups wanted to stop at the end of that hour, other people had the same experience. I’d never before experienced such a shift with strangers. Quite remarkable.

A member of my group is a hospice nurse, and she said that people die in all sorts of ways, just like they’re born in lots of different ways, but they all get to the place of peace before they die. I liked hearing that. She also said she was hesitant to mention it because she doesn’t feel like it’s helped her at all with her fear of death.

What I found out is that Death Café is an international movement that started in England four years ago. On the website, they say “Our objective is to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.” In other words, when we recognize we are going to die we take life more seriously. (http://deathcafe.com)

There is such a taboo in our culture about speaking about death, and Death Café is trying to change that. There are Death Cafés in many cities in the U.S., and if there isn’t one in your city, the website has a guide to starting your own. I left that first night knowing I’d be back every time I could. I was at one last night. I’ll be back again.

H is for Hawk

I find myself voraciously consuming books about grief. H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, was received with rapture by critics earlier this year; a New York Times review called it ‘breathtaking’; it won awards.

A friend gave it to me, thinking I would find solace in it; the book has been promoted as the story of a young woman coping with her father’s sudden death. I expected it to be about grief and loss. It wasn’t at all. It was about Ms. Macdonald’s relationship with a hawk.

The New York Times has just listed it as one of the ten best books of 2015, and I want to speak up about it, to let others know that this is not a book that will help someone who is grieving.

Here are my journal entries as I read the book last summer:

Reading H is for Hawk and feeling somewhat outraged. Where is her poor father? He almost doesn’t exist. Or her mother and her grief? Her father was a photographer. He was out taking photos one night when he had a heart attack and died. The last photo in his camera was taken from the ground; perhaps it was taken as he was having his heart attack. Ms Macdonald says she looked at it once and never wanted to see it again, like it was something too horrible to consider. Really? I’d cherish that photograph. That was her father saying, “Look! I am dying and this is what I am seeing.” It says to me what an amazing man her father was, capable of documenting even that (like the female scientist in the film “Brainstorm”). It was her father saying, “This—death—is also worthy of documentation.” An incredibly courageous and beautiful act, and you don’t want to look at it?! Here is a gift from your father of his last impressions and you don’t want it? I can’t understand this.

H is for Hawk reminds me of another grief memoir, by a woman who lost her mother (The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O’Rourke). It is self-indulgent in similar ways. In these memoirs about the death of parents, and admittedly my sample size is still quite small, the authors don’t seem consumed by grief like I was, like what C.S. Lewis describes in A Grief Observed. They skip over the emotions of grief and spend most of their time on themselves, on how they healed. H for Hawk is like Wild, where the grieving ‘child’ goes on an epic journey of self-discovery. But:

Do they wrestle with their relationship with the person who died? Is their book about becoming a better person because of that wrestling, or is it about taking on a difficult task to distract them from grief?

I would say the latter is true for H is for Hawk.

Read more in Hawk. She writes short passages on life and death, yet they don’t seem profound to me at all. Her father is still a mystery and barely mentioned. Her grief is just assumed, like of course she’s sad because her father died. ‘Nuff said. There’s no substance to it, it doesn’t make you feel anything when she says she’s grieving, sometimes I think she read what other people said grieving was like to be able to throw in a comment here or there. And even these are astoundingly infrequent.

I came home and finished H is for Hawk. What a disappointment. I read some 1-star reviews for it on Amazon yesterday while filling a few minutes before going to a dinner engagement. I agreed with all of them: boring, all about hawks, nothing about father, self-indulgent, has emotional problems not connected to grief, pretentious, anytime she came close to sharing an emotion or feeling she’d duck and run, padded with T.H. White in an incredibly annoying fashion (a large section of the book wasn’t about her at all, it documented the author T.H. White’s struggles to learn how to be a falconer).

Who are these literary types who certify books like this as ‘dazzling’ and lavish awards? My only conclusion is these critics have no idea what grief is.

Everything Is NOT Going To Be All Right

An acquaintance gave me a book when he learned that my husband had died, called Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working through Grief. The author, Martha Hickman, is familiar with grief; her daughter died in her teens. Every day has a quote culled from a wide variety of sources and a brief commentary by Ms. Hickman.

I have found the book only mildly helpful, partly because of her Christian framework. Of most interest to me are the quotes, some of which have been quite meaningful.

For the first few months of my grief I read it every day, along with passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s poetry was a lifeline for me, day after day I found solace and peace in his words.

I quit reading Ms. Hickman’s book early this fall because it just wasn’t feeding me. But I’ve picked it back up just to go through the rest of the book looking for useful quotes.

Today I got to October 31, and the quote was: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” [Julian Norwich] Ms. Hickman writes how someone told her, when her daughter died, “Everything’s going to be all right.” She thought that was crazy at the time, but then found herself using those same words when she comforted another woman who lost a child. Clearly she now thinks this sentiment has comfort-value.

I can’t imagine how horrible I’d have felt if someone had said that to me in the first days of my grief. I remember being somewhat appalled when people told me my grief would lessen over time. Even here, at ten months in, I find the idea offensive. I don’t think “Everything is going to be all right” is comforting at all. Everything isn’t all right, and without my lover there will always be something amiss. He’s gone and there’s a hole in my life. How can that be all right?

Maybe at some future date I will see that everything is all right, but I just don’t see how that is an appropriate thing to say to someone in the midst of grief. What means something to me now is ‘I know you’re hurting; this grief is a reflection of your love. Embrace the love and the grief. Let me embrace you and weep with you.’

The Phone Call

One of the consequences of having suffered the death of a loved one (my husband of 34 years died three months ago) is the people around you get a little nervous. They are afraid of reminding you of your loss (as if there’s any chance you’ll forget), or of exposing you to something that will make your broken heart bleed anew.

This happened to me this weekend, when I was at a friend’s house. For some time she has wanted to share some of this years’ Oscar-nominated short films with me, and this night we settled in to watch her favorite, ‘The Phone Call.’ It quickly became apparent that the film is about a man who is in despair over his wife’s death, and my friend hit the pause button, horrified, and apologized for her thoughtlessness. I replied that not only do I not want people to censor themselves around me, I also have to get past any reluctance to see or read about people encountering death, because that is one of the great themes of art and literature.

In fact, I have found that art provides one of the best solaces for grief (being outdoors is another). And I am not alone in this. I’ve read a few ‘grief memoirs’ recently and every person has said that poetry helped them cope.

If you haven’t seen ‘The Phone Call,’ I’m going to give some spoilers so you might want to stop reading now until you’ve seen this beautiful film. Here's the trailer: