Incurable things

In the end, we want the devastation to stop.

In four weeks, it will be a year and a half since Diane’s death. There’s no clear-cut, well-defined metric by which progress toward healing can be assessed. By many measures, I’m doing far better than I was (say) fourteen months ago, when the grief was still fresh and raw, and when I was still bleeding from every pore. Then, the intense longing and pining for Diane was nearly unendurable. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to go on living; and that terrified me. I was almost completely alone; and the world felt like a suffocating place. Those memories, though I try not to reactivate them now, are a grim reminder that grief is a massive trauma. There’s a lot of nonsense out there that minimizes how awful it really is; people don’t want to stare awful things in the face, lest they have to acknowledge that they might well be the next victim.

There’s a highly influential theory in psychology, “terror management theory”, about just this. Many people just can’t face the reality that their loved ones will someday die, and that they themselves will also. This is why some people can’t go to funerals, and can’t visit seriously ill people in the hospital, and can’t even walk through a graveyard or stand seeing a hearse. We all know, at a highly abstract theoretical level, that death is real and universal; but many people cope simply by choosing not to think about it, to pretend that it will never happen, to console themselves with the notion that it must surely be a long way off yet, outside their so-called “psychological time horizon” and thus something they can think about later — not today, not yet.

Yet, death occurs. I didn’t expect to lose my beautiful Diane at such a relatively young age, though her parents, and three of her siblings, had all died before seeing their seventieth birthdays; I suppose that she and I were in denial about it. Death is no respecter of persons, though all of us imagine that we are somehow exempt. In one famous study, young people were rated on a 0-10 scale in terms of their physical attractiveness (the standards are somewhat subjective, and culturally bounded, yet we all know cute when we see it), and their fear of death was also measured using a standard questionnaire. Sure enough, those with higher attractiveness scores had lower fear of death, which makes no logical sense. “I’m too pretty to die” isn’t going to impress the Grim Reaper; even supermodels are mortal, but somehow, we think that if we’re beautiful enough, or successful enough, or smart enough, or good enough, we’ll live to be a hundred. It doesn’t work that way; but we clutch our paper shields anyway, and go forth to fight the dragon.

Those like me who believe strongly in God and Heaven are somewhat insulated from all this; indeed, one of the classical Christian virtues was the deliberate contemplation of one’s own mortality on a regular basis, and there are echoes of that in some other faith traditions as well. That doesn’t mean that death is trivial for believers; but empirical research shows that faith (the kind that offers full assurance) makes a difference, though there are complicating factors. But all of us, believer or not, also tend to make some investments in what is known as “symbolic immortality”: doing things that make us feel that who we were in this world will somehow outlive us, that we won’t be humanly forgotten. People speak of living on through their children, through their achievements, through impressive monuments. I hope that, when I’m gone, people will belatedly read my essays and realize how brilliant they all were; but that may largely be a fantasy.

On some online grief groups, it’s common for people to ask if the death of a loved one makes them more worried about their own mortality. This didn’t happen for me when Diane died; I think of my own mortality regularly and always have. But for some, this apparently hits them like a thunderbolt, though (again) everyone knows in a conceptual way that death does exist. Others start taking the idea of a “bucket list” seriously; I already have a nice bucket, though it needs a new handle, so I did put that on a list. Some decide (wisely in my view) that they need to get serious about deciding what they believe about ultimate reality, about the divine, about the nature of personhood; still others turn to various palliatives that are good servants but terrible masters as a way of numbing their fears. Some keep busy; yet there is, inevitably, the day the running stops.

I still have days when it simply seems impossible that Diane isn’t here and that she isn’t coming back. My love for her is as strong and true as ever it was; why isn’t it strong enough to reverse the fact of death? Intellectually, I know that’s absurd; but emotionally, it has symbolic power that’s difficult to shake. Everything still reminds me of her; of course I want that, but I also don’t want the sorrow that goes along with it. I go back and forth in my mind about whether an eventual remarriage would ever be psychologically possible for me; quite possibly it isn’t and never will be, yet a part of me thinks that then the deep grieving would end. Probably it wouldn’t; I’d be less lonely than I am now, but that’s not the same thing at all. Really, grief isn’t something curable; it’s a permanent condition with which we have to learn how to live, responsibly and productively, in this flawed, broken world we inhabit.

I try in these essays to do three things: to be true to my faith, and a witness to that which I hold most dear, and to the High Priest who meets our need; to write in a way that has some literary merit, which means that the ghost of Bennett Cerf would say of me, “the boy’s got something”; and to be honest, authentic, transparent, vulnerable about the way things really are with me. Because we can only heal when we call things by their right names: if we hide who we are from ourselves and others, we’ll stagnate and decay. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt; it is a destroyer of worlds. We have to step into the light, and say what really is; then, to the extent that healing is possible, we can experience it.

So I try to say what’s true about grief and loss. Because I’ll always love and cherish Diane, I’ll always grieve and mourn her. She’s completely happy and whole, of course, so I’m not sad for her; I’m sad for me, about the deprivation and sorrow that losing her has brought into my life, but still, it’s something permanent. It’s not as devastating as it once was, but it will always be an unwanted guest. Or perhaps not entirely unwanted; because just as I sought to be a good husband when she was alive, I want to be a good widower now that she’s gone — if I can’t have temporal happiness, I can at least have virtue and honor. It’s not always clear what that means, or what the parameters might be; some things can only be learned experientially, emically, by walking the path, solvitur ambulando as the Romans used to say. So I walk, step by baby step, limping toward glory; it’s a long and winding road, but it leads home in the end. And though I walk alone (humanly speaking) now, I do occasionally spot others on the way; usually they have large, menacing dogs. “Don’t bother him”, they say; and, in an odd correlation, the cuter the walker, the larger the dog. Don’t ask me why that is.