The Language of Grief

Grief agitates us in a spin cycle of sharply opposed desires. We yearn for the soothing presence of others, and we yearn for the detachment of islanded isolation. We resent that the world is disinclined to stop, and we pray that, like an engine low on lubricant, it does not seize. We covet meaning, and we know that meaning is annulled, an echo of a ricochet. But mostly we want words of comfort, words that will salve the raw wound of loss, words, like the balm of Gilead, unguent with curative power.

I have been thinking about the words we offer to those who have lost a loved one. Two years ago my mother was stolen from me before she was taken from me by Alzheimer’s Disease. She was the most hospitable person I have known, yet, in the months before she died, she remembered me only as the “nice man” who had brought her three chocolate chip cookies after a Fourth of July dinner at her assisted living facility. A bit less than a year later my father died from “failure to thrive,” or so the death certificate said, but what it meant, I suspect, was a systems failure entailed by old age. If so, it would have been, to my knowledge, the only thing my father failed at. Two funerals in two years, and at them many people spoke many words to my brother Dennis and me to pierce the ruthless grief we felt. I found that the discourse of comfort does not comfort. The language of condolence is too meager, too much a closed set of assertions that mean well but do not mean.

But how could it be otherwise? There is always a lurking moreness to the felt experience of grief that is resistant to words. How can we know the embodiedness of another’s grief? How can we compact ourselves inside the fractal experience of the grief that circumferences another? Our own affairs call to us, and, by necessity, we must turn to them. We cannot linger. Yet, we would be kind. We are unsettled by another’s loss, pained by another’s suffering. And so, we appeal beyond the moment, to the future, to the healing embrace of time. But time has not healed the wound of my parents’ loss. The grief abides, though it has attenuated, tapered to a slender shadow athwart my days. Still, the threads suturing that wound periodically tear open, and I must muster myself, resolve myself into an acceptance that I will be intermittently heart-stung. Our mourning is always, finally, a drama enacted before a house in which we are the only audience.

I am uncomforted by the thought that they are at rest in a better place. Perhaps they are. I don’t know. I find myself willing but, finally, right now anyway, unable to share that which is assumed, that which is gestured toward, by the phrase “a better place.” It tokens a sacred mystery, and I crave surety. That better place, for me, would be here, where I could again listen that loving banter and bicker of a couple married nearly six decades; where I could watch my mom make spaghetti sauce from scratch—“no damn Ragu in this house”—and tell me that when she married my dad she knew how to make only popcorn and fudge—“the fudge was great” my dad would say, “but she kept burning the popcorn;” where I could watch my dad in his furnace room workshop crafting cabinets and tables with the hand tools he had inherited from his father; where my dad told me how he worked his way through college taking horseracing bets over the phone for his Uncle John, a local bookie, how he was able to purchase a new car with cash, and how my mother made him quit when I was born. My mom and dad localized me, emplaced me, hailed me with their familiar address. Now that they are gone, I have found myself asking, am I still a son? Am I a motherless and fatherless child? How am I annotated? How much has their passing severed the ligatures that bound my identity?

I have the memories, I was told, and they will never die. But some do, and many fade, or become partial, or smudged by time’s passing, or fragmented by time’s shear. I feel a stab of guilt when the clarity of recall escapes me, when I have lost the continuity, the trace; when past time slips the fetter of remembrance and becomes a barely glimpsed shadow; when the beckoning, the summoning go truant; when the conjuring is malnourished by consciousness.

But some memories do remain, and will remain because I have made them narratives and pinned those narratives to two photographs I display on a bookshelf. Those narratives are my tea-saturated madeleines; they are my consolatory ceremony. In every telling they remaster for me the original experience. They are my counter-discourse to the pale language of grief. They encapsulate, for me, the essence of my parents, transform their thereness to hereness. There is my mother in her floppy gardening hat, holding a hand trowel, bent over the tomato plants she nurtured every year along the south wall of the garage, tomatoes that she coaxed to firm-skinned fruition, tomatoes that ripened richly red in the tendering warmth of her devoted attention and care, tomatoes that my diverticulosis-stricken father could not eat, but which I ate, like apples, like the love apples they were. And there is my father, dark and handsome and in the prime of his manhood, standing alongside the Little League team he coached, the team of which I was a member, an expansion team, a rag-tag collection of cast-offs from the other teams, a team my dad was told he should not expected too much of, a team he nonetheless led to the Little League World Series championship. My mother raised aspirations; my father defied expectations.

In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the 14-year-old protagonist the trauma of grief by making lists of the things that bring him joy: lists of his favorite foods, his favorite basketball players, his favorite books and people and musicians. His list-making is a small act of transcendence, a ritual of order and purpose to countermand the disordered and arbitrary. Those photos on my shelf, the narratives within which I’ve cocooned them—those are my lists, my ritual, my talisman, my arrested moments, my frieze of memories, my small act of suspending the finite, the contingent.