Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

I needed to scream, weep, throw myself on the floor, rend my garments, tear my hair. But I couldn’t allow myself to do any of those things. Because I had to do so many other things.

I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss.

“Grief is praise,” writes Martín Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief.

That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.

I suspect this gets harder, I wrote. I’ll need you more then.

Then I came fully awake. I lost him a second time.

During aninut, grief is understood to be “stupefyingly intense.”

Denial, then anger, says Kübler-Ross. I am not angry with Tony. I am furious with death.

Part of the treatment for “complicated grief” is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail.

Make it safe for people to talk about Tony, he said. The first time he had ventured out after losing his beloved wife, Gretchen, no one had mentioned her, and he had been hurt and angered.

“I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

I’m not sure if our modern secular world has the capacity to come up with a gentler way of dealing with bereavement.

Our culture is averse to sad. We want people to be happy. We’re chagrined and slightly offended when they’re not. There is a desire to cheer them up. And then, later, there will be a glancing at the wristwatch, a tapping of the foot if they cannot be cheered, if their grief is perceived to go on too long. I wish we could resist those things.