Maria Popov has a thoughtful literary web site called Brainpickings. She recently published an essay by Joan Didion on the subject of grief. She notes, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days….”
Note: For me it has been one memorial service last weekend in Pennsylvania for my lovely sister; another tomorrow in Seattle for a young physician colleague who succumbed to a malignant brain tumor. Didion implies that we spring from nothingness and return there. I simply don’t agree. My own logic prefers Aristotle who reasoned backward that there must be a creative force – one that he called the Unmoved Mover – energy itself, the source of being. Belief in God and an afterlife is an act of faith – but so is not believing. Our own existence is so improbable that it lies beyond our ability to figure it all out. But in our human way, most of us try to put meaning into existence – whether we are secular humanists or have an underlying religious/spiritual belief system. No matter what, grief strikes us all.