competitive sorrow

On Being Tender to the Living

Years ago — twenty-one this past August — I lost my father after a car accident.

I’ve written about this both publicly and privately, which is how I tend to metabolize everything in my life; it took me almost a decade to grok it, as my friend Annie Lamott likes to say. Not to truly fathom his loss, per se, but to be able to step back and see with some level of objectivity the giant unspooled thread of grief that his death left knotted at my feet. I went through the robotic motions during the week following the accident while he was still alive, in a coma: there were car insurance papers to file and medical meetings to have and a lawyer to hire and the realization that he’d sold his burial plot when he divorced my mother in 1978. There was magical thinking: I would walk into his room in the ICU and he’d be sitting up, doing the Times crossword puzzle in ink, and asking me to time him. There was my stepmother, critically injured and in a different hospital, and her sons who, in their own frantic grief, removed my father’s will from the condo our parents shared. There was my aunt, the family matriarch, who more or less suddenly wanted me to vaporize. There was another family member who sharply admonished me for my quiet sorrow when I had to remove my father from life support: When my father died, this person said, taking ownership of my pain, I didn’t have the luxury of grief.

For more than two decades, those words have careened around the inside of my head. I didn’t have the luxury of grief. The luxury of grief. The paratactic: luxury, grief. I didn’t have it. For a time, I was too close to these words, and they made no sense in the way that sometimes, a word that we use every day of our lives simply looks wrong, like box, or this: are we spelling it right? Does it sound right? I didn’t have the luxury of grief. It made no sense to me, and so I had to break it down into sections. I didn’t have meant this person didn’t have something that I did; the luxury means, by dictionary definition, a condition of abundance, or great ease and comfort; of grief means of sorrow, sadness, anguish. It also means — as in don’t give me any grief — harassment, irritation, annoyance. The fact of my grief had become, for this person, a competition; I had something — she implied that I had taken it away from her — that she didn’t. She had made it proprietary: my grief was bigger than your grief, she was saying. And so I won’t allow you to have yours: I will trivialize it, belittle it, dismiss it so that you will no longer mourn the loss itself, but instead, the memory of my reaction to it.

Her words stuck to me like sludge. Janna Malamud Smith describes shame similarly, as viscose grime. And this is what competitive sorrow sets up for the anguished, as we try to carve our way through a jungle of darkness: that we should somehow carry shame and apology for our despair, which in turn leads to profound isolation. Suddenly, we find ourselves carrying the burden not only for our own loss, but for the way others feel about our loss. We want to mourn; they want to taxonomize.

It seems to me that there is no greater act of inhumanity than to not acknowledge the sorrow of another, and to not let them have the time and space for ritual. Animals seem to understand this: elephants mourn loss, their herds providing support for the anguished. So do apes and dolphins. But we have become increasingly incapable of allowing others to sit with their pain, although this sitting is itself a part of bereavement rituals, certainly in the Abrahamic traditions: in Islam, the family and community of the deceased come together for seven days after their loss. In Judaism, the family and community of the deceased come together for seven days after their loss. In both traditions, the dead must be buried within twenty-four hours. In both traditions, the mourners are acknowledged, recognized, cared for compassionately by their communities. In the Shinto tradition of a Buddhist friend, she and her family observed a forty-nine day period of mourning when her father died. A Hindu friend from Mumbai with whom I went to grade school observed the traditional thirteen days of mourning when she lost her mother.

No matter who we are: we all do this.

When my father died in 2002, I was pinned with a kriah — a black ribbon torn to represent the rending of one’s garments, and a tradition that goes back to the days of Joseph and Jacob in Genesis 37:34 — as was my stepmother and my aunt. As his child, mine was pinned over my heart; just as the presiding rabbi was about to lean forward to attach it to my blouse, the luxury of grief person held their hand up and said But wait just a second here … as though they had to give it some further thought.

Emotional warfare uses the heart as its battlefield, and it does not care about the gore that is left behind. It is not just used to maim; it is meant specifically to desecrate memory, be it at the hands of an army or a step-sister. When we watch the news — if we watch the news; I maintain that the human constitution is not meant to be bombarded with such images of unspeakable horror because we have no way to organize and metabolize it, and that leads to becoming inured to it, which further leads to dehumanizing, which further leads to demonizing — it is important to think about ritual: what can be done and what can’t. How are these humans on both sides — mothers for their babies; fathers for their sons; children for their parents; everyone for their elders — actually processing their sorrow? Left in the hands of the news — also, both sides — and the sudden experts who have about as much experience and knowledge of the history of the place as my terrier, we are told that one’s sorrow simply isn’t as important as another’s. One’s loss matters less than another’s. Even at times of such wild conflagration lurks the bizarre need to be bigger and better; to have more importance, and more value. And that taxonomizing and weighing of grief is as devastating as any rocket.

We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most writes Robert Macfarlane, in Underland. If only, in our wobbly humanity, we were able to remember that.