Grief, Grief

I

A few months ago, I lost my mother. Now I am experiencing capital-G Grief. As an anomic citizen of modernity, I search for books to teach me how to do things I feel insecure about. That happens to be most things. Productivity, depression, motherhood — death. On the same day I got the news, feeling completely untethered from reality, I still managed to get online to ask my AI friend du jour which books could help me face this entirely unique experience of losing one’s mother. It gave me suggestions any bookstore clerk would: The Year of Magical Thinking, A Grief Observed. But also a lesser-known book by philosopher Michael Cholbi, titled Grief: A Philosophical Guide.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, I learned that a disoriented Didion also searched for books to teach her how to live with the sudden death of her husband, which puts me in good company. This is important: that I do what Didion would have done. Whenever unsure, look up to your betters. But A Grief Observed struck me as hasty. The descriptions of his grief — the experience of visiting places, the awkward looks from friends, the fractured relationship with God — all resonated with me, and I was grateful for Jack’s company. Yet, something uncanny happens toward the end of the book, some abrupt movement that seems, in its eagerness to heal the wound, like an inexperienced illusionist’s trick. Now you see it, now you don’t. Suddenly, his grief resolved, his relationship to God, restored. A balm applied over exposed bone. Perhaps our psyches are all inexperienced illusionists; the trick works on you but everyone else can see through it.

Despite its dry and formulaic tone, Cholbi’s book was the one that best helped me frame the unprecedented state of being motherless. This is slightly ironic, since the one thing he warns in the introduction is that this book is not for those who are in the throes of grief. I didn’t heed his warning — I could not afford to. I needed something, whatever it was, to grab on to; a frame, however crooked, it didn’t matter, as long as I could hold it up to the experience and it would put the right things inside and leave the unwieldy things outside. I listened, like a dutiful child trying to get a good grade on an exam, to make mom happy. I listened as he said that the good that comes from grief is self-knowledge: when grieving shatters the self, the work of putting the shards back together might reveal cracks you didn’t know were there before. The possibility of comfort became real, within reach, and it was somehow within my power to either make good use of my grief, or let it pass and be one of the people who “grieve wrong” — like Lewis. The bottomless horror got a nice makeover; pretty clothes I could dress it up with. There would be an end to this, and not just an end, a goal. For Cholbi, grief is not merely an emotional response to loss but a process of attention. We are compelled to attend to the relationship, to what the deceased meant to us, and the shape of our lives up until that moment. The knowledge that one grieves things other than the death of persons was not news to me. But at that moment, when grieving the death of my own mother, I had completely lost access to the fact that anyone in the world can grieve anything other than the death of one’s mother.

II

In 2015 I moved to Sweden to pursue a PhD. I knew nothing about my project’s subject; to me Sweden was Swedenborg, Nobel, snow, black metal. ABBA? I was too cool for that. And I was overconfident in my ability to deal with any challenge life threw at me, all by myself. Hubris is what it was. That first year was hell.

I arrived in the deep dark, cold November. The person who picked me up at the airport said, “from now on it can only get better.” He meant the weather, which wasn’t true, and it was definitely false about everything else. Sweden might as well have been in the outer solar system. The gray, slushy everything; the naked trees with their black branches like an ink drawing made in a hurry. The landscape and my sense of self collapsed into one. Some day in that first December, as I sat in the fika room around 2 p.m., drinking coffee by myself, I looked out the window and saw the full moon shining bright against a starry sky. The uncanny discomfort that had been tightening my chest came into full view. By all my previous standards, you were not supposed to see the stars in the middle of the afternoon.

But here I was. And here was nothing I knew. I had left my previous boyfriend of five years, whom I still loved; I had left my mother, whom I still emotionally depended on; I had left my friends, whom I could still rely on for a good time — or a bad one. And I left, failing to understand what I was leaving. Leaving isn’t subtraction, it’s bisection. Moving to Sweden wasn’t my first disorienting experience, but it was my first totalitarian disorientation. I had extricated myself from my life and transplanted the mushy pulp into an unrelenting anomie without an exit door. So, I turned to books.

At first I wanted to be no-nonsense about it, so I started with books about mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn gave me the legitimacy I needed to pick up the subject. After all, I was reading the work of an actual doctor. I needed to perform magic on the self, but for the trick to work I needed permission for it to work. These days we get permission to do magic with anything by adding the epithet “scientific” to it. And magic it was.

Mindfulness was my gateway drug to more hardcore Buddhism. I searched for mindfulness retreats and became acquainted with S. N. Goenka. I wanted to immerse myself in mindfulness, but the thought of traveling to a ten-day silent retreat while already away from home — a matrioshka of estrangements, being unreachable and unable to reach anyone — scared me from going. I kept dangling that carrot in front of my face: one day, when I feel better, I will have the courage to go. The next step that made sense was to feel better so that I could go to the retreat where people go to feel better.

Together with Dōgen I read The Heart Sutra, the most studied scripture in Mahayana Buddhism. He took me from the surface to the other side, which was no other side, but the surface itself. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form; not an underlying reality to be discovered through enlightenment, but a reality that is already the case because enlightenment is already the case. Walking, standing, sitting; the mundane is wisdom. I was enlightened already. I wanted to shed the self, disrobe this false skin. I wanted to become rarefied, distinct from the “everyone else” who has “everyone else’s problems”. If problems could boil down to an inner choice of framing (and at that point, before having children, it could), if reality was one’s own ready-made object, then struggling was for the weak of mind. Dōgen’s words remained a beautiful apparatus.

Buddhism, mindfulness, and the assorted satellites of “wellness” culture were beneficial to me. I managed to get my act together, pull myself out of a depression that rendered me immobile at times, finish my doctoral degree, and have a child. All the while living without the safety net I had in my native land. I was convinced that I was sturdy, the line between delusion and reality blurred. But there were things that didn’t sit well, that had never sat well, and I kept telling myself the problem was me. It was my framing, my resistance, my attachments — not the things themselves. There was real suffering that could not breathe from within the place where everything was a top-down command.

“If sitting ever doesn’t feel good, remember that a feeling is just a thought plus a sensation, and it will pass away just as it arose.”  “Just observe the experience without identifying with any part of it and without trying to fix anything in it. Observe that you’re trying to fix that too. Before changing something anywhere, you need to kindly accept it.” “I don’t have to grasp or avoid anything. There’s no need for attachment or aversion.” “I don’t have to try to manufacture or manage any internal state, any experience, because everything is just happening anyway.” My notes, a litany of imperatives issuing instructions to myself like a commander trying to manage an unmanageable interior, denying the self while furiously I-ing, me-ing, mine-ing.

“Preciso parar de gastar dinheiro. Não tem compra que vá preencher o vazio.” ^[1] After years of litany, something starts to poke its head, trying to break through the spell. A panicked alarm sounded in my mother tongue. “Esse sofrimento está tentando chamar a minha atenção, tentando me dizer algo.
Vida?
Carreira?
Parceiro?” ^[2]

I choked myself resisting the fact that I had problems impervious to my reframing tricks. My weeks would slowly escalate into an inner panic that I didn’t allow even my analyst to hear, landing on a “bang!”, and a guilty wind down after the pressure cooker sputtered.

Then:
“Everything is fine just as it is.
Every day is a good day.”
A cryptic paraphrase of a koan:
“Why did you have a child?
I don’t know.
Not knowing is most intimate.”

It could not go on.

III

My husband and I are prone to neurotic bouts of helplessness and inadequacy. We share similar anxieties that wax and wane, bringing us together, pushing us apart. On Christmas Day he started looking somber. I recognized the look. I had been unknowingly ruminating about the same things when he told me, in an adult version of a tantrum, that he found it suffocating how we are so irrevocably unbalanced — which is a moral failure that can be witnessed by us having a messy house and chaotic children. He showed me incontrovertible evidence that we are bad people: a photo sent by his childhood friend. The well-combed blonde wife holding her well-behaved toddler, both sitting on a sparkling clean wooden floor, wearing matching Christmas onesies — red, tacky-looking things — and reading a book. The book detail was the most offensive: that I, who enjoy reading so much, have children who do not.

“How can they manage to be harmonious like that, but we can’t,” asked my husband, the affliction audible in his voice. My first instinct was to argue for all the ways that was an unfair comparison: this is a posed snapshot, a Baudrillardian simulacrum (who talks like that?), it’s not their everyday life; you can’t compare your behind-the-scenes self with their staged performance; etc ad infinitum. But then it struck me: I was giving analgesics to existential pain, treating the symptom but not the disease. I stopped cold. And said out loud: what if it’s true? I said it mostly to the part of myself that was scared. What if it’s true? What I had been saying had also been an attempt at numbing my own distress, lulling myself away from the horror I refused to name. These people might indeed be better at all of it — more balanced, harmonious, well-behaved, excellent at parenting and keeping their home tidy. “So, what then?” That probably means they are better quality people. They have it all figured out. They are living The Good Life and we are not. Ok. And then what?

When I look at the photo negative of these feelings, I now see ungrieved grief. Grief at the unlived life. Grief at the astronomer I abandoned at eight, the poet I buried at fifteen, the philosopher I couldn’t sustain at twenty-two. Grief at not having had a father who was emotionally present when he was physically present, grief at not having known that this or that person would scar me. Grief at not being better, whatever “better” meant at that time. And grief at not being able to rewind the clock and rewrite the story. Losing my mother was a loss in my life, and a loss of my life, of the life I thought I would get to live: asking for her guidance (even though I wouldn’t listen), visiting her with my children during the summer holidays (despite complaining that she’s overbearing), her attending her grandkids’ graduations (and not understanding a word). Knowing someone across the world would say good morning and good night, every day, for decades more to come. None of this will ever happen.

The photo triggered more than comparison; it triggered the whole apparatus of loss. My attention had been captured by grieving over my mother’s death. Now that process unraveled into an understanding of how we ferociously resist another type of grief, one that hides in plain sight: the grief of everyday life. We come up with stories to protect our egos, their true palliative purpose betrayed by their repetitive structure — like a medicine that must be taken at regular intervals to work. “This didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but it made me who I am today and I’m better for it.”

There is so much I had not truly grieved until this moment. I had thrown temper tantrums over the loss of generous sunlight, birdsong year round, “bom dia, querida”, black coffee with sugar, roosters crowing and dogs barking in the middle of the city, taking the bus in the scorching heat, seeing the sun rise over the mountains, the toucan nest on the building’s rooftop, drinking piss beer in the bar at 10 am with friends, the loss of mom stroking my hair as I fell asleep, her long nails tickling my scalp. Of being held by all of that. Yet I had thought, magically, these things could be salvaged or replaced by “commensurate items”. I rationalized my way to being in the present moment and accepting the way things are, forcing a precast mold onto hardened concrete. I had not, though, despite all my years of sitting in meditation, sat with the irreversibility of loss.

Why was I spending so much energy controlling life? If I stopped, I would have to face death, the death of my past life. Was my book reading, meditating, experience reframing, self-dissolving ego-death, just intellectualizing nonsense? What was my then partner thinking — the one who had to withstand the berating speeches coated in self-help lingo? What was my one-year-old son feeling about losing the breast of his mother, who needed her daily hour of staring into a wall? Who else is paying for my self-deception? Who else are we failing to know by getting to know ourselves so well?

^[1] I need to stop spending money. There is no purchase that will fill the void

^[2] This suffering is trying to call my attention, trying to tell me something. Life? Career? Partner?

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