Grief, myself, and I

I have quoted Joan Didion’s book “A Year of Magical Thinking” (YMT) several times during the course of writing this blog.  Her book is an honest reflection on the impossible year following her husband’s sudden death.  It’s also one of a relatively small number of books detailing grief and loss. I have been wrestling lately with one of Didion’s main theme’s–self-pity–as the second anniversary of my mother’s death approaches.  Didion writes in the opening pages of her book:

“Life changes fast./Life changes in an instant./You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends./The Question of Self-Pity.”

What is the difference, as Didion so poetically asks, between grief and self-pity?   How long are we able to morally carry these pains with us?  And who is to decide?  Life changes irrevocably in an instant.  How long are we, those left behind, allotted to realign ourselves with that new and painful reality?

How do we, then, best deal with grief and mourning?

We live in a society uncomfortable with death, a culture that prefers to move quickly, if not awkwardly, past these “situations.”  We no longer have many cultural institutions around mourning, aside from casseroles.  I am not advocating for the days when women were forced to dye all of their clothes black and observe a strictly enforced “mourning period” though I could see how having that time set aside to process one’s loss could be beneficial.  To be visually marked out, to have socially accepted customs surrounding the experience, agreed-upon expectation.  As it is, many of us are allotted our days off for funerals and visitations, then it’s back to the grind.  There is so little space for loss in modern life.

The difficulty in talking about death also puts me in a quandary now, almost two years later.  There is a part of me that feels I should be over this by now.  That it is self-indulgent to moon about, marking the days in February and thinking of where I was at this time 730 days ago.  Is it selfish and narcissistic to still be writing this blog?  Is it “ok” to inflict my bad days on those I love, to still be mired in the painful feelings of “missingness” that haunt me still?

I think Didion beautifully articulated some of these same questions in YMT.  She concludes with a haunting conclusion, beautiful in its simple honesty:

“We are not idealized wild things./We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all”