The Language of Loss. Barbara Abercrombie
In Blackwater Woods
Index of Authors and Titles of Works
What are the right words?
The language of condolence, no matter how well intended, irritated me. My husband had not gone to a better place as if he were off on a holiday. He had not passed like clouds overhead, nor was he my late husband as if he’d missed a train. I had not lost him as if I’d been careless, and for sure, none of it was for the best. He had died. And maybe if I heard this and said it often enough, I would finally understand that my husband had disappeared from the face of the earth and was gone forever.
I knew, of course, euphemism was offered in kindness, and I was grateful to friends for any attempt to comfort me, but what I really wanted was the language of hard truth and reality. I found myself needing to tell people over and over what had happened those final weeks. I wanted true words for his death, for what I felt. I needed to find a narrative, a story—a container for the chaos.
I told people who had not yet heard of his death that my husband had died, that my husband was dead; I was not interested in softening this news. I was learning that grief for someone you loved and shared your life with was far more complicated than I’d ever imagined it could be. I was overwhelmed not only by unspeakable sorrow and loneliness, but also with regret, guilt, confusion, and anger.
Reading always gets me through hard times, and this was the hardest of all times, but in the beginning I couldn’t concentrate on prose. I needed the brevity, the cut-to-the-chase, the depth and distillation of poetry. Poems about grief in all its contradictory complications. I wanted to read poems I could relate to, poets who wrote about the death of a partner or a spouse, who could put into words my own feelings and provide “not release from grief,” as Donald Hall wrote about poetry and his own grieving for his wife, “but companionship in grief.”
Later, when I could concentrate again, I needed writers who turned their stories of loss and mourning into the narrative and clarity of memoir, not attempting to advise how to fix or heal grief, but telling how it felt, how they managed to get through it.
When my husband died, a recently widowed friend emailed me that if people hadn’t gone through the death of a partner there was no way of explaining to them what it felt like, and if they had gone through it no explanations were necessary. A wise and dear Episcopal priest told me that I’d be crazy and fragile for a year, and then I’d still be crazy and fragile but not as much so. There are no perfect words in the face of grief, but those were the words that rang most true and guided me through the early days of being alone.
“Only grieving heals grief,” wrote Anne Lamott.
Shakespeare wrote, “Give sorrow words.”
After the service, after the gathering of friends, after family has flown in and then returned home, you’re alone in a way you’ve never been before. But grief is given a short shelf life in our culture. As Madeleine L’Engle writes, “We are not good about admitting grief, we Americans. It can be embarrassing. We turn away, afraid that it might happen to us.”
We the grieving are to be resilient and to pull ourselves together. We’re expected to move through those stages of grief quickly, to get on with our lives and to find closure. Except there is no closure after the death of someone we love. Closure: a word that should only be used for roads, not hearts. You learn to live with absence. Peace and grace eventually come—but there’s no closure. And our healing comes, as Jan Richardson says in her book of blessings for times of grief, “in allowing ourselves to give exquisite attention to our grief—to feel it in its terrible fullness instead of ignoring it, to let it speak instead of silencing it.”
This book is about paying attention to grief, letting it speak. Language used as companionship and solace. The writers and poets in the following pages write of their loss as reality, not as euphemism, and use, as Julian Barnes writes, “the old words... death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak.” Their prose and poems move from searing loss to pushing through grief with what Jane Hirshfield calls “the black clay of stubbornness going on after,” and then into grace and hope, and discovering that, as Patti Smith writes, “slowly the leaves of my life turned.”
As the pages and years of my own life turned, I slowly learned another language, one of gratitude. The dead do rise up and we get to keep the love we’ve shared with them, the story and the poetry of that love. Bashō’s temple bell stops but the sound keeps going, and the world doesn’t end. I learned that after grief we can find our way to rejoice in the world again, our hearts even more open than before.
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted opon Earth—
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity—
—EMILY DICKINSON
Drive toward the Juan de Fuca Strait.
Listen to “Moondog Matinee.”
No song ever written gets close to it:
how it feels to go on after the body
you love has been put into the ground
for eternity. Cross bridge after bridge,
through ten kinds of rain, past
abandoned fireworks booths,
their closed flaps streaked with soot.
Gash on the flank of a red barn:
Jesus Loves You. 5 $ a Fish.
He’s dead. Where’s your miracle?
Load a tape into the deck so a woman
can wear out a love song. Keep moving,
keep listening to the awful noise
the living make.
Even the saxophone, its blind,
unearthly moan.
—DORIANNE LAUX