I lost my wife to cancer last year; she was 46. She was my best friend, lover, my son’s mom and one of the greatest people whom I’ve ever known. Q
It is a surreal experience. For me it started as shock. I did not eat a meal for almost two months. Lots of people were around and I kept busy doing random things. Then people go away and the random tasks are done, and it’s quiet and strange.
I chose to move forward, focusing on my son, fitness (I started running), we did a charity drive in her honor, and we focused on being more social. I have a boy to take care of and responsibilities to be met - but I think this transition is where many grieving people fall into trouble.
I’ve lost my dad and my grandmother, both of whom I was very close to. But this hit different.
This column, “No Love is Ever Wasted”, captured my feelings well in a unique way.
I lost my dad over a decade ago which I was close too, and a couple of years later broke up with my SO which I'd been with for well over a decade at that point.
While nowhere close to your experience, that weird emptyness sounded very familiar. Coming home from work, eating dinner alone and then just "ok, now what?". Suddenly the days seemed to have so many more hours to fill.
And that feeling when you had some fun or nice experience and you just want to share and pick up the phone only to go "oh... right". I still get that with my dad, and it still hits hard.
Her take on it was that she had hope and a chance with metastatic melanoma because she was standing on the shoulders of those before her. Basically, she had a 60/40 chance of 5 year survival. 10 years ago, it was zero.
Now, there’s a variety of new treatments in trial that will make the chances for future patients much better… there’s a customized Moderna vaccine and other immunotherapies on the horizon.
"Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go."
Jamie Anderson
Felix Revello de Toro - Woman, 1965
Beautiful and very True. And the worst thing is you really cannot share it with anyone, it is just too personal. There is also a real danger that this can seek outlet via anger against close folks/circumstances/world in general.
It has been a little over a year and half since i lost my Mother(i spent the last decade living with/taking care of her) and the grief is still there. I cannot show it (because i am a "Man"), don't know how to process and deal with it but am only trusting to the passage of time to help me forget. "Human Bonding" is not mere words but is really something strong. I used to poo-poo at all sentimental emotions but now i know better through experience.
This is brilliant. And it also illuminates how it can turn into something deeply maladaptive and self-destructive when we cling too hard to something that's passed or will eventually pass, when we define ourselves too much by that which we love or are loved.
It reminds me of all the times when I was young where I thought I was deeply in love, but really I was just in love with the feeling of being loved and accepted. And my grief when that was gone was love that I could've directed towards myself where it should've gone. It took until my 30s when I realized I could provide the love that I'd been missing all my life, and only then could I be in love in a way that wasn't suffocating and borne of fear.
Having lost both parents young, all my grandparents and a spouse... years and years ago, and a brother who is alive but is lost to mental torment from fighting his grief... and I'm not even 40 yet.
Calling grief maladaptive seems deeply wrong, while I both grieved and persevered through the loss and have been financially successful and am "well adjusted" and "successful" by any external observers measure, I do not think I would judge myself or anyone else who was pulled into the abyss by grief, I still doubt if living with grief was even the right choice, though I am glad I ended up in a mental state where I retained my volition to make the choice.
Loss is loss, a person who has part of their brain removed, their heart damaged so it barely pumps enough oxygen, their limbs lost or kidneys damaged... their inability to function or find joy, meaning or energy in life would never be judged as maladaptive.
I persist, that is true, but I see no moral or emotional difference between my functioning and if I was non functioning. I so repeatedly see people discount grief, mental trauma and other forms of true tangible loss as if was somehow different from other types of physical loss, but it isn't.
To call it an inability to adapt to loss is one thing, just as a head without a body could not open a door with our current technology, but I would humbly suggest that it is too far too call it maladaptive.
I loved every person I lost, due to my age for my parents I was quite literally dependent on them, and the sheer force of will required and personal self subjugation I cannot clearly say was worth it, After all, I've never met an unhappy, struggling or grief stricken man in the ashes of an urn. Loss is loss, it is as real as a limb or organ lost.
We all have different experiences, but just some thoughts to consider.
I appreciate this quote, but after looking into it, I must offer some correction regarding attribution.
Félix Revello de Toro is a Spanish artist born in 1926. He specializes in portraits of women, including a 1965 one depicting a woman curled up on a chair with her head tilted down so as to permit her long black hair to hang down and obscure her face.
Jamie Anderson is the author of the blog "All My Loose Ends". The quote in question is an amalgamation of excerpts from a 2014 blog entry about loss:
"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."
Never seen this before, as a person who has grieved considerably but won't/doesn't read grief literature.
I came to the conclusion years ago that grief is just unexpressed, unshareable, uncommunicable, thwarted love. It's all the love I cannot give, all the words and touches and moments that fail to alight on the one I love but instead, missing its intended, affix me to the void.
So not merely entwined, I think grief is love itself unsatisfied.
That’s so accurate. I think of it as something that happens to you. Grief comes for you, often when you least expect it. It’s a trap door you didn’t know you were standing on.
Mourning, however, is active. It’s a choice to turn and face your loss. Grief is your body telling you that you aren’t doing enough to mourn.
> “I love talking about her, by the way, so if I cry, it’s only a beautiful thing,” Garfield explained. “This is all the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, no matter if someone lives till 60, 15, or 99.”
“So I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her,” he added. “And I told her every day. We all told her every day. She was the best of us.”
Good quality information in there, saying this after years of trying to overcome a lot of stuff and never really finding anything of value. This was interesting. Hope others find some help in it.
ps: I always assumed that grieving is supposed to be done with others, they buffer the loss, share it with you and make your future make sense because your pain is not unheard and thus your emotional self is somehow intact and allowed to be. Without this you may end up as a fake shell unable to find any form of true connection since you've been alienated at your deepest moments.
The hardest part of grief for me is the guilt and the anxiety. Yeah for keeping the catholic guilt but not believing so not getting the benefit of 'universal love and forgiveness' and afterlife aspects.
I went down a rabbit hole when my mom died of theories of time not being linear just so I could take comfort in all those shared moments still happening, indefinitely.
Readit News
It is a surreal experience. For me it started as shock. I did not eat a meal for almost two months. Lots of people were around and I kept busy doing random things. Then people go away and the random tasks are done, and it’s quiet and strange.
I chose to move forward, focusing on my son, fitness (I started running), we did a charity drive in her honor, and we focused on being more social. I have a boy to take care of and responsibilities to be met - but I think this transition is where many grieving people fall into trouble.
I’ve lost my dad and my grandmother, both of whom I was very close to. But this hit different.
This column, “No Love is Ever Wasted”, captured my feelings well in a unique way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/style/modern-love-no-love...
I lost my dad over a decade ago which I was close too, and a couple of years later broke up with my SO which I'd been with for well over a decade at that point.
While nowhere close to your experience, that weird emptyness sounded very familiar. Coming home from work, eating dinner alone and then just "ok, now what?". Suddenly the days seemed to have so many more hours to fill.
And that feeling when you had some fun or nice experience and you just want to share and pick up the phone only to go "oh... right". I still get that with my dad, and it still hits hard.
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Her take on it was that she had hope and a chance with metastatic melanoma because she was standing on the shoulders of those before her. Basically, she had a 60/40 chance of 5 year survival. 10 years ago, it was zero.
Now, there’s a variety of new treatments in trial that will make the chances for future patients much better… there’s a customized Moderna vaccine and other immunotherapies on the horizon.
It’s cruel and it sucks but there was hope.
Jamie Anderson Felix Revello de Toro - Woman, 1965
It has been a little over a year and half since i lost my Mother(i spent the last decade living with/taking care of her) and the grief is still there. I cannot show it (because i am a "Man"), don't know how to process and deal with it but am only trusting to the passage of time to help me forget. "Human Bonding" is not mere words but is really something strong. I used to poo-poo at all sentimental emotions but now i know better through experience.
Elizabeth Akers Allen's emotional poem Rock Me To Sleep nicely captures much of the feeling - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52071/rock-me-to-slee...
I forgot to mention a very important book on the subject of Grief from the great Cicero which is rectified here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472916
It reminds me of all the times when I was young where I thought I was deeply in love, but really I was just in love with the feeling of being loved and accepted. And my grief when that was gone was love that I could've directed towards myself where it should've gone. It took until my 30s when I realized I could provide the love that I'd been missing all my life, and only then could I be in love in a way that wasn't suffocating and borne of fear.
Calling grief maladaptive seems deeply wrong, while I both grieved and persevered through the loss and have been financially successful and am "well adjusted" and "successful" by any external observers measure, I do not think I would judge myself or anyone else who was pulled into the abyss by grief, I still doubt if living with grief was even the right choice, though I am glad I ended up in a mental state where I retained my volition to make the choice.
Loss is loss, a person who has part of their brain removed, their heart damaged so it barely pumps enough oxygen, their limbs lost or kidneys damaged... their inability to function or find joy, meaning or energy in life would never be judged as maladaptive.
I persist, that is true, but I see no moral or emotional difference between my functioning and if I was non functioning. I so repeatedly see people discount grief, mental trauma and other forms of true tangible loss as if was somehow different from other types of physical loss, but it isn't.
To call it an inability to adapt to loss is one thing, just as a head without a body could not open a door with our current technology, but I would humbly suggest that it is too far too call it maladaptive.
I loved every person I lost, due to my age for my parents I was quite literally dependent on them, and the sheer force of will required and personal self subjugation I cannot clearly say was worth it, After all, I've never met an unhappy, struggling or grief stricken man in the ashes of an urn. Loss is loss, it is as real as a limb or organ lost.
We all have different experiences, but just some thoughts to consider.
Félix Revello de Toro is a Spanish artist born in 1926. He specializes in portraits of women, including a 1965 one depicting a woman curled up on a chair with her head tilted down so as to permit her long black hair to hang down and obscure her face.
Jamie Anderson is the author of the blog "All My Loose Ends". The quote in question is an amalgamation of excerpts from a 2014 blog entry about loss:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200720034003/http://allmyloose...
Vision - Westview, NJ, 2023
-- Nick Cave, https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling/
I came to the conclusion years ago that grief is just unexpressed, unshareable, uncommunicable, thwarted love. It's all the love I cannot give, all the words and touches and moments that fail to alight on the one I love but instead, missing its intended, affix me to the void.
So not merely entwined, I think grief is love itself unsatisfied.
Mourning, however, is active. It’s a choice to turn and face your loss. Grief is your body telling you that you aren’t doing enough to mourn.
“So I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her,” he added. “And I told her every day. We all told her every day. She was the best of us.”
- Andrew Garfield about loss of his mother
Good quality information in there, saying this after years of trying to overcome a lot of stuff and never really finding anything of value. This was interesting. Hope others find some help in it.
ps: I always assumed that grieving is supposed to be done with others, they buffer the loss, share it with you and make your future make sense because your pain is not unheard and thus your emotional self is somehow intact and allowed to be. Without this you may end up as a fake shell unable to find any form of true connection since you've been alienated at your deepest moments.
The Strangeness of Grief - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21939131 - Jan 2020 (20 comments)
I went down a rabbit hole when my mom died of theories of time not being linear just so I could take comfort in all those shared moments still happening, indefinitely.
In particular; see Cicero and the Emotions : Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 by Margaret Graver. - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo364132...
A good review here - https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2002/2002.09.15/
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