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To grieve is by its nature both a subjective state, and a state that everyone must experience in one form or another simply because loss and death, and the sadness that ensue, are logically the flip side of life. So I’m going to start this post by describing a personal experience of grief that got me interested in why some people choose to mourn alone.
Liz and I had a baby boy who was born with serious problems: hypotrophic left-heart syndrome with transposition of the great arteries. Olivier lived through several surgeries, and was tended with utmost care and skill by Children’s Hospital in Boston; despite their efforts he died a month later. I remember, when he died in my arms, feeling what I thought of as utmost grief: as if the universe, which until then was whole and good, had broken, and nothing would ever be the same ever again.
And I remember talking to my father on the phone, and he offering to take a Greyhound bus to Boston to keep me company; and I thanking him and saying “Thanks Papa, don’t do that, I’m all right.” I wish now I had accepted because it would have made him feel better, and closer to me, but at the time all I was conscious of was the need to be alone with my grief because that was all I had left of Olivier.
When people seek counsel on the subject of grieving the usual advice, reflected in various Psychology Today posts, is to accept the presence of others because solitude can make the sadness worse. Cultivate relationships, one such post advises.
Another, in the context of losing a spouse, describes “existential loneliness” and the “opening of past wounds,” in the absence of “the luxury of being known” and of “the intimacy of a long-term relationship.”
There is no doubt that solitude in circumstances of great mourning can drag the mourner down a worsening spiral of sadness, isolation, depression, and so on. In some cases this can lead to pathological grief, the different forms of which research published in a Canadian medical journal categorizes as “chronic, inhibited, delayed [and] atypical [grief].”
It can have physical effects, too, the most extreme form of which is known as broken-heart syndrome—wherein the grieving person, usually after the death of a long-term spouse and often in conditions of isolation, experiences severe physical effects clearly correlated to loss: effects that range from difficulty breathing and chest pains to congestive heart failure and death.
“It’s just too hard to represent in any satisfactory way what’s going on emotionally,” Hope Igleheart, a therapist working in New York City, writes in regard to grieving. “A person in mourning is in a kind of netherworld, often losing sense of time and space, and even turning away from food. A mourning person is [often] in a space they don’t understand or want to articulate about. … Talking with other people about yourself or the other person is just too taxing.”
And it’s true that a spouse, say, will naturally feel as if no one else knew the dead person as well as they, and therefore will find talking to people who had lesser or even no knowledge of their husband or wife is distressing and tiresome. How often, after all, have we had to cringe through the ritual homily of a well-meaning pastor that begins, “While I did not know Harry personally, I am told he was a great guy and a first-class badminton player …”
There may sometimes be a less-than-healthy element of denial involved in shunning isolation during the process of mourning. U.S. culture, possibly the most individualistic and materialistic ever known on this planet, notoriously treats death as something unpleasant, un-American, which should be kept at bay with money and medicine. As another post in Psychology Today puts it, “The rise of the self [in America] has made it increasingly difficult to acknowledge the fact that our individual selves will no longer exist.” It follows that mourners, after the immediate rites are done with, often experience pressure to “put it behind you” and re-enter the social swim, if only on Facebook.
Yet there is an argument to make for solitary grieving. Jewish tradition, for example, calls for sitting shiva, a social process of receiving family and well-wishers after someone’s death. But it also recommends shrouding all mirrors in the house of the bereaved: a practice that, according to literature provided by the Star of David Memorial Chapels, aims at focusing one’s thoughts and emotions toward the dead, reducing the distance between material and spiritual worlds and, crucially, allowing privacy for the bereaved. “By covering mirrors in the house,” the undertakers’ material states, “mourners redirect their focus toward reflection and introspection rather than vanity and personal appearance.” Such practice clearly requires some form of solitude.
(It’s possible, however, that shrouding mirrors is related to another custom in Judaism, which is never to utter aloud the name of “God”: an implied admonition that the “spiritual world” is off-limits, absolute and not to be understood through the relativism of mortals, thus enforcing a separation of religious belief from tools of logic and science. This separation was effected in Christianity by the scholastic “realists” and the precepts of St. Augustine. From this perspective, mirror-shrouding can be seen as a warning to avoid focus on the self; to shun solitary introspection and the individual’s quest for spiritual meaning.)
None of the above beliefs and theories—even the Jewish tradition—come close to encompassing what I felt after losing my son; what I still feel when I seek out his memory, as if the utmost grief I experienced because of losing Olivier exists untouched in a pool deep inside me; a pool that no longer slops over into my daily life but that is there, waiting, in pure and undiminished state whenever I want to visit him. I have told people before that this, to my mind, is the true meaning of eternal life: that those we love continue to exist (the way they often did while alive) as a flock and whirl of memories and feelings in our minds—to be visited at will, or in dreams.
There are many other ways to deal with loss: I also employed a very different technique to cope with losing Olivier. As Ann Behringer, a therapist and former hospice social-worker practicing in Santa Monica, Calif., wrote when I queried her on the subject, “Grief is a kind of trauma. Some grief processes are more traumatic than others. One of the most common questions I have been asked [by those who grieve] is ‘How do I do this, I feel like I’m doing it wrong.’ I tell them there is no wrong way to grieve, it is a personal experience.” This feels to me like excellent advice.
Still, from the examples cited above it seems to follow that a balance of solitude and communion with the memory of the person one has lost, on the one hand; and a gradual reentry into social life on the other; makes a lot of sense. Obviously the person who is grieving will need the succor and advice of friends and family in the process, but in the end she, or he, is the one who must manage the balance. By doing so, one might argue, neither the dead person nor the survivor is ever truly gone.
