Could a Day of National Grieving Be One Step Closer?
During his visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma on Tuesday, June 1, 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the riot by a White mob that burned a great deal of the prosperous Black section of town, President Biden officially declared the day a “day of remembrance.” Calling it “a massacre,” he provided details of two days of rampaging and killing that essentially gutted what was then known as Black Wall Street. No foreigner to tragedy and loss, Biden is this nation’s greatest hope for healing between the White and Black communities. His political agenda includes a number of measures to correct inequities and injustices between the two groups. His mere presence in Tulsa on a day commemorating such a long-overlooked event speaks volumes about his compassion. In time, he may indeed come to see the need for a day of national grieving, which along with policy changes, could set our country back on the road to healing.
Review of Steve Leder, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift (New York: Avery [Penguin], 2021). Pp. 228.
Inspired in large part by the death of his own father, this little but important book by a practicing rabbi contains a lot of wisdom about death and dying. Throughout its pages, Steve Leder offers many insights, a deep sense of compassion, and inescapable humor. As a rabbi, Leder has to guide many of the members of his temple at one time or another through the painful process of watching a loved one die. He often reminds them, when they face the death of a loved one, that they’ve overcome challenges before in their lives. He knows his scriptures well and admires the sagacity of the ancient Jewish writers. From the Song of Solomon, he reminds us that ‘Love is as strong as death.’ While we may worry about what is going through the minds of our loved ones as they lie dying, he points out that it is we, not they, who are afraid of dying. With tongue in cheek, he writes: “If you are afraid of dying, it is not your day. Anxiety is for the living” (18).
He practices a certain mindfulness in his profession and encourages us to stay focused as much as possible on the present. This said, however, he recognizes the importance of the past and the memories of someone on the verge of dying as much more beneficial than dwelling on the disease that is currently ravaging his or her body. In a passage that brought to mind my own time at the bedside of my dying father, he tells us that it is perfectly acceptable to tell the white lie (or truth, inasmuch as we can know what that is for the future) by saying to someone who will soon leave this world that those who remain will be just fine. My own father, who had succumbed to a massive stroke, may not have been able to hear me, but perhaps he could feel my presence or the touch of my hand on his in the hospital room. I felt comforted, then, as I read the subchapter heading “Don’t Underestimate the Power of Simply Being with Someone.” Lever recommends that we be ourselves in our last moments with a dying person and counsels against pretending to be anyone else. He sees in the last goodbye simply an “ordinary” experience that we can approach naturally. It’s easy to become enmeshed by the pain we feel upon the loss of a cherished fellow human being, but Leder assures us this “is the surest sign … that life matters” (41) and “[t]o deny grief its due is to deny love” (140). Or, as I might rephrase this in a similar vein, our pain is a clear indication of our humanity. Having “seen more than a thousand dead bodies” (108), the author is more convinced than ever of the soul’s immortality. On this earth, it is our memory that allows us to keep alive in our hearts and minds those who have died.
The author moves seamlessly back and forth from the spiritual to the practical. With respect to the desires of the living to see a dramatic turnaround when death comes, his experience has shown him there are none or, as he puts it, “most people die the way they live” (55). Leder’s training as a devout rabbi has engrained in him the belief that only God can take away a life. But whereas he sees love in extending a life, he sees cruelty in putting off death. When the time comes for our eulogies, we shouldn’t whitewash a deceased person’s life in our words of praise. A certain degree of truth makes these encomiums more believable and helps those hearing them feel more at ease recognizing the person they are honoring.
As he concludes his book, Leder leaves us with this lesson: “What have I learned from so much death? Simply this: to live and love fully while I am alive. …I want to live a beautiful life so that beauty is what remains within them [his children] when I am gone” (174-76). Leder’s frank honesty and willingness to share his own personal experiences and those whom he has known as a rabbi or a friend (and sometimes both) make this work as powerful as it is and profoundly inform its pages. It loses its inspirational qualities only when he occasionally drifts from these to repetition or analysis of the published writings of others. He shares a great deal of his deep feelings for his own father and an “ethical will” he has written for his children. He shows us not only how to live, but how to die or, as he might go on to put it for those surviving the loss of a loved one, how death can make life beautiful (223).
Poetry and Prose about Bereavement: Denise Riley’s “Say Something Back” and “Time Lived without Its Flow” (New York Review Books, 143 pp., $16.00 [paper])
From the website of New York Review Books (Link):
The British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today. With her striking musical gifts, she is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American press, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back, a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived.
Children’s Grief Awareness Day
from the program’s website (Link):
What is Children's Grief Awareness Day?
Created in 2008 by the Highmark Caring Place, A Center for Grieving Children, Adolescents and Their Families, and since recognized by organizations around the world, Children's Grief Awareness Day is observed every year on the third Thursday in November (the Thursday before the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving). This time of year is a particularly appropriate time to support grieving children because the holiday season is often an especially difficult time after a death.
Children's Grief Awareness Day seeks to bring attention to the fact that often support can make all the difference in the life of a grieving child. It provides an opportunity for all of us to raise awareness of the painful impact that the death of a loved one has in the life of a child, an opportunity to make sure that these children receive the support they need.
The Anatomy of Grief by Dorothy P. Holinger (New from Yale University Press)
From Yale’s website (Link):
Grief happens to everyone. Universal and enveloping, grief cannot be ignored or denied.
This original new book by psychologist Dorothy P. Holinger uses humanistic and physiological approaches to describe grief’s impact on the bereaved. Taking examples from literature, music, poetry, paleoarchaeology, personal experience, memoirs, and patient narratives, Holinger describes what happens in the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved.
Readers will learn what grief is like after a loved one dies: how language and clarity of thought become elusive, why life feels empty, why grief surges and ebbs so persistently, and why the bereaved cry. Resting on a scientific foundation, this literary book shows the bereaved how to move through the grieving process and how understanding grief in deeper, more multidimensional ways can help quell this sorrow and allow life to be lived again with joy.
Visit the author's companion website for The Anatomy of Grief: dorothypholinger.com/
Dorothy P. Holinger, Ph.D., was an academic psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for over twenty-three years. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has her own psychotherapy practice.
When a Country Can’t Grieve a Death, It Becomes Mentally Sick
Since Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, it’s taken me several days to bring myself to write this piece. Something got in the way, namely, our country’s politics. Mere hours after she passed—her body could still have been warm! —Democrats and Republicans alike turned not to her death and the extraordinary life she led, but to the question of her successor. I was disgusted by both parties, but especially by the Republicans, whose reaction was nothing less than rapacious. Personified by their leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, they seemed like birds of prey delighting in the death of another creature. My own response was one of anger, verging on rage. Why couldn’t this country declare a moratorium on politics and remain neutral for a long enough period of time to mourn and bury this distinguished Supreme Court judge? The politicians’ unsavory behavior was covered in the press, which put at least as much emphasis, if not more, on the political parties’ fight over the timing of the hearings for the next Supreme Court justice as it did on the accomplishments of RBG, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg familiarly came to be known. I had a terrible time focusing on the kind, warm images of this gentle and brilliant woman, whom I had the honor of sitting close to once at a summer afternoon opera performance at Glimmerglass, the opera house in Cooperstown, New York. She was sitting on the same row I was, just a few seats down from me, separated by two or three secret service agents. She shared an interest in opera with the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, with whose legal views she may have differed. These views did not, however, keep her from enjoying a wonderful relationship with him. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the very image of someone who could bridge political differences. It would have been most fitting for the country to have suspended, however briefly, its animosities and to have honored her in the way she deserved. Instead of the peace that comes from reflecting on a life well lived, I felt only turmoil. I couldn’t really grieve her passing without the distraction of politics. The incredible “noise” coming from politicians in Washington drowned out any efforts on my part to gather my thoughts about the loss of an iconic American woman. To borrow a metaphor from Ginsburg’s beloved field of music, it was as if two orchestras were playing at the same time. On the one hand, a quiet, mournful adagio was playing, like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which has become our country’s hymn in times of deep national loss. While on the other hand, the other orchestra was making loud, boisterous music with clashing cymbals. It’s impossible to concentrate while both are playing such diametrically opposed “music” at the same time. Death often sets off strong emotions, and we need times of calm reflection to manage our way through them. When we can’t pay the kind of attention we need to at such important times, we do ourselves psychological damage.
My own anger over the handling of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death left me with a sense of helplessness, which I believe is widespread in our country right now. The coronavirus pandemic has prevented thousands of families from grieving over their lost ones. There can be no large gatherings such as wakes, where friends and family come together to remember fondly the recently departed and to console one another. When they gather for funeral rites, they are limited to small numbers. In its “Funeral Guidance for Individuals and Families,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discourage “the number of people who are engaged in activities like singing or chanting as these behaviors can increase the amount of respiratory virus in the air.” In short, these intense moments, some of the most important times we share as human beings since time immemorial, lack many of the essential elements that make them special, memorable, and comforting. I can only imagine that those who have been denied indispensable and time-honored rituals for their grieving will sooner or later feel angry about what they have not been able to do. But how can one direct one’s anger at a virus?
If, as I suspect, anger and helplessness are the emotions smoldering under the surface in our country right now because of politics and a virus that just won’t go away, then we need to be aware of the possible consequences of these strong feelings. Considered a passion in philosophy and one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism, anger usually ends up hurting oneself, if not others. We may not be able to do much about our frustrations during the pandemic until a vaccine comes along. Even then, however, the damage will already have been done for those who have missed out on important final rites around a death. Meanwhile, it will take large doses of the virtue of patience to counteract the deleterious effects of whatever anger we’re feeling right now. But we can do something about the kind of politics that may have left us feeling angry and helpless; it’s called voting.
Review of W.J.T. Mitchell, Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020). Pp. iii + 176. $22.50.
Little did I know when I met Tom Mitchell in the summer of 1983 in Evanston, Illinois that we would both have children who would later be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Tom was one of my professors at the School of Criticism and Theory, held at Northwestern University that summer. His son, Gabe, was just turning 10 at the time, my daughter 3. Both would be struck with this devastating illness in the prime of life around the time of their 21st birthday, as are many others. It is difficult enough to know that one’s child will probably never be the same again, that his or her dreams will likely never be realized. It is something else, however, for parents to see their child’s life—or for siblings to see their brother’s or sister’s life—come definitively to an abrupt end.
The entire Mitchell family is contributing to what is nothing less than a lasting tribute to Gabe and his life. Tom has written this book, to which is added a postscript of fourteen poems by his wife, Janice. Their daughter, Carmen, is creating a film about her brother’s life. Schizophrenia can break families apart, so it is indeed touching to see that it can also bring them together in a unified purpose.
Any book on the subject of mental illness and suicide has to be extremely difficult to write. The structure of this book reflects some of the decisions Mitchell has made. He chooses to divide his narrative into two roughly equal parts. The first outlines the evolution of the illness itself with all of the unanswered questions that go up until the time of the psychotic break, followed by a creative period of eighteen years, which then ends suddenly. The psychotic break has the “advantage,” if one can even call it that, of lending clarity to a previously confusing set of behaviors, but it also usually brings with it a tragic sense of lost future opportunities. The first part of the book concludes with Gabe’s suicide at the age of thirty-eight by jumping from the balcony of his apartment on the fifty-ninth floor of his building. One senses a kind of relief from the author to move on past this painful point to the second part of his book, which turns to everything Gabe was trying to achieve in his life.
Mitchell does a great service to the families of children with schizophrenia by making very clear that although one may be labeled with this diagnosis it does not define the person suffering from the disease. Every person is unique, and this is all the more true of those with schizophrenia. Mitchell’s son, Gabe, is simply not ‘a case’ of this illness. Gabe was not one to take his diagnosis as the final word. A highly intelligent and artistically gifted individual, he fought the disease with every ounce of mental fortitude he could muster. He studied film and produced a number of screenplays, which at once strove to rise above his mental illness, portraying his capacity for tremendously insightful observations, but which also reflected dark undercurrents in his psyche. As Mitchell puts it, alluding to the title of his book: “Gabe lived on the border of a world that most of us know only fleetingly—a world of suffering and shattering both relieved and exacerbated by grandiose fantasies, expressed by a fierce determination to put those fantasies to work and build a world out of the ruins. He was a mental traveler” (88).
The book traces not only Gabe’s journey into madness, but his father’s journey with him along the way, supporting his son’s ideas as much as he reasonably could. Whereas the first part of the book touches upon the inevitable frustrations of parenting a child with schizophrenia, its second part takes a much more sympathetic view of the son. The father and the son develop an extraordinarily close relationship. Mitchell goes so far as to call Gabe “my best friend” (73). The roles of caregiver and patient are reversed during one six-week period when Gabe takes care of his father after the latter is confined to a wheelchair because of a back injury. Gabe becomes a collaborator with his father in his research, helping him better understand a number of iconic images and leading him to websites his father wouldn’t have normally known about. A highly regarded University of Chicago professor, Mitchell even considers leaving his job at one point and making movies with Gabe. He admires his son’s tenacity in proving Michel Foucault (author of an important history of madness) wrong about the “unproductive” nature of madness. Mitchell saw firsthand how hard his son worked to produce a considerable body of artistic work. Mitchell rightly suggests here the value of the lives of those suffering from such a debilitating disease as schizophrenia. We will never understand how hard they struggle, and they deserve our respect for everything they accomplish, however great or small it may be.
Understandably, Mitchell has a difficult time letting his son go, as does his wife, Janice. Her poems, attached as a postscript, express the constant longing she feels for her son’s presence. “You are still with us,” she writes in a poem written three days after his death. There is also the haunting thought of what might have gone through Gabe’s mind before he jumped over the railing of his apartment. She thinks of him as a newborn baby and on important dates such as his birthday, family holidays, and the anniversary of his death. In one poem, she can’t help simply asking ‘Why?’ and, at its conclusion, entreats her son directly: “Stay with us now/In some way/Stay with us.”
I recommend this book strongly to any “fellow traveler” who has a son, daughter, or sibling with schizophrenia. It is also a poignant lesson to any reader about the uniqueness of every human life.
Why It’s Important Now to Have a President Who Knows about Grieving
Joe Biden, the Democratic Party pick for president, has some unusual skills, one of which is his deep understanding of grieving. At the young age of 30, he lost his wife and daughter in a tragic car accident a week before Christmas. Up to that point, his future was looking very promising, almost superhuman. He had just been elected as a senator for the state of Delaware. Tragedy would strike again when his son Beau died of brain cancer at age 46. Despite these personal calamities, however, Biden has not retreated into his shell. Not only does he understand what is involved in grieving, but he uses his knowledge to console others who themselves have suffered great losses of their own. Apparently, he has understood pain for a long time, ever since he was a child of 4 and had a terrible stutter. Just before his recent acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, we heard a version of this quote from him: “Stuttering gave me an insight I don’t think I ever would have had into other people’s pain” (first recorded in an interview by John Hendrickson for the January/February 2020 issue of The Atlantic). Biden has given countless eulogies for deceased colleagues and friends. He reaches out to those who have suffered the loss of loved ones and truly feels their wrenching grief, and they cannot help feeling his genuine sincerity. He will even give complete strangers who are grieving his personal information. His own words in his acceptance speech bear repeating:
I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.
But I've learned two things.
First, your loved ones may have left this Earth but they never leave your heart. They will always be with you.
And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose.
Biden found purpose in public service, and his view of government and the people is no different than his view of the relationship between the consoler and the consoled. As his father used to tell him: "Joey, I don't expect the government to solve my problems, but I expect it to understand them." It’s all about understanding the other person’s feelings, his or her humanity, especially when that person is suffering. At this time in our country, there is a lot of pain. We need a healer like Joe Biden, whose seemingly boundless capacity for empathy would go a long way toward unifying our country, putting it back in touch again with the gentle feelings that define us as human beings, and recapturing its soul.
Is It Time for a Day of National Grieving?
The coronavirus had already saddened me. I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t in a state of downright depression. This pandemic was not only killing people, but it was putting many people who live paycheck to paycheck in a very precarious position. Our country was in a crisis, and there was no sign of its letting up anytime soon. I thought often of all the people in our country who were suffering. Small business owners were struggling to survive. Many people couldn’t pay their rents. I couldn’t exactly say I was grieving for them—as grieving usually implies a death that can set off this reaction—but my heart certainly went out to them. It didn’t seem as if things could get any worse in our country. But they did.
The brutal treatment of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, which resulted in his death, however, definitely gave us something to grieve over. On Wednesday, June 3, shortly after this killing of an African-American man, our local public broadcasting station, KPBS, aired Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, the documentary by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The television program could not have come at a better time, for it showed not just the great hopes of black people after the Civil War, but the massacres and lynchings that followed shortly thereafter. It took 100 years for civil rights laws to be enacted and enforced in this country after Reconstruction. Meanwhile, the killing went on and on. And it’s still going on. That was the sad, bitter truth of the documentary, and it was poignantly brought home to me by the killing of George Floyd. I couldn’t help thinking of the thousands of black people whom we have wrongly killed in this country. The NAACP website states that between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States, of which 3,446 were blacks. This figure does not include the many massacres that occurred during Reconstruction and afterwards up until 1968. Nor does it include the number of blacks who have died at the hands of policemen. In George Floyd’s death, I grieve for all of these fellow human beings who have gone much too early to their graves.
Is it time for a Day of National Grieving for African Americans, to be observed annually? I definitely think so. This could be a moment of truth and reconciliation in the spirit of the commissions with this aim we have seen elsewhere around the world to heal the open wounds in a society. We need to begin righting the wrongs we have done: the enslavement of Africans, the persecution of them and their descendants on our soil (the recent book The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd is particularly moving on this subject), and their dying at our hands. It is time for us to grieve together as a nation for the lives we have robbed. I’ve been particularly touched to see policemen kneeling with protesters lately. In so doing and in engaging in other acts of reconciliation, maybe we can recognize a fundamental truth: namely, that we are all human beings with feelings and that we need to take care of one another. It is time for our country to move in a very different direction and to come together around a basic understanding of our humanity. Let’s start the healing as soon as possible and unify our wounded country.
Prayer for Grieving or Mental Illness
Elizabeth Bernstein has written a superb article titled “The Science of Prayer” for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). A two-line synopsis under the title of the printed article—the online version is slightly different—neatly sums up its contents: “People often pray in crisis. Research suggests it may boost mental health.” What struck me in particular in this piece was the deep consolation prayer can give to the mentally ill by letting them feel less alone. My daughter lives by herself, and I know prayer helps her through her days.
The article was published in the May 18, 2020 issue of the paper. Since that time, I’ve been trying, to no avail, to find a way to make it available here for free. I’ve learned, however, that in order to read the entire article one must either already have a subscription to the WSJ or join on a trial basis. The WSJ is running a limited-time offer right now: $1 for 2 months (and you can cancel any time), which, I must say, is a pretty good deal. Failing all else, if you still can’t read it, please write me, and I’ll see what I can do. Ms. Bernstein tells me the Journal regularly publishes articles on mental health. With a subscription, one can also apparently read back columns on mental illness. Here’s the link to the article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-of-prayer-11589720400
A Bibliograpy on and Resources for Mental Illness
Our 20-year-old daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2001. We were desperate to find out more about this mysterious and devastating illness. We were also interested in learning more about mental illness in general. I found works that proved very helpful at the time and later. This is, of course, just a starter list.
You can find the bibliography in the “Bibliographies” section on the “Mental Illness” page.
An Invitation and Bibliography about Grieving
As I mention on the home page, I hope this place becomes an open forum for the free exchange of ideas on grieving and mental illness, especially schizophrenia, as they are experienced in real life and depicted in memoir and children’s literature. Feel free to write in with your thoughts or questions, and I will do my best to reply in as timely a manner as possible. Use the “Contact Me” link above.
As an initial foray onto this blog, I thought I would share with you the books I read while writing my memoir on the death of my father (1989), my mother (2001), and my brother (2014). I found them helpful not just with writing, but with the grieving process itself. You can find this bibliography in the “Bibliographies” section on the “Grieving” page.