Sharing the Grief
On April 26th, my grandfather passed away suddenly. He woke up briefly, gave a last fond touch to my grandmother, and then was gone. They had come down to see the coffee shop my parents had just opened; that day, much later, my two older sisters and my niece were due to arrive. Papa never met his first great-grandchild in person.
The following week was as you might expect. My mother and her brother conferred intensively over the arrangements, my sisters and I comforted our grandmother who had just lost her husband of 59 years, and the week seemed to telescope out ahead of us. As the plans for the funeral coalesced, it seemed that the entire world popped from zero to sixty, even as the days spooled out. The shop shut immediately, hastily-written signs and social media posts informing customers that we’d had a family tragedy and were very sorry to be closed so quickly after opening. My oldest sister took my grandmother back to Pennsylvania while the rest of us helped my parents get everything in order to reopen the following Monday–bran muffins, scones, banana bread, all prepared and frozen to be heated fresh when the shop opened again. Then my parents were off for Pennsylvania as well, leaving the last of us to follow them the day after. I pulled into the driveway at my grandmother’s house at two or three in the afternoon, and changed for the first act of mourning.
A funeral, in the kind of community my grandparents are from, is a very specific affair. You have the visitation, a grueling experience wherein the family receives a long line of relatives, friends, and acquaintances, many of whom have no notion of how to treat a person who’s just lost a close relative. This carries on for around five hours. Then you go home, and you eat with a closer group of people you love, piles of food brought in by the community around you to support you in a difficult time. Often, the refrigerator is full to bursting by the time everyone has expressed their condolences. You talk, you laugh if you can, and you try your best to do the correct thing when someone goes distant or starts to cry. If you’re me, you rarely get it right. But there seems to be an almost endless wellspring of social energy to be spent in dealing with your strange and off-putting relatives and the old, close family friends you’ve come to resent. You build the reserve over time, accumulating a sort of white-knuckled determination to maintain the peace, and then at last you tap it when you at last have to wade in. It’s like customer service, in that you have to perform for an audience, producing a display of bereavement to people much less affected by it than you are.
At last, the funeral itself. The casket is closed, the prayers are lifted, the hymns and old time gospel songs are sung. The person you loved and cherished for your entire life, who was a fact of existence for decades, is gone. You’ll never see his face again. You’ll never hear him chuckle at something absurd again. You’ll never see the twinkle in his eye as he lays out some complicated explanation that smells just real enough to get you going until you realize he’s pulling your leg. If you’re me, that’s when you finally cry.
You go and eat dinner in the church basement.
I asked my sister what it was all for as we all but huddled out of the main flood of the visitation, trying to project an air of “we’re good, no need to try to talk to us” to the relative strangers filing through. She considered for a moment, and then told me it was more for all of them than it was for us. For the strangers, and for my grandmother, whose peace of mind needed her to fulfill this social obligation. I watched her bible study group, a group of couples and singles in their thirties pass by to support her in a way I couldn’t. My sister suggested that maybe, for my grandmother, this was comforting. For myself, I wanted to go sit on a couch and eat a pint of ice cream without help.
I picked apart the experience as I went, trying to fashion it into something I could understand, and therefore navigate my way out of–my usual pattern. It didn’t make me stop feeling bad, but it helped me withstand the condolences a little longer. It helped me suspend my resentment of the false joviality and nonspecific concern laced through the behavior of everyone around me. At length, I realized that my sister was right. My grandmother needed the preparation to structure her thoughts. She needed to exercise the social acumen that the rituals required. That sense of being busy, of having things to do that she knew she could do, helped her steady herself. And she needed to be reminded of the people around her who have known and loved her for as long as her husband did.
Losing someone so close to you is something like losing a limb. You’ve grown with each other, changed, become more and more in tune over the years until you can feel the needs of the other and fill them without even asking. They root in your life like a tree, and when the tree falls, it makes a sound. You might feel like you’ve stopped being yourself; after all, if you’re comprised of the people you love, then shouldn’t the person you know best and love most contribute the largest part of who you are? Shouldn’t losing them make it hard to feel like you’re the same person?
That’s the real value, I think, of grieving in community instead of in isolation. When you get together with other people and talk through the life of the deceased, you revisit the places where that person should be and start to fill in the gap. You don’t forget their impact, of course. In the process of remembering together and being bereaved as a group, you start to shore up the slumping structure of your life. You determine who in your community will hold a given function now that the person you relied on is gone. You find ways to make the absence easier to bear.
Communal grief forces you to retain your identity beyond the death of a person you hoped would always be part of it. You don’t expel their influence from your makeup. You emboss it deeper into yourself. You build a life without them that still has their shape. That’s what grieving is, in a way: the construction of a new self that can function in the absence of the necessary, the non-negotiable. The communities we live in form a network, like the heist-movie-laser reproduction that every kid has to tangle out of string at some point, or the red ribbon on a conspiracy board. That system of connections tensions itself and holds us all in conformation. When a node is burned away, everyone else has to figure out how not to collapse. The nearest people are most affected. The people further from the epicenter provide support and absorb the stress so that the ripples don’t rip the most jarred ones apart.
My siblings and I loved Papa deeply, of course. He was a wonderful man who worked his whole life to provide for his family, to ensure that his kids didn’t have to endure the privations he did. He made sure that his family never went without, even in some cases after they had their own children and homes. I’ll probably never know how much financial assistance he gave my family over the years, but we had essentially interest-free loans from him on multiple occasions. He quietly enabled his wife’s charity work, quietly pursued his own, and paid his grandchildren for work we would (or should) have done for free. But the ceremony of it all wasn’t really for us to grieve him. It allowed his brother to help bear the casket. It was a way for my grandmother’s nieces and nephews to support her. It was an excuse for her sister-in-law to show up and spend the next week with her so she didn’t have to sleep in that house on the hill alone.
Bundled up in my own cocoon of shifting feelings, I watched the mourning spread out across the community like a spider web at dawn, each thread of the pattern made visible by dewy eyes, gossamer bonds beaded with grief and the smell of old lady perfume. I watched my grandmother’s home swaddle her with a love as palpable and sustaining now as it was when she was sixteen. The people who have known her all this time gathered in and showed her, through reflection and remembrance, who Papa was to them, and who she herself continues to be. It’s all for the continuity; the ritual and ceremony are the finger stuck in the shoelace knot to hold it until the loops are finished. My grandmother’s life threatened to dissolve into mist that morning. Her family and friends dropped everything as soon as they could and converged on that little town to show her that she still had the right shape. Now, she can begin to darn the hole.
