The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  So I believe the end of the immediate bereavement period, however it is experienced, is a useful opportunity to take a deep breath and examine your emotional situation. What do you now feel? Why do you find yourself in denial about what happened? Why do you then feel bursts of anger against her—angry that she died and left you in this predicament? How do you stop feeling guilty that he died and you’re still here? These are all normal and necessary stages in the grieving cycle, but they still really hurt. If you feel it is necessary, you may wish to seek professional guidance and community support.

  Most bereavement specialists concur that those suffering through loss must truly consider if the sorrow and the pain have the potential to or have already robbed them of their ability to function in the normal activities of daily life. It’s difficult to self-evaluate such a thing, and it is advised to let family and trusted friends help you with their candor and compassion. While we all grieve individually, there are few who would not benefit from grief counseling and/or participation in a well-established grief support group during the weeks and months following a death.

  Even though most American therapists and clinicians are busy with packed schedules of clients and patients, there remains for many people a general inclination not to visit with a psychologist after a death. Emotional issues, trouble with children, divorce, job crises, or general depression and anxiety drive Americans to psychologists and psychiatrists—with death, not so much. The stigma of being unable to just “get on with things” is all too often invoked, along with the American tendency toward stoicism and repudiation. We believe that we should be brave, and we tend to refute any suggestion that we can’t get right back into our careers and social lives. But as Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, wrote: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”16 So it is with grief; it forces us to adjust.

  I remember only weeks after my father died, our family convened at the house for the annual Seder, the festive banquet of Passover. My father had always proudly led and meticulously directed the ceremonial meal, holding, reading, and chanting from the Haggadah, the book of blessings and folksongs that also includes the grand narrative of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Like a provincial king, he raised his glass of wine at every appropriate juncture in the service around the carefully organized table. He imperiously broke the outsized communal matzah in half to signify the strenuous human journey to freedom.

  It was Passover for me, Christmas for some, and Eid al-Fitr for still others. Regardless of creed, we all have bittersweet memories of a parent or grandparent who was the principal figure at holiday gatherings and with whose voice, face, and hands we associate the occasion.

  Naturally, it was difficult to gather for the celebration so soon after we lost the given leader of this hallowed dinner-table event. The bitter herbs we always tasted at the meal especially stung our throats, and the saltwater, representing the tears of enslaved peoples, drained into our souls. And, at the outset, there was the question of who would now sit in Dad’s chair and conduct the rite. Although I am the elder of three children, I deferred to my brother, Sam. Sam was sixteen and his suffering was pronounced; he had especially adulated our father.

  Sam solemnly reached into the dining room cabinet to retrieve the Haggadah books with the mournful gravity of a curator in a private museum. He distributed them reverently to all of us, including our sobbing mother. The room filled with an elegiac stillness.

  I realized quickly that I had been serendipitously handed a distinct Haggadah, indeed. It was the one my father had used for all those years. Sighing to myself, I saw his handwritten commentary in the book, along the margins. In a quiet shock of recognition, I observed his slanted, Semitic scrawling in the myriad, fussy notes to himself. Dad had, over the course of time, and beholden to his honored responsibility, jotted down an entire personal guide of data, instructions, comments, and directions that he used in conjunction with the text of Passover night.

  Later, at one point in the Seder, Sam became momentarily flustered. He wasn’t altogether certain how to proceed. Some Haggadah books are heavily laden with prayers and passages; reasonable deviation and improvisation is permitted and acceptable. Our father wove his own way through the manual while leading us.

  Sam looked up and indicated that he did not recall what exactly the next step would be. He glanced around the table, amiably anticipating a suggestion. I looked up from the page in my book and announced, “Sammy! He tells us what to do.”

  “What?” my brother asked.

  “Dad is telling us what to do.” Then, reading from what my father had inscribed neatly in the book, I declared, “Now turn to page 27 and ask the children to sing.”

  We all turned to page 27 and were soon singing, “Go down Moses to Egypt-land/Tell old Pharaoh, let my people go!” Even my mother smiled through glistening tears as she sang out loud. Sam, our sister, and I sat in praise, feeling as though our collective shoulder had been tapped from heaven. We realized, as we spiritually took another step across the bridge of grief, that our parents would always leave their handwriting in our lives. With his peculiar, slanted script, our father was still there. All we needed to do was remember him. Not for two days, not for seven, but for always.

  15 John F. Kennedy Commencement Address at American University, Washington, DC, June 10, 1963.

  16 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1962).

  Chapter Five

  Channeling Your Grief: What Should I Do in the First Year after a Death?

  “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”

  Rumi

  People alleviate their grief by turning it over to creative and caring endeavors that honor and reflect the life of someone they remember. People often make a decision to do something like this about six months or so after a death. A study about grief published in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed a number of complications are created by delayed or ignored sorrow. The report indicated that about six months after a loss, in cases when survivors did not face the reality of death and did not endure bereavement, serious psychological risks were at play.

  What happens is sometimes called “complicated grief.” An NIH report states:

  People with complicated grief are at risk for cancer, cardiac disease, hypertension, substance abuse, major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidal thoughts and actions. Complicated grief, a syndrome that occurs in about 10 percent of bereaved people, results from the failure to transition from acute to integrated grief. As a result, acute grief is prolonged, perhaps indefinitely. Symptoms include separation distress (recurrent pangs of painful emotions, with intense yearning and longing for the deceased, and preoccupation with thoughts of the loved one) and traumatic distress (sense of disbelief regarding the death, anger and bitterness, distressing, intrusive thoughts related to the death, and pronounced avoidance of reminders of the painful loss).17

  Bereavement and Unresolved Grief

  A social worker named Judy Tatelbaum wrote a book in 1980 called The Courage to Grieve. The author expressed that after someone dies, “[W]e must thoroughly experience all the feelings evoked by our loss,” and if we don’t, “problems and symptoms of unsuccessful grief” will occur. In fact, the concern that people who experience a death must actively undertake their feelings, clinically or therapeutically, or otherwise suffer post-traumatic issues, originated with Sigmund Freud. The Viennese neurologist was, arguably, the original scientific scholar to identify both the significance and the pervasiveness of unresolved grief. He began to concentrate on bereavement while living through World War I.

  Like many, Freud was deeply shaken by the frightful number of people—military and civilian—who perished during the war. It is estimated that eighteen
million people were killed. Several million of these died from disease and pandemics. Death became the center of a new and morbid universe. The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying reports: “Many of Freud’s family members and friends were suffering from depression, agitation, physical ailments, and suicidal thoughts and behavior. Later he realized that many people lived in grief for deaths not related to the war and that these losses might account for their various emotional and physical problems. Freud’s grief-work theory suggested the importance of expressing grief . . . in order to recover full function.”18

  Freud referred to death as “the great unknown” and “the gravest of all misfortunes.” He became committed to equating death and grief because until the cataclysm of the Great War, people simply did not think about it all that much. Before his era, there had been little scientific or clinical study of death and grief because, thought the psychoanalyst, people were more interested in things they had actually known, such as love, hunger, sexual desire, spiritual ecstasy, or having children. Humans were not inclined to fear death because, ironically, they had never had this experience and because, as he asserted, finality and death are simply not computed by the unconscious. We are in denial, which is dangerous. We need grief, which is remedial.

  Freud introduced revolutionary concepts about death. He called it “the aim of life” and he declared, “everyone owes nature a death.” He demanded we all become consciously aware of it. It may be strange to us now, who watch death twenty-four/seven on television and social media, but until about the twentieth century and its genocides, death was largely a private and singular matter and grieving was hardly examined from the medical and psychological viewpoints. In fact, to this day, there remains a limited amount of study about death and bereavement in the curricula of many medical schools. Physicians know a great deal biologically about death but not nearly as much about how survivors cope in light of a death.

  I think Freud is really the one who discovered “complicated grief.” He became preoccupied with mortality and mourning in the latter part of his life and career—particularly as Nazism spread in Germany and Europe was sliding into a second inferno. Freud was a Jew and his publications were conspicuous among the books that were burned and banned by the Hitler regime. He and his family escaped from Austria in 1938, fleeing to London—where he died on September 23, 1939, just as World War II and the Holocaust of European Jewry were breaking out.

  Freud’s youngest child, Anna, was also an acclaimed psychoanalyst; her work focused on children. She nursed and cared for her father as he was succumbing to jaw cancer. Anna responded to her father’s death in a way worth noting—remembering his deep concern for the suffering of youngsters caused by warfare, she created a foster care center in London. The mission worked to save and rehabilitate the city’s children from the continuing bombardment of German rockets and bombs. The “Hampstead War Nursery” proved effective and cured many little ones from their wounds, both physical and emotional. After the war, it was revamped into a healing center for youngsters who had survived the Nazi concentration camps.

  We who survive the death of a loved one can gain much inner strength and therapeutic relief by turning our grief into expressive, imaginative, or philanthropic work in our loved one’s name. It’s particularly redemptive in situations of complicated grief. Again, as the prayer book says, “Grief is a great teacher, if it sends us back to serve the living.”19

  Channeling Grief

  Three years after his teenage son took his own life, his father spoke to me about the anti-suicide mentoring foundation he created in his memory. He was by then freed from the immediate grief, which he had processed through with support groups, his church, and a number of bereavement therapists. The scar will always be there, but the father was now reflective and philosophical about his family’s situation. He managed to turn his grief into healing by turning the memory of Tobey into the future of many other young people.

  He told me that what had helped him was the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of these other youngsters. “They are all vulnerable,” he said. “Each time we help one of these kids, I feel my son closer and closer to me. And it keeps his memory alive because we teach these high schoolers all about Tobey’s values, his struggles, and his wonderful optimism.”

  The dad made it clear that in recovering from his complicated grief, he discovered a beneficial values clarification. Time and work were no longer dominating him—he had taken charge of both. He spoke to me about his new definition of time, “I have learned to really honor time and the use of it. It’s not about money anymore for me. You can lose money or valuables, but time misspent just vanishes.”

  Countless numbers of people have channeled their emotional wounds after losing someone—particularly in tragic situations—into foundation and charitable work in favor of life and progress. Among the most renowned is John Walsh, who lost his six-year-old son Adam to a brutal abduction and murder. Walsh is well-known for hosting the long-running television program, America’s Most Wanted, which has steered the rescue and recovery of scores of missing children. He and his wife, Revé, established the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, a not-for-profit association that has directly led to several laws being passed to help locate and support the young victims of pedophiles and child molesters.

  Walsh appears muscular and commanding on television. He is a household name. But even his powerful persona cannot conceal his unrelenting pain. His cause, however, has given that pain substantial therapeutic release. He has stated, “People don’t understand the devastation the murder of a child does to someone. Eighty percent of parents of murdered children wind up in divorce. The only thing you have in common is that horrible sadness. You can’t see the joy of your previous life.”

  Similarly, the family of Polly Klaas has turned their tragedy into triumph by creating the Polly Klaas Foundation, which is also dedicated to child safety and recovery. Polly was snatched from a pajama party in her California home and murdered in the fall of 1993. Her mother was quoted two weeks after Polly’s disappearance, “I have a daughter out there—without shoes.”20 This anguished plea from a mother galvanized the nation into a new awareness of the horrors of abducted children. The foundation inspired the enactment of “Amber Laws” in all fifty states.

  The name Susan G. Komen is synonymous with breast cancer awareness. The foundation was founded in 1982 by Komen’s sister, Nancy, after Susan died from the disease at the age of thirty-six. Nancy made a promise to her dying sister that she would do everything possible to eradicate breast cancer and its attendant agony, humiliation, and dread. Komen, as the organization is simply called, has changed the entire medical culture of breast cancer, with its five-kilometer Race for the Cure and other fitness walks, its national hotline, meal deliveries, and free mammograms and surgeries for those afflicted.

  Although grief is personal, it sometimes is even bigger than the person who is grieving. Soldiers who’ve outlasted war nonetheless directly witnessed close comrades being blown to bits and were splattered by their friends’ blood and body tissue. Men, women, and children who have outlived the numerous genocides and ethnic cleansings of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are plagued by punishing trauma, terrifying dreams, and, of course, their devastating sorrow for their family members who were slaughtered.

  Private bereavement is hard enough. But when death is experienced as part of a massive, horrific event or cataclysm, the consequences and suffering are unimaginable. That is why we can learn so much from the coping mechanisms of such survivors.

  In the spring of 1979, I joined with a group of fellow clergy in Toronto to welcome an uncommonly unique visitor over a luncheon discussion. A tragic man named Otto Frank appeared in the room. At ninety years of age, eternally bowed with sorrow, he nonetheless held his firm physique with elegiac gravitas. He was impeccably outfitted, true to his Swiss-German businessman’s roots, all but bald, and with a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes emitted no light and
his mouth was a wound.

  Otto Frank, who would die a year later in Switzerland, was the father of Anne Frank—the hauntingly passionate teenage diary writer and poet laureate of the Nazi Holocaust. Otto’s family of four hid in “the secret annex” above his business office at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam for two years during the Second World War. They were ultimately betrayed by an outsider and arrested by the Gestapo in 1944.

  The family was brutally dispersed among the concentration camps. Fifteen-year-old Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just weeks before British soldiers liberated the camp. Her older sister Margot also perished in the camp within days of Anne. The final whereabouts and fate of their mother, Edith, were never discovered. Otto managed to endure several months in the hell of Auschwitz and was liberated at the war’s end. He immediately made his way back to Amsterdam and reconnected with a sympathetic couple, Jan and Miep Gies, who were among the small group of “Righteous Gentiles” who helped conceal the Franks and who smuggled food, clothes, and books to them. Miep Gies had been Otto’s private secretary. She and all those collaborators, who risked their lives to assist the Franks and four others in the secret attic, were the group’s only contact with the outside world for more than two years.

  Otto Frank now sat down among us looking like a stone. A priest asked him, “Mr. Frank, how did you cope with the loss of your family?” The older man closed his eyes for a few moments and then opened them. Slowly, deliberately, he spoke in strongly accented English:

  “I don’t know that I truly coped. What I know is they are all gone and I am still here. What gave me strength was the discovery of Annie’s diary.”

  Miep Gies was the one who found the plaid, cloth-covered journal kept judiciously by the teenage Anne Frank. Gies had wandered mournfully through the cramped, four-room annex just after its Jewish internees were removed. When Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam, he sought out Miep and she gave him the diary, which has become one of the world’s best-selling books.