Death of a loved one: poignant reflections on grief
They say that grief comes in waves. When my father died a little over a year ago after a brief and brutal illness, it was more like a tsunami that left me flailing for footing. We grasp for similes when grieving, wrote CS Lewis; otherwise it “won’t go into language at all”. But while words may fall short, as anyone struck dumb composing condolences will tell you, they don’t fail entirely.
While grief is a perennial subject, its literature lands differently post-pandemic: we all lost something, if not someone. No doubt at least part of the outpouring of emotion after the death of Queen Elizabeth was the opportunity to process collective grief through ritualised mourning.
Against this backdrop, the authors of three timely new books share their experiences, bringing fresh perspectives — some personal, some societal — to further an overdue conversation. While there is no consensus on the modalities, or even the lexicon, of grieving, each author challenges the received wisdom on the process.
For the comedian Cariad Lloyd, Covid has made people more open to talking about grief. Lloyd, host of an award-winning podcast, Griefcast, lost her father to pancreatic cancer in 1998, when she was 15, but took years to address it due to our societal discomfort around death.
Yet, as Lloyd emphatically notes, Kübler-Ross based those stages on interviews with terminal patients, “not those left behind”. While for nine out of 10 of us, grief abates over time, she adds, it is “not in a linear way”. Kübler-Ross came to acknowledge that not everyone experiences all five emotional states, or in stage order.
Despite being debunked as lacking in empirical evidence by researchers at the University of Michigan in 1993, the five stages stubbornly persist: a recent study of the internet of grief found that more than 60 per cent of websites still refer to the model.
The stages are ubiquitous in our cultural narrative of loss — applied to everything from break-ups to dropping an iPhone. (They are also open to adaptation: “denial, anger, drinking . . . more drinking” posits the gloriously cynical spymaster Jackson Lamb in an episode of Slow Horses.) Lloyd attributes their lasting legacy to our desire for simplicity, a neat narrative in which grief comes to a full and final stop.
One of Lloyd’s recent podcast guests was James Runcie, whose memoir, Tell Me Good Things, recounts losing his wife of 35 years, the drama director Marilyn Imrie. In February 2020, Imrie was diagnosed with motor neurone disease: “the three words [doctors] most dread having to say”. MND causes progressive paralysis until a patient can no longer move, eat, drink, speak, or, eventually, breathe. As the world shut down for Covid, Imrie’s body gradually shut down, too; she died less than six months after her diagnosis, aged 72.
Having lost a baby at term in utero, which she wrote about in a poignant memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (2008), McCracken flatly rejects the words “grief” or “mourning” for “the ordinary deaths of elderly people”. Her mother, who lived until 83, had survived a brush with death seven years before. “A quiet death in old age, people you love nearby: It feels like luck,” she writes.
The Hero of This Book is framed within a trip to London in August 2019, “the summer before the world stopped”. Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator — a character similar to McCracken — roams the city, recalling a prior visit together. Having relied on mobility aids due to a birth injury, her mother had never let her disability stop her: she “loved being alive and in the world”. The narrator revisits her mother’s favourite haunts — part of the charged “afterworld” the deceased can no longer enjoy.
McCracken has said that she found freedom in writing The Hero of This Book as fiction, that she could not have written it as a memoir. As a writing teacher she cites in the book says about genre, to the reader “it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”
For the author, however, it somewhat mitigates a crisis of conscience about privacy. Told with McCracken’s trademark self-deprecating wit, the “hero” of the book comes alive in this tribute, but the narrator stops short of taking any creative licence about her mother’s inner world: “Who knows what another person dwells upon?”
The narrator of The Hero of This Book says the project is to prevent her mother from “evanescing”. Similarly, Runcie was compelled to memorialise his wife and remember her as she was before her illness. He had even tried to prepare himself for such an eventuality by killing off the protagonist’s wife in The Grantchester Mysteries — written “in a wild haze of anticipatory grief, long before any diagnosis”. But “to anticipate a situation is by no means to understand it,” he writes. “Everything still comes as a shock.”
Part of that shock involves dealing with the objects left behind. Daunted by the prospect of sifting through the possessions of her parents, who lived “in squalor”, McCracken’s narrator agrees for the contents of their house to be sold in an estate sale. She finds the event “oddly cheering” until someone makes away with a drawing of her young mother. Tidying his wife’s possessions sparks tears rather than joy for Runcie until he comes across gifts they had exchanged: an asparagus tray, a tiny vase, a bluebird plate.
But bereavement, we know, is not all bluebirds. Runcie writes candidly and relatably about the uglier side of grief, notably his anger. Everyone from newly engaged couples on Instagram to a grandmother pushing a pram in the street filled him with fury: “Why were they still alive when my wife was not?” (I’m not proud to admit that my initial reaction to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2021 Notes on Grief was envy that her father lived 14 years longer than mine, although I was reassured that she, too, found herself flooded with “needle pricks of resentment” at the thought of those outliving his 88 years.)
This is one of the fundamental challenges of grief writing: how does an author unite readers when we can feel so separate, or even competitive, in our grief? It’s perhaps no accident that novelists have a knack for evoking empathy: Runcie and McCracken join memoirists with fiction under their belts including Lewis, Adichie, Joan Didion, Julian Barnes and Yiyun Li.
You Are Not Alone takes a different tack: it is unabashedly self-helpy, complete with a pep talk postscript. The aural warmth of Griefcast doesn’t quite translate to the page, however, where Lloyd’s voice teeters towards twee. The book’s most compelling contribution is the particularities of mourning in the digital age.
“What does it mean to grieve someone in the age of death trolls, Facebook memorials, and Kanye creating a hologram of Kim’s dead dad as a gift of love?” Lloyd asks. Conversely, while a sorry substitute for their in-person equivalents, the Zoom funerals and iPads in Covid wards were far better than not getting to say goodbye at all.
The paucity of mourning rituals in contemporary society can leave the bereaved at sea. Each of the authors finds their own sources of solace: Lloyd, as a teenager, binged on soap operas; McCracken ferries across the Thames to honour her mother, who loved boats; Runcie tends to a “graveyard garden” to have fresh flowers to bring to the cemetery.
Although his father, Robert, was an Archbishop of Canterbury, Runcie believes that for many in the west, literature and drama have displaced religion as a place to process our anxieties. While the experience of grief is ineffable, when the waves threaten to pull us under, literature tosses out a towline. It reminds us that while it is borne alone, there is, of course, nothing more universal.
You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd, Bloomsbury Tonic, £18.99, 304 pages
Tell Me Good Things: On Love, Death and Marriage by James Runcie, Bloomsbury £12.99, 224 pages
The Hero of This Book: A Novel by Elizabeth McCracken, Jonathan Cape £14.99, 192 pages
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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Mia Levitin
