![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I crossed my mind ahead of us
just there where the trees give way
do forgive, do forgive, I will forget your name
far be it from me, far be it from me to take care
- Woven Hand: "Your Russia (Without Hands)"
Interesting article about an extreme form of grief in the NYTimes today.
I don't have it, this "complicated grief" or "prolonged grief disorder," but it is surprising that 15% of the bereaved do suffer from it - and also wildly sad that this can go on for decades:
I think it changes people in different ways, realizing that they're a part of this cosmic club of loss. Many people, I think, become overly sensitized to other people's losses. I try to avoid potential triggers but my mother, for example, seeks them out. Even if you don't seek them out they creep up on you - when you're watching ESPN Gameday specials, for example. This happened to my mother recently: twenty years back a star player at Colorado died of cancer, leaving behind a girlfriend and son, who now plays football despite never having known his father - all my mother said when I saw her crying was "the mother was the coach's daughter." These triggers doesn't mean there's some interstellar conspiracy against you. It just means death is everywhere. It's in commercials. It's at the cat clinic.* It's just that now you feel it like a live wire.
That's prototypical. Grief does more curious things too. For example, I now hate movies like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men. I was talking about roadside memorials - I don't really like them, and I think grief should be done in private - and brought up the point someone else had made: does that mean people who die in other places get their own memorials in those places? What about hospitals? And my mother said: "That's always something that bothered me about 9/11 memorials. What's so special about them? I mean, yes, it was very sad for the families of the people who died. But what made them so much more important than everyone else who has died ever?" And she didn't say it but I knew she was talking about my dad - but at the same time not just about him, which is why I think she doesn't have complicated grief. She'd taken her pain to the next step (applied it to the real world, as my chemistry teacher would say, not just used it to practice the same old problems), arrived at a realization about the way deaths get ranked in sadness and importance and nobility, even though people hurt for their dead regardless. She said this with unusual vitriol, for my mother, and it's been ten years. Grief's like that.
After you "move on" with your life (we used to say in group therapy that nobody ever "moves on" and "gets over it" and they're right), grief just sleeps most of the time. It's sort of like the demon in Paranormal Activity - it latches on and follows you, and it may lie dormant for many years until something brings it up to the surface again. You can ignore it and you can scream at it and you can call an exorcist on it, but it's not going anywhere. Welcome to the club.
medicine tongue and a heavy hand together made a list
row on row of cold and hardened hearts
that wish my weeds and flowers would together both grow wild
from a distance
from a distance
they come up close to smile
*: We were sitting at the vet's office, waiting for our cat to get her glucose checked, when this old woman came in with a Petco box and something inside that made the most horrific, scratched-up, Exorcist-inspired meow ever. We overheard the woman tell the receptionist that the cat had had a stroke (which is what my father died of). I just sort of pressed my lips together - the way I do when tsunamis and earthquakes kill people in Indonesia - but my mother started crying. I said, "at least that's not our kitty," which was of course not the point, but you don't talk about The Subject.
just there where the trees give way
do forgive, do forgive, I will forget your name
far be it from me, far be it from me to take care
- Woven Hand: "Your Russia (Without Hands)"
Interesting article about an extreme form of grief in the NYTimes today.
I don't have it, this "complicated grief" or "prolonged grief disorder," but it is surprising that 15% of the bereaved do suffer from it - and also wildly sad that this can go on for decades:
when patients with complicated grief looked at pictures of their loved ones, the nucleus accumbens — the part of the brain associated with rewards or longing — lighted up. It showed significantly less activity in people who experienced more normal patterns of grieving.I forget much more than I dwell, which has allowed me to carry on with my life. Amnesia and denial only work so long, however, and when that reserve wore off I got another salve: group therapy. Grief is so stifling because it's so isolating. It's so personal. You and your loss swallow the world. Group therapy defuses that. There are suddenly other people who feel their loss annihilates the world. Suddenly it's not so personal. And you start realizing - I know it's obvious, but bear with me - that it happens to everyone. Just like truth, death and grief are "given by God to us all in our time, in our turn." This calms you. This has happened before and will happen again, to you or to someone else. You move on, but by now it's changed you: grief has given you a certain outlook on life.
“It’s as if the brain were saying, ‘Yes I’m anticipating seeing this person’ and yet ‘I am not getting to see this person,’ ” Dr. O’Connor said. “The mismatch is very painful.”
I think it changes people in different ways, realizing that they're a part of this cosmic club of loss. Many people, I think, become overly sensitized to other people's losses. I try to avoid potential triggers but my mother, for example, seeks them out. Even if you don't seek them out they creep up on you - when you're watching ESPN Gameday specials, for example. This happened to my mother recently: twenty years back a star player at Colorado died of cancer, leaving behind a girlfriend and son, who now plays football despite never having known his father - all my mother said when I saw her crying was "the mother was the coach's daughter." These triggers doesn't mean there's some interstellar conspiracy against you. It just means death is everywhere. It's in commercials. It's at the cat clinic.* It's just that now you feel it like a live wire.
That's prototypical. Grief does more curious things too. For example, I now hate movies like Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men. I was talking about roadside memorials - I don't really like them, and I think grief should be done in private - and brought up the point someone else had made: does that mean people who die in other places get their own memorials in those places? What about hospitals? And my mother said: "That's always something that bothered me about 9/11 memorials. What's so special about them? I mean, yes, it was very sad for the families of the people who died. But what made them so much more important than everyone else who has died ever?" And she didn't say it but I knew she was talking about my dad - but at the same time not just about him, which is why I think she doesn't have complicated grief. She'd taken her pain to the next step (applied it to the real world, as my chemistry teacher would say, not just used it to practice the same old problems), arrived at a realization about the way deaths get ranked in sadness and importance and nobility, even though people hurt for their dead regardless. She said this with unusual vitriol, for my mother, and it's been ten years. Grief's like that.
After you "move on" with your life (we used to say in group therapy that nobody ever "moves on" and "gets over it" and they're right), grief just sleeps most of the time. It's sort of like the demon in Paranormal Activity - it latches on and follows you, and it may lie dormant for many years until something brings it up to the surface again. You can ignore it and you can scream at it and you can call an exorcist on it, but it's not going anywhere. Welcome to the club.
medicine tongue and a heavy hand together made a list
row on row of cold and hardened hearts
that wish my weeds and flowers would together both grow wild
from a distance
from a distance
they come up close to smile
*: We were sitting at the vet's office, waiting for our cat to get her glucose checked, when this old woman came in with a Petco box and something inside that made the most horrific, scratched-up, Exorcist-inspired meow ever. We overheard the woman tell the receptionist that the cat had had a stroke (which is what my father died of). I just sort of pressed my lips together - the way I do when tsunamis and earthquakes kill people in Indonesia - but my mother started crying. I said, "at least that's not our kitty," which was of course not the point, but you don't talk about The Subject.
