(Host) Commentator Willem Lange has been reflecting on the process by which we get over devastating losses in our lives, and describes it as an ever-widening spiral.
(Lange) Our nation has just completed a year of grieving for lost family members or friends. Many of us hold heartbreaking memories of falling bodies and buildings and last telephone calls. Others may be grieving at the apparent ease with which the symmetry of such a well-organized universe can be demolished. And many mourn the death of illusions: that Americans are beloved worldwide; that terrorism is a minor annoyance; that we are secure behind our oceans and intelligence services from any serious threat.
A friend of ours once described to us the different stages of grief. It’s important, he said, to know what stage a grieving person is in if you want to help. If you miss it, you might as well have stayed away.
He described grieving as a spiral. When someone has lost, say, a spouse, he’s in the tiny central vortex of the spiral. He remembers every detail of the loved one’s dying: the time of day, the last words, the last breath. That’s what he needs to talk about; and anybody coming in with cheerful homilies can do real harm, and certainly no good. My wife tested that theory once, with a young woman who had just lost her husband to cancer. “What was it like for him at the end?” she asked — an apparently grossly inappropriate question. But for the next hour she listened as the woman poured out the last moments of her life with her husband. “Thank you!” she said as they parted. “Nobody else has asked me that, and I needed to tell it.”
As the spiral widens and the death becomes less immediate, the last weeks of life come into focus: the last trip to the movies, a last hike with the kids, laughing together over photo albums. The lost life is coming into perspective, with all its joys and its unrealized hopes. The grieving person can begin to share the stories; and he who would grieve with him must be ready to listen.
Finally, the gyre opens to place the deceased person’s life on a screen that includes his friends, his job, the foods he loved and hated, the choral group he sang with for years — in short, his place in society, and his contributions: the importance of the events and actions of his life in as large a context as possible. At this point, the significance of a life can begin to replace the grief at its loss, and the living can resume theirs.
This week marks the end of the year. Mourners in the Jewish tradition who have gradually resumed their normal lives, are now adjured by Hebraic law to put mourning aside and get on with them. If there is meaning in what happened — and there surely is — it will be clear in time. It’s for us who are left to ponder what we can do to mitigate the hatred that motivated it and forestall its ever happening again.
This is Willem Lange in Etna, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in Etna, New Hampshire.