Grieving as Healing
I recently talked with my friend and Performance Philosophy colleague, Stuart Grant, about how grief is one way that death lives. His interest in the phenomenology of death leads him to believe that death is always here with us, the living. It doesn’t exist as some limit of life or transcendent otherplace. Death, too, lives.
We may not like to admit this, and yet we can hardly avoid it. Ants carry away fallen butterflies. Autumn comes and goes. Fungus composts all into new life. In the social world of the human animal (though certainly in other animal worlds, too) death also lives here with us in the form of grief. There’s a beautiful equation in the making here: Grief is love; we love those who are dead; the dead live on in our love and our grief. This grief and love can take many forms, including ritual rememberings, anniversary celebrations, and telling stories of our most dearly departed. I suspect grief and love also dwell in the scars we wear, both physical and social. All in all, then, grief helps us see death in a new way.
This past summer, I’ve learned how grief helps me see health and healing differently. Our son, Ren, two years old, is now home and healing after his second open-heart surgery. The surgeons performed what is known as the Fontan Completion, the final stage in a palliative process that reroutes Ren’s circulation so as to remove all burden from the right side of the heart. His condition, hypoplastic right heart syndrome with pulmonary and bicuspid valve atresia, will be stable for at least a short while and all signs of disability will remain practically invisible except to those of us who know how to read his various scars. The surgery itself was relatively easy. The healing process was arduous.
Ren needed 18 days in the hospital in order for doctors and nurses to help his body drain excess fluid, steady its electrolyte balance, and rebuild the proteins lost in the fluid discharge. With all this time to observe and think, I found myself studying the relation between grief and healing. Most people associate grief with the traumatic event itself, and from this association comes a, to my mind, false comparison between grief and injury. My experience has taught, to the contrary, that grief walks astride the pain of the healing journey. I believe that the two walk in such close lockstep because they carry each other. Healing is slow; it hurts; it unfolds in a nonlinear fashion. Grief is the time signature of that slowness, the wisdom resulting from the pain, and the optic perspective afforded from the haptic experience of nonlinear movement.
And so the equation expands: death lives in grief; grief manifests as love; love enables health; health and healing can hurt; death and life are never far apart from each other. Grief, health, and death: neither opposites nor remote strangers but, rather, three fine threads woven finely throughout the fabric of the day-to-day.
The time has come to free grief from its status as untouchable, as something to be avoided at all costs, as something to be nudged away in order to bring a person back into the threshold of normalcy (whatever that is or was). What does grief become when we see it alongside health? How does our notion of health change when it’s freed from its seemingly polar opposite constructs of sickness or death? When we admit and acquiesce to the transformative pain of healing and recognize the communal effort required for healing to occur, might we be able to make some space for grief, to learn from what it reveals?
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