In a Time of Mass Mourning, Grief Stories Are a Lifeline

When I was very young and we were still living in Elk, in the red farmhouse in the meadow surrounded by trees, my father got a letter in a flimsy envelope, addressed in thick pencil that had blurred on its transit from Berlin. He read it carefully, turned it over and read it again, and then he went outside and picked up the axe and chopped down an apple tree and meticulously tore the branches apart, sending leaves and bark everywhere, scourging his skin and leaving red, seeping welts. He left the fallen branches in a pile in the orchard and walked back into the house, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it, slamming it down on the counter when he was done.

No one spoke of it, and the branches slowly rotted into the earth, turning into a tumbled, weed-covered pile where once an apple tree had stood.

*

In 2017, I went outside and tore out the blackberries slowly eating my yard, a massive decades-long growth that towered over my head and sprawled like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Day after day in the summer heat, I hacked away, sweat dripping down my back, streaks of dirt in my hairline. My arms were shredded and, despite sunscreen, my skin turned red and flaky. After a while, the neighbors stopped waving when they walked by.

Day after day, I would spend a few hours in the thicket, loppers snapping, eyes narrowed against the sun, which was ruthless that summer. The deeper in I went, the more treasures emerged, legacies of years of use. A giant barrel of waste from oil changes in the 1950s. A pile of lead pipes. A hose wrapped around the dying canes of blackberry seasons past.

There was something about being outside, ripping and tearing, fighting the landscape, that scooped my brain out like a little cantaloupe, leaving it cool and ragged. I could drink a shower beer and feel the thoughts trickling down the drain and then go to sleep, insects whirring through the window, sheets limp. The violence of it all was the only thing that kept me rooted in the world, because if I stopped, everything would slam into me with the weight of an airmail letter from Germany.

*

I broke a glass today. Nothing special, a greenish Duralex glass, tall, the perfect size for iced tea or a smoothie, but it brought back a flash of memory. Opening the box and pulling out the set of four one by one while K beamed at me. We were sitting on the floor in my first apartment, empty of furniture, the kitchen a scattering of items pilfered from my father’s house. We’d had to go to the coffeehouse around the corner for plastic spoons to eat ice cream out of the carton.

K is dead now.

This was the second-to-last glass.

“Oh,” I said, in a small voice.

*

You might think this is a story about death, and mourning, and how the explosive physicality of being alive when someone else is dead and never coming back becomes too much, chewing at our skin and turning us into ponderous monsters. Death is so mundane and yet momentous at the same time, each one unique and crushing but also perfectly ordinary.

What should be a national enterprise of support has turned into a lonely, harrowing endeavor.

But this is not an essay about death and the things we destroy when grief overtakes us—not exactly. It is an essay about why some of us want to read essays about violent frenzy when we are in mourning. Why do we want more grief when we are in grief?

We are surrounded by death and dying in this moment, having just marked the grim milestone of one million coronavirus deaths in the US (likely many more, according to excess mortality statistics). Nearly all of us know someone who has died of the virus, or are close to someone in that position. So many of us have had to grieve alone in distant, disjointed ways. What should be a national enterprise of support, a Grief Corps, has turned into a lonely, harrowing endeavor. We are wallowing, but I also want to wallow. I want nothing more than to read about death, to think about death, to immerse myself in death, and I am not alone. We are not alone.

The uptick in deaths in the last two years also means there has been a profound uptick in death stories. There have been loving, detailed, thoughtful chronicles of the lives of people who died of coronavirus, the chilling recounting of the dead in The New York Times, but also a truly beautiful flowering of essays about dying, death, and grief—and those have not necessarily been Covid-specific. Whether they’ve chronicled deaths happening in this deeply shadowed moment or explored losses from years before, they’ve contributed to a growing body of work that is humbling and intriguing. Why are we writing and commissioning and reading so much about death when the air is so thick with it? It feels like coals to Newcastle.

There are many kinds of death stories: searing fiction and stark poetry and elegant sculpture and chilling paintings, Guernica and The Year of Magical Thinking and various Books of the Dead. But the essay has a particularly sparkling place in this genre, a work that invites reading and interaction through its short, accessible, and shareable form as people process some of the most upsetting and frustrating and bizarre days of their lives.

Some of the best entries into this canon have not been about coronavirus at all, despite the losses occurring in a period of collective grief. Matt Ortile wrote of how baking his mother’s recipes keeps her in his life. Vauhini Vara produced a compelling, slightly creepy, complicated essay about grieving her sister when she didn’t have the words—and using an AI to reconstruct her sister to see if she had them, instead. Jesmyn Ward wrote about losing her husband in January 2020, seeing her overwhelming sorrow echoed around her, amplified by the grief of being alive and Black in America. Mary X. Dennis wrote about “complicated grief” (a concept I do not subscribe to) and her brother’s death in a challenging piece that forced me to probe my own attitudes about grief. Each of these precious gems carries weight and meaning for the author, but also for us, the readers. Reading someone else’s story, even if their lives are very different from mine, makes my experience feel more valid, real. “More,” my grasping, grieving fingers cry. “More, more, more.” This is why we read death stories.

Or is it?

*

Last summer, I destroyed my house from the inside, the worm to my apple. It started with emptying out my office, the place she loved to be, bookshelf by bookshelf, and then instead of piling things in the hall I just filled garbage bags with twenty-five years’ worth of letters and old student readers and reference books I would never use again. I moved faster and faster, throwing out the debris of eleven years. The trick is to move fast enough that your spirit doesn’t have a chance to sense what’s missing.

I left her bed on the desk for a while, but everything else fell away around it, and when I had stripped the office to nothing but essentials I took the bedroom, and then the living room, the kitchen, the hallway. I hauled a car’s worth of garbage to the dump and came back the next day, the attendant nodding at me in a familiar way. The way of someone who has seen this play out with hundreds of customers, hurling their lives into the compactor, giddy and shell-shocked. At the thrift store, I thought about who might end up with my red hat, my glass plates, my navy peacoat. Boxes of books sat in my hall for nearly a year before I could go to the city to sell them, masked and furtive in the bookstore where once I browsed for hours.

I walked through my hollow house and saw the scars on the wall where paintings used to be and the scuffs on the floor where once there were bookshelves. Scooped out, ragged, cool, like a melon, but then I was done and I couldn’t escape. I did not understand that constant motion was not the way out of this, that I could not put the feelings away as easily as I placed books on my now-roomy shelves.

*

I fear, sometimes, that in our constrained culture where public, obvious, raw grief is not socially acceptable, grief stories are being asked to do too much. People are supposed to button up and move on, not cry in public or be angry about funerals not held because of the pandemic or tell stories about the people they loved. In this context, grief stories risk becoming a lifeline rather than a hand up, the only place where people feel comfortable expressing themselves instead of one of many.

Sometimes I secretly think we pursue stories about death in the way that we probe at a canker sore, simultaneously thrilled and terrified by them. If we read enough, then when it comes for us, we will be ready, our grief titrated. Instead of washing over us, choking us, overwhelming us, perhaps it will be more of a light tickle. Just a pinch. Desensitization therapy for sorrow.

That desensitization does not work: It cannot. But in the process, sometimes it warps the reader’s understanding of grief as a social endeavor into a deeply private one, in which people must process grief alone and without support. Grief readers may hope that grief encountered in bits and pieces that do not shatter them will make them stronger. That grief will not reappear days, weeks, months, years later to double them over when they break a glass or encounter a stray hair, see an old photograph or get an awkward question from someone who doesn’t know. The New York Times will not be there to scold them for mourning too long and accuse them of having insufficient motivation to return to society. Maybe instead of selling ten cases of books at a cut-rate price just to get the volumes out of the house, they will clean out their nightstands or add a decorative rock to the mantelpiece next to the urn. They will have a glass of red wine in the tub one time only, and then return to regular programming.

*

The last glass sits on the shelf above the sink, ideally positioned for disaster in an earthquake, but so is all my kitchenware. When I file the insurance claim, I don’t know how I will describe it. A 15.6-ounce glass, Duralex. A memory from a lifetime ago. A relic of a person who is blurred and fading, little more than a sense memory, the faintest whiff of cloves and redwood duff.

I will pick through the pieces on the floor and remember how the people in the village in Greece where I spent my childhood used to judge the quality of a life by the wailing at the funeral, leading most families to bring in ringer wailers, though you had to be careful. Couldn’t have the same distraught young woman showing up at the funerals of too many elderly men, if you get my drift. We would all scream as we carried the coffin to the cemetery, bright white and glaring in the sun, because what else could you do? Just let it out!

If we must process grief alone, at least we can do it with a story.

In so many cultures the ultimate destruction of death is accompanied with a paroxysm of intense outrage, of violence and sadness and something else altogether. There is a recognition that death is a firework exploding in our midst, something that must be allowed to rupture the walls because containing it would prove far more destructive. On the island, we dug up our dead later to say hello to the bones, to put them in the ossuary, to make room for the next dead person. Touching them, seeing them, triggered a whole new round of catastrophic but also cathartic wailing in the shimmering heat, cigarette smoke wafting in the air. That physicality and shared social experience was an important part of processing the death: Yes, it is sad and unfair and horrible and enraging, and yet, the deceased has in a sense cheated death by remaining a defiant part of our lives.

In white American culture we are prim and proper and quiet and we do not have a culturally acceptable outlet for grief save for the death memoir, because the society we have constructed does not support us in other ways. If we must process grief alone, at least we can do it with a story. We do not throw ourselves over coffins because we are so bereft at the thought of a world without our loved ones that we would rather simply die, or at least hold here, because once the body is taken away, it is final, no takebacks, no cheating, no alternative ending. Instead, we have a dull memorial with indifferent potluck foods and when everyone is gone, we dump the leftovers and sweep the floor and sit alone on the couch, staring into space.

We need to be back at work in two days. In the meantime, if you could just check your email real quick for a minor question, that would be great. No pressure, though. Just . . . it would be great if you could do it, actually. It’ll just take a minute.

*

For as long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling each other about grief, over fires, in great halls, on sheets of parchment. Grief is the universal equalizer, coming for us all just as death does. These works keep resonating with us, even centuries later, because grief itself is resonant, a ringing that goes on forever, even if it passes beyond the reach of our ears, still there, vibrating. The grief of King Lear is wrenching. “I am bound upon a wheel of fire,” he cries, “that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.” Like Isis, we want Osiris to rise from death. “Long ago I heard / that this is the road we must all / travel in the end / but I never thought it might / be yesterday or today,” wrote Ariwara no Narihira in the ninth century, in a deeply relatable commentary on our collective surprise at death. (Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .)

Reading these stories is a form of inoculation, but not against grief. It will not make us stop feeling, will not mean that our breaths will stop catching as we pass a favorite chair, will not make us stop wearing a treasured piece of jewelry or putting out a third set of tableware at dinner. It is instead an inoculation against becoming inhuman, one for empathy and kindness. It is one that allows us to be together, apart, as I told a friend’s frightened child in summer 2020; we can all stare up into the same moon no matter where we are, knowing that others see it too, that the moon is real and alive and luminous and filled with patience.

And there are times when it feels as though no one truly understands us like the person putting the words on the page. We are safe here, can rest, can breathe out, knowing that we do not need to explain ourselves; here is someone else for whom a seemingly ordinary juice glass carries unsettling weight, someone else who has experienced the thing we have—death long and slow, abrupt and unexpected, death of a child, a parent, a beloved friend, a mentor, death at the hands of the state or a murderer, death that feels like conflict as we mourn a dog more intensely than a human. We are already infected, all of us, or will be eventually, and the hands of those who have been here too build us up and lift us out.

*

The intimate conversation between author and reader is what helps some of us figure out how to be whole again, how to live in a world without. But the seduction of that space can also be dangerous. Eventually, we must return to the world; we should not need to hide our grief or perform normality, but we do need to take the lessons we have learned with us, to find our fellow grievers, to be in community together, or we will flounder. Perhaps as we sit at the table with tea and cake, we can talk about that great essay we read, or the one we all despised, but we are sitting together with people who share our grief, and that is the important part.

Grief is a survival tactic that keeps us safe, and it looks different and follows its own timeline for everyone. The white cultural insistence on hiding grief and rejecting shared experiences of grief is harmful. Wailing at a funeral is not simply a public performance or an individual expression of outrage at the world: It is also a very real, visceral, shared version of the death story, a collective acknowledgement of this thing we are all suffering through, not a beginning or an ending but a point in time. And if time has a point in it, that means there’s another one, and another, and we will get there together.

When people emerged from their houses to bang pots and pans for health care workers, I thought to myself, Why are we not doing this for our dead? Why are we skulking back into our isolated homes to furtively scroll when we should be screaming together?

Read the essays. Write the essays; I want to read them. But talk about them too, because that is the only way to truly cheat death.

• 0