“Dad, the phone’s ringing.” We’re playing one of my young daughter’s favorite games. Nothing interferes with tea time. “Doesn’t matter, Jess. Nobody on the phone is more important than you.”
As Jess grows, the television is muted whenever she walks in the room. “It’s just TV. You matter more than anything on a box.” She visits us for Thanksgiving one year, now twenty-three, and we trot out an old tea time photo. In it, two-year-old Jess has cups and saucers in place, a pot and lid in each hand. Adult Jess giggles, glares, and scolds me: “Thanks to my abusive childhood, I don’t take a call or have sound on the TV when my friends come over!”
Jess died in January, 2015. She was twenty-six. I still mute the television when I think of her.
April 22 is my birthday. Despite our long-running joke about not answering the phone, Jess never missed calling me today, even when I was half a world away. This marks the eleventh year that my phone will not ring.
Yet against all reason, I keep waiting.
Grief is not just a feeling, C. S. Lewis writes to his recently widowed friend Henry Willink on December 3, 1959. Rather, it is a continuous shock that renews each time we face alone roads that we once traveled with our loved one. Lewis adds that a misplaced belief in moving beyond grief is poor consolation. “It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.”
Lewis has a point. Anticipation of a future reunion with Jess may help ease my sorrow, but she’s still gone, she’s still dead. Personal and societal pressure to “heal” and “move on” often fosters conflicting expectations. We may feel constrained to “get over it” while simultaneously living with permanent bereavement and a love that does not end with death. I’m reminded of Linda Pastan’s 1977 poem, “The Five Stages of Grief.” Pastan completes each step and reaches the final goal of ACCEPTANCE (her capitalization), only to realize she has achieved nothing: “But something is wrong. Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you.”
Mary-Frances O’Connor (University of Arizona) agrees. Grief increases heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones because we are seeking a physical presence that is no longer there. “The world feels all wrong,” she writes. “Our body still reacts to their absence.” O’Connor observes that through bonding you and me turns to us. But when our us is removed with death, “we do not return to the ‘me’ of before, because the absence leaves a hole that could not have existed before we ever knew love.” Our ongoing sense of attachment is as real as our loss. This is certainly true for me. I continue to think of my daughter as I drift to sleep each night and rise the next morning.
Take four years ago, April 22, 2021. As I wake, in the brief seconds before memory returns, Jess seems to greet me in celebration. Then reality hits. But today seems different. On a whim I buy a cake. Chocolate for me, decorated with flowers for her—reminiscent of the botanical gardens that Jess so loved.
I ask the baker to write, “Happy Birthday Dad.” Does this seem odd? Not to the grieving. I didn’t stop being a father in 2015. Modern research suggests that such small traditions help us acknowledge death while validating our ongoing love for those we’ve lost. “Grief, it seems, is a consequence of love,” observes psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes. “You cannot have one without the other.” This is a consequence I gladly live with.
These continuing bonds with our dead play important roles in many of the world’s religious rituals, according to grief experts Robert Goss and Dennis Klass (Webster University). Customs often provide structure when all seems lost. For example, influential scholar Maimonides falls ill the day he learns that his younger brother David is dead. He takes to bed and remains there for a year, suffering from fever, boils, and overwhelming grief. He says this is “the greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life, worse than anything else.” Maimonides is recognized as one of the world’s finest Jewish philosophers, a man of profound wisdom and telling insight, most particularly in his The Guide for the Perplexed. But sorrow plays no favorites.
“I am nearly blind with grief, my limbs reduced to a shadow,” Maimonides reads in the Book of Job. He finally understands that the passage is not hyperbole. Eight years after the death, in 1176, he still asks his friend Japhet ben Eliyahu, “How shall I console myself? Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his letters, my heart turns upside down and my grief awakens again.” He then quotes Jacob’s lament for Joseph: “I will go down to the grave, to my son, mourning.” Maimonides is invoking a set biblical ritual that was not intended to make him feel better, notes Hebrew scholar James Kugel (Harvard University), but rather “one that, like all rituals, created a kind of familiar territory for people in moments of transition or stress.”
Religious rituals are frequently coupled with private family customs that provide a positive and healthy sense of connection. Mourners may use these traditions to reframe their memories in what is called narrative reconstruction. For example, in the bereavement support group I facilitate, a grieving son shares what he would say to his dead mother if he could. We acknowledge his pain, accept and validate his thoughts, and then ask another question: “What do you think she might say to you if she were here? How might she feel about what you shared with us?”
Each participant, facilitator included, pauses to consider what our loved one admires about us and how they might express their support now. Lorraine Hedtke (California State University, San Bernardino) refers to this process as “folding their stories into the lives of the living.” It enables us to see our strengths and the new possibilities of our continuing relationship in separation. It also empowers us with a sense of resilience.
“We are wired for attachment in a world of impermanence,” says Robert Neimeyer, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition. He and his colleagues Jane Milman (St. Edwards University) and Edith Maria Steffen (Roehampton University), suggest that “a central process in grieving entails an attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss.”
In a separate study, Neimeyer and An Hooghe (University Hospital Leuven) add that reconstruction helps mourners identify, imagine, symbolize, and articulate a world of meaning. “All grief therapy is family therapy in absentia,” they write, that should “utilize the presence of the deceased as a key component in treatment.” The emphasis is not on some kind of séance or hallucination. Rather, mourners acknowledge the bond’s ongoing influence in their lives. This helps them process the heartbreaking reality of death while simultaneously “accessing the back story of their relationship to the deceased, resolving issues in it and often restoring a measure of attachment security that was shattered by loss.”
Many who mourn have a normal and expected anniversary reaction near dates that are emotionally important to them. Herman Musaph (University of Utrecht) and his team demonstrate that our bodies undergo a measurable biochemical change around birthdays or other special occasions. We might feel uneasy, anxious, sleepless, and understandably sad. In desperation we may ask: What can I do with this sorrow? Where do I put my love now?
“There are no rules governing grieving,” writes psychiatrist Judith Bernstein. Many of her bereaved patients ultimately return to familiar routines during holidays and birthdays. Some set a chair for their dead loved one. The experience may be painful, but it also provides a time and place for shared memory and communion. This new tradition reaffirms their loss and the ongoing love they will always feel.
Ann Finkbeiner, a journalist and bereaved mother, interviewed thirty parents about what they call an indestructible tie with their dead child. “The answer to how to live with an unbreakable bond,” Finkbeiner concludes, “appears to be, just continue it.” Psychotherapist Barbara Rosof adds that bereaved couples look for direct and indirect ways to carry on being parents. How they do this is as varied as grief and love, but the impulse is nearly universal.
People once built monuments and elaborate mausoleums for their dead, notes Earl Grollman, a pioneer in emotional reactions to grief. But there are other ways to remember. “Your loved one is still part of your life,” he says. “Death brings you a choice. It can lead you to the edge of the abyss. Or you can build a bridge that will span the chasm.”
In my personal narrative construction, I picture Jess beside me as we cross this chasm together. I believe she is pleased that I honor her life and our love with my annual ritual. This thought is a comfort when the phone does not ring.
Today marks my eleventh birthday without Jess. I keep my tradition of buying a cake. Again I ask for a simple message: Happy Birthday Dad. Our local baker seems to notice its importance. “Don’t you worry, hun,” she smiles warmly. “I’ll make it special.” It already is. Jess sees to that.
Image Via: RawPixel
