Grief’s Hermitage is an anthology or common-place book for anyone grieving who wants something to dip into now and then when sadness is looking for the odd clue or for a momentary balm. The pieces are not arranged to be read progressively; grief is the only organising principle.
To arrange the material according to ‘the stages of grief’ model would go against the grain of my inclination and my experience. Many people surely find the stages of grief that have been defined by wonderful and caring specialists to be of immense comfort. Perhaps my variance from that norm accounts for the lack of progression in the book. I am sure there are many people who find being sized up to a given model agonising and oppressive. People who like the model do not feel sized up or oppressed by it; people who are not comfortable with fitting a given can feel odd and so add to their already overstrained emotions the anxiety about what they should or should not be feeling. There is something about getting things in the right order that mitigates against one’s personal experience; your experience is uniquely yours and doesn’t have to meet any prescribed standard.
Grief has its own time frame which doesn’t meet any given specifications, different researchers give the grieving process differing normal durations. Some gave it in months, some in two or three years, and one writer said eight years was not abnormal or unnatural. One day you wake up and feel kind of together again, even though you are still grieving
Each cause for grief is unique. Of course, there are similarities, but to the person grieving the uniqueness of their experience carries by far the greater importance. Grief is also chaotic and random, even after years have passed one can still, out of the blue, feel as though the beloved has only just gone. Grief, like love, partakes of the nature of eternity and the obvious, though often ignored fact about eternity is the absence of time. We humans cannot really get with the idea of the absence of time but in love, and in grief, we can experience timelessness even while we do not understand it. Both states can temporarily carry us beyond our ordinary human limitations, but in them we do not observe ourselves for we are too absorbed by the experience.
Reflecting on the experience is mainly what this book is about, in the hope that through the words of poets and writers both ancient and modern we may find, even perhaps in the most unlikely places, thoughts that can enliven, enlighten, comfort and console. I hope too that we may occasionally find laughter.
Much of this book is from the perspective of the loss of a primary loved one, but, of course, we can grieve for many different people and purposes and for our pets that become so entangled in our emotional lives. Grieving for friends or pets can stir us deeply and set up its own confusions. Over our friends we can feel we don’t ‘have the right’ to make a fuss, or be overt in our grief in case we look ostentatious or as if, somehow, we are encroaching on someone else’s emotional territory. So much of grief brings us into conflict with what other people may think is appropriate. Maybe they don’t think negatively but our inner sense that they might can contort the straightforward expression of what we feel.
This is when in retiring, at least in attitude, to our hermitage we can allow ourselves to feel the reality of great sadness without having it judged or thought to be judged by anyone else. Sadness, grief, the sense of loss are real feelings and do not need to be condemned. What we feel is neither good nor bad, it is simply what we feel, an expression of our own individual emotional life which does not have to meet any pre-conceived pattern of appropriate responses.
I thought long and hard as to whether I should include in this book something of my own experience, as I experienced it. It is a comparatively easy thing to write retrospectively, but inevitably that is coloured by the passage of time, and pain in recollection, spoken of from a distance of years, will not have the reality level, the poignancy of the actual experience. Why should I consider sharing these agonies and ecstasies? When I conceived of writing this book it was because I believed it was worth the effort to bring some kind of consolation, through my words and the words of poets and other thinkers, to people in the time of their acute bereavement. The bits and pieces from my journal give a very real account of the kinds of ups and downs, and downs, that one goes through at the loss of a loved one.
Some of the experiences cannot usefully be shared with one’s loved ones, who are also grieving and don’t need anything more to add to their distress. These expressions are, nevertheless, the kind of thoughts that one goes through and the fact that someone else has put them into words might be a comfort, as though to say, “Look, that’s how everyone feels from time to time, it is okay. It is so horrible to feel that way but it is okay.”
The second reason for including actual experiences is really at the heart of this book. Because I have always believed in the continuation of life after death and that love is stronger than death. The days following my husband’s death tested these beliefs to the utmost, but did prove to me that they were well-founded. This material could well be of value to other people who are grieving. The words I wrote through those dark days catalogue the certainty and the doubt. There were days when I not only believed in his abiding presence and love but I experienced it; there were days when I wondered if it was all a load of wish-fulfilment as the doubters would affirm. I know that there were many, many desperate times when I would have given everything to have had even a momentary sense of his presence, and it didn’t come. When he did come it was always a shock, not when I was looking for it, hoping for it, begging for it. I had no say in the matter of his being there; if it were merely wish-fulfilment I would have had more control and probably given myself more constant comfort. The quality of these visitations baffled my imagination and was distinctly different in kind from memories or images conjured up by my conscious mind.
Perhaps in the sharing of these experiences, readers may be encouraged to believe in the possibility of a continued connection with a loved one. The experts and researchers in the field seem to agree that the onus of establishing such a connection lies very strongly with the one still living in the flesh. This may read like an argument on the side of the ‘wish-fulfilment’ viewpoint, but it is just common psychological sense. What we believe about the continuation of our communication to a large extent determines how it will be, not because we make it happen in our minds, but because our beliefs will determine whether or not we are open to the overtures that may come.
I remember hearing a man sharing his experiences of his departed wife and how loving and beautiful it was for a brief time; then he had a dream, which he recounted. In the dream he saw his wife and he knew that she was saying good-bye and that he would never experience her presence again. As he recounted the dream, I couldn’t help thinking that the imagery might as well have been interpreted in the opposite way but the dreamer, in consciousness, did not believe in the possibility of communication with the departed in any shape or form. He was surprised that it had happened but knew that it could not last, so how could it?
This present work takes the opposite view. In this somewhat eclectic gathering of short writings, you will find pieces from a variety of authors who hold different views of life and death, but none of the ‘once you are dead you are dead’ category. There are many, many books available; some works of consolation; some arguing for the continuance of life beyond death; some promoting a strongly traditional Christian viewpoint. It is a wide-open field and we have to take care as we make our choices.
While I do not want to impose a specifically religious template, I am clearly writing for people who have some sort of belief in life being more than is admitted by scientific materialism. Love, beauty, art, grief all point to ranges of experience that cannot be encompassed in a purely materialistic world. Speaking of the Divine does not commit one to a Christian view of God or the After-Life. It is important to keep the language fluid for we all make our own interpretation of the symbols, in line with our personal faith. Some of the ancient writers used ‘Energy’ as a term to cover the Unseen and, in our time, given what we have learnt from quantum physics, maybe that is a really good word to use. Long before the New Testament was written Greek poets spoke of the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” This is quite a choice way of attending to that which binds us all and the whole of creation. For some people the specifically religious point of view will bring solace, so I have devoted a chapter to Christian writers.
Other people do not identify with that approach but find in the poets a voice that they can hear. There is a good selection of poems covering all shades of experience of loss, of despair, of gratitude and hope. Unfortunately, quoting modern-day poets is a somewhat complicated issue so I have given some links to poets whose works are worth following up. Poems like W.H. Auden’s “Stop all the Clocks” have a most contemporary feel and speak most aptly to where we are today. It is an easy matter to spend a little time at the computer following leads to discover more poems that speak to the heart.
I count myself fortunate to have had so many wise guides and mentors in the books that I have read over the years. In no way did that richness cover or assuage the pain of loss but I did at least ‘have somewhere to go’; resources to apply to when I needed something to counteract the deadly silence. It is my hope that this collection will provide a similar resource for people who are in a place where their normal patterns of focus, interest or engagement are totally interrupted by grief and they need something to hold on to.
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