Grief is not a failure

This week’s winner

MANILA, Philippines - Neyo E. Valdez, 40, is a widower and father of three. He is Rex Bookstore Inc.’s in-house editor and does freelance writing and editing. He is working on a reading book for elementary pupils and has a regular column in Bannawag magazine, a literary magazine for the Ilocanos. He is also in the last semester of earning his law degree. “And thank goodness for books. I always find reading therapeutic. It really helps me keep my sanity, before and during my wife’s illness, and most especially now that I am at my lowest ebb, three months after her death.”

This one is a brief review of the novel Ordinary People by Judith Guest. It was a fairly quick read, but I still feel its lasting impression.  And here’s why.

I didn’t know anything about the book, its author, or its theme until I picked it up and browsed it. Upon reading the backside that its movie adaptation, directed by the legendary Hollywood actor Robert Redford, was highly praised and won the Oscars for Best Picture in 1980, I didn’t hesitate to buy it.

Why not? Between choosing bestsellers and award-winning books (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Awards, Nobel Laureates’ magnum opuses, etc.), I prefer the latter category. And books made into highly acclaimed movies have always been a good alternative. After reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, both winners of Best Picture in the Academy Awards in 1930 and 1996, respectively, I’ve been on a frantic hunt for novels whose movie adaptations won the Oscars’ most coveted award.

Ordinary People is one of those novels (actually an old book from the ‘70s, when no cell phones, computers, or social networking got in the way of a good story) I didn’t realize was out there to be discovered or explored. Its theme is universal, which is the loss and the different ways people deal with it.

It is written from the perspective of a reserved teenager, Conrad Jarret, trying to tackle by himself the loss of his older brother. Out of guilt for not being able to do anything to help his brother in an accident while boating together, and feeling disconnected from his parents, he attempts to commit suicide, which lands him in the hospital for eight months. Later on, his father helps him find a psychiatrist.

So disparate is the family grief that it drives the members apart from one another, instead of bringing them together when they need each other most. 

The family the book depicts is appropriately “ordinary,” that is, they’re familiar to us. They could be your neighbors or relatives, or could be your own. The characters seem real: you hear them speak and you see their pain, and feel for them.

I can relate to the book’s compelling theme. I really felt for the surviving son and his father Cal, as he tries to reach out to him. I felt connected to both of them. I lost my wife last August, or barely a month before I read this book. With her untimely demise due to breast cancer, all my dreams of getting old, complete and satisfied, with her and our children sank into a black hole and I have yet to cope with the ordeal of being a shocked survivor. I had this uneasiness, however, in seeing my own incomprehensible emotions laid out before me page after page in this novel.

Reading through the struggles of the surviving family members, it brings to mind Hamlet’s affecting question: “To be or not to be?” You suddenly feel envious of the dead, because they are in peace while the survivors have to live long and deal with the traumatizing event, and suffer with more and more issues, like the idea of suicide, isolation, brokenness, deep longing for connection, and a cesspool of unwanted memories. 

I’ve read some novels with the same subject — bereavement — and I can only remember Bag of Bones by Stephen King (a writer suffering a severe writer’s block after the death of his wife); The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (a father who is consumed with guilt at having failed to save a daughter and a mother who drifts away and leaves her husband after the tragic death); and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (a rich hunchback shutting off from his mind a sickly son and a beautiful garden after an accident killed his wife), but none had put more than the usual amount of emphasis on depression from a clinical standpoint.

Ordinary People is a very psychologically astute book that tells us matter-of-factly that depression is, in the words of the novel’s psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, “not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.” It’s your own choice why you feel numb or void of feelings, because it is your mind’s way of protecting itself. But it is the kind of isolation and being lonely and miserable that is unforgiving and cannot be forgiven when there are people who are more than willing to listen and patiently try to lift you up. I really like that shrink.

So for anyone who has ever struggled with similar loss or depression, this is an eye-opening book. It shows how grief may drive people away from the shelter of the family unit, and yet the same grief may also draw some closer together, like the son and his father in the story. Even “ordinary people” can overcome difficult and unthinkable circumstances all the time, and some handle these poignant and razor-sharp emotions differently, most of them with success. And some made good with the help of a counselor or a psychiatrist.

There is goodness about all things. The book tells us then that there is no insurmountable pain in bereavement. Life may be a lot of problems, yet it is full of hope. The good Dr. Berger has also remarked that after bereavement, “there is just Phase Two. Recovery. A moving forward.” That could be a guiding principle, a perfect mantra, in any depressing time or some shattered relationship.

Except for the deterioration of the marriage between Cal and his wife, the novel ends on a positive note. Conrad Jarret slowly starts to respond to Dr. Berger, and comes to terms with his feelings. The teenager becomes his own man and gets over wallowing in his intoxicating survivor’s guilt and identity crisis, thus resolving the internal conflict of the story.

People just need to learn to work with and around each other in order to live their lives and be happy. I would not have learned these things if I didn’t pick up this outstanding book. I am now well reminded of the reasons that life is still worth living in spite of some horrible things. 

After all, grief is not a failure.