Grief and its rewards

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

As a journalist, covering disasters and conflict, bearing witness to other people’s losses becomes far too commonplace. We bridge the gap between numbers and data and give the numbers names and faces, providing a human perspective that can be easier for readers and viewers to relate to than cold numbers. We tell stories to enlighten and move the heart.

With the availability of the internet, the same readers and viewers have available multiple such stories competing for the same mental and emotional ground in hearts and minds.

‘If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics,’ Josef Stalin is often quoted as having said.

Compassion fatigue hardens the heart and the imagination. There is only so much bandwidth that one person can have for other people’s problems, especially when they are unimaginably large or complex.

But then there is the personal experience of grief and loss.

Pause, dear reader, pause. Remember a time when you lost something much loved. Perhaps it was the death of a parent, a friend, a child or even an object; the end of a relationship, job or way of life... And then perhaps you found that time itself paused.

When my father passed, it was after months of illness as he tried to recover from a stroke. When he did die, it felt as if life had somehow fundamentally changed. Everything was the same and yet it was completely different without his presence. I was stumped by how difficult it was to just do things.

Two books meant a lot to me then and come to mind now, both forensic examinations of their journeys through the loss of their partners, Catholic philosopher CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed” and journalist and writer Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I wouldn’t recommend them as self-help books by any means, except in the sense that I needed. I wanted writing that was bracingly, bruisingly honest: that shared my pain.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing,” Lewis confides. He tries to make sense of the pain by finding ways to quantify it: “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.” For me, reading this was a consolation because I found someone else who had gone through the process of trying to make sense of something that just ends: “Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?” And yet is everywhere: “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

I’ve recently taken to visiting the mother of some dear friends at her home and in hospital as her health has deteriorated. E is an enormously clever, erudite scholar, great cook and strong woman. She doesn’t want to eat nowadays and is grappling so hard with her various illnesses that I sometimes think her mind is slipping so that she can deal with the awful fact of her own mortality. I am close friends with all of her daughters, the eldest of whom is a rabbi who shared her feelings and thoughts in an article. Rabbi A meditates on why she prays again to a God to whom she prayed for her father to live when he was ill, but then died, now that her mother is so ill. She suggests that the act of praying again is itself an act of epiphany and faith though there is no “reason” to have it.

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Joan Didion. “Grief,” she writes, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

Didion’s surgical coolness is somehow necessary in this sometimes excruciatingly intimate account of the emotion that is the bridge between love and death. It begins with the sudden fatal heart attack of her husband and is intertwined with the story of their daughter’s medical emergency which sends her into a coma. It is a detachment that allows the story to be told in spite of the almost unbearable pain of which it speaks. “We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.”

Both Lewis and Didion are unsparing in their descriptions of the waves of different emotions and their impact in these accounts. Less dramatic are their accounts of their recovery, acknowledging that writing about their experiences is itself part of the process. It is cathartic and it is also inevitable: like time itself. Slowly and gently the new contexts of their lives unfold and they are able to come to terms with their grief.

In the Leyte wasteland left by Typoon Yolanda and in the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh, since experiencing such grief and reading these books, I found myself in a position of trying to do justice to such stories of extraordinary loss and grief multiplied by hundreds of thousands. Where does one begin?

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about Sulaiman who had lost all but one of his extended family when Myanmar soldiers and neighboring villagers arrived in their village on the last day of August two years ago.

A film-maker sent me the image of a man and asked me if the account was of this Sulaiman. At first, I said no, that couldn’t be him because in my memory he had been so very broken. I looked again and then said yes. Sulaiman is smiling.